To look at my CV or read my clips you’d think all I cared about was luxury: posh travel, designer fashion, effete culinary pursuits. While it’s true that I would probably always pick the aspic over the wheat grass, it’s not actually fancy stuff that interests me the most. It’s the wacky flair and obsessive attention to detail embodied by the people who design and cook and build and collect beautiful things that I find so fascinating. I’ve never given a hoot about skirt lengths, but the personae of the people who design the skirts interest me a lot. Most professional aesthetes are capricious and exhibitionistic, and I find these qualities to be like beautiful birds, or a road accident from which I can’t turn away.
And then there’s the fact that we all need to go somewhere else, and we all get dressed in the morning. What do we want to project and attract, and what do we think we are when we’re putting on our armor for the day? What do we see, hear and taste when we’re somewhere unfamiliar? How did we get there, and why? These are things that I like to explore, and they are a point of commonality for us all, whether we’re wrapped in shawls made of endangered mountain goats or poly-blend workwear; waking up encircled by an inches-deep featherbed or in a tent on the side of a desert road.
