According to Wolfgang
Fashion’s favorite eccentric opens up
“This cures me from fashion, and this cures me from Paris,” the designer Wolfgang Joop smiles as a waitress pours for each of us two glasses half filled with Coke and fresh squeezed lemon juice.
“It’s very healthy,” he adds with a nod, encouraging me to take a sip of mine. It’s the day before his spring 2009 show in Paris for his four-year-old women’s wear line, Wunderkind, and the notoriously eccentric German has taken a break to have lunch with me at his favorite restaurant, Chez Georg. I can’t say that the Coke and lemon tonic is exactly healthy, but it’s definitely tasty enough to become my new addiction. As the caffeine kicks in, it becomes obvious that sodas aren’t the only thing Joop has pearls of wisdom on.
On staying fresh during the financial crisis:
“With this crisis, you have to really work to be great. Status brands are over. Now it’s time to get real. Everything is so goth now and that’s such an old idea. I’m not going to Paris [fashion week] for that. I can find that in London or Berlin. Re-channeling is not what fashion is for.”
On spring:
“My spring collection is all about American optimism and modernism. I look for models who have a healthy, happy, bohemian look to them. I’m not looking for manufactured beauty or these manipulated bodies.
On the fashion club:
“Fashion and music brings people together no matter what race or background. That has always been the mystery of fashion. So I’m a little disturbed that so much of fashion feels like a club. I see all of these little clubs that have been created that I’m not invited to. Fashion needs to open up. Back in the ’70s at, say, Yves Saint Laurent, it was about the individual. You had Nan Kempner, but then you also had the hippie girl. One time my wife and I were outside of an YSL show — we had no ticket — and when Yves arrived, he pulled us into the show because we looked so fashionable. Things were different back then.” JOOP!, which would become one of the most popular scents of the 90s.