Approximately 800 people turned up for Derek Blasberg’s talk with Carolina Herrera’s creative director Wes Gordon in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis.
The Nov. 18 event was the Saint Louis Fashion Fund’s annual “Speaking of Fashion” speaker series, which is held in partnership with Washington University and Caleres, the global footwear company.
Gordon said that as a child, he insisted on choosing his own outfits and wearing red suspenders every day to kindergarten, played with his mother’s old Barbie dolls and would “go into her closet to tell her what she had to wear each day.” Attending a fairly conservative school, he said he kept this double secret of being different and gay, and wanting to be a fashion designer “when everyone else wanted to be a baseball player,” Gordon said.
“Drawing women in dresses,” before he even knew that was a thing, Gordon said an old coffee table book about Valentino made him realize that that was the job for him. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he built up the courage to find a local dressmaker to teach him how to sew. At Central Saint Martins, his graduation collection was made out of blown glass.
As a St. Louis native, Blasberg, whose role at Vanity Fair recently switched to special correspondent, has been a loyal supporter of the SLFF. Another fashion insider, Karlie Kloss, who also hails from St. Louis, was there too.
Before the Q&A, Gordon gave some fashion students from across the state one-on-one critiques of their collections at a luncheon. St. Louis City Mayor Cara Spencer presented a proclamation to Gordon, which proclaimed Nov. 18 “Wes Gordon Day in St. Louis.” The designer also picked up the Saint Louis Fashion Fund award from the group’s executive director Becky Domyan.
Recalling his internships at Oscar de la Renta and Tom Ford, Gordon said de la Renta was “a man who knew extremely well the women who wore his clothes.” As for Ford, he was described as fastidious with an attention to detail — “nothing is left to chance,” Gordon said.
Asked for advice for students, Gordon said, “That’s time that you’re never going to get again so be a weirdo. You’re going to go into a career where you have to make clothes that sell. Your life will be about sell-throughs and margins. Use this opportunity to do something crazy.”
Debunking a fashion myth, the designer said, “Everyone has this idea that fashion is ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’ because it’s fun and sexy and we like to think that everyone is catty and bitchy. In reality, it’s a community, a family of like-minded people, who share similar passions and work so hard. There is a real feeling of camaraderie and team spirit. You see it with events like the CFDA and whenever there is a gathering of people together, which doesn’t happen enough. You see it with the three of us being here right now [referring to Kloss, Blasberg and himself.]”
Gordon continued, “The world is big enough to support a lot of different designers. It’s not this game of nemesis and arch rivalries, and being mean to assistants. It’s people who are rolling up their sleeves and working so hard to try to make the impossible possible. And we’re all in it together.”
