How do you approach the traditional rules of dressing?
Dress is a language that uses vocabulary (clothes), syntax and grammar (rules), but style is poetry: the ability to use that language creatively to express original ideas in a personal manner. Picasso once wrote that the greatest enemy of creativity is common sense. Being safe is not stylish. A book of grammar exercises is no fun and neither is dressing by the book. A poetic licence is not a grammar mistake – it is an instrument to a greater purpose. However, creativity can run wild if not censored by good taste.
How do you use colours, patterns, and textures?
Music is a language, too, and if dress is music, then pattern is the melody, colour is the key and texture is orchestration. Style is what each of us, as composer, makes of them: the song we sing to the world. As in music, rules and guides are mostly negative, teaching us how to avoid cacophony, but for the rest we are (and really ought to feel) free to choose and mix as we please. Loud or quiet, colourful or sober, smooth or fuzzy, they have little meaning of their own until we choose and mix them: that gives them a sense – our own. Even shiny black monochrome says something about the wearer – quite a lot, in fact!
We can try anything but here is the acid test: if we recognize ourselves in the mirror, we are dressed fine; if we see someone else (even if it looks interesting), we are in costume and those around us will sense it.
What made the Duke of Windsor, Fred Astaire and those men so stylish?
They are the heroes of style, but perhaps we should raise a monument to the Unknown Stylish Man: there are many, untainted by celebrity, who are fluent in the universal language of style. What do they all have in common? – they have something to say to the world and they were able to find happy expressions for it in every aspect of their lives.
How do you look at fashion in connection with style?
To come full circle and return to the musical metaphor, fashion is finding yourself in the music, while style is finding the music inside you and giving it your personal expression.
Style is an expression of the individual substance; following fashion is adopting an outside form and either trying to squeeze your own substance in it, or using it in order to camouflage the lack thereof. Of course, there is a two-way relationship between form and substance, in the sense that the adoption of a form often generates the substance – we are what we wear, to paraphrase a nutritional aphorism; therein lie the dangers of following fashion.
Style is also the ability to adapt any fashion to oneself, to remain creative, open-minded and take from fashions the ideas (and not the forms) that can work, interpreting them in a personal manner.
