Did you really play football in high school?
It was my freshman year. I wasn’t very good so I didn’t get to play much. I was a guard which is odd because I don’t have the body of a lineman. I only got to play if the score was 53 to 3 and I would get put in because I couldn’t screw it up. I wasn’t friends with the guys on the team, but I was with the cheerleaders. So they’d cheer “Put Steven in! Put Steven in!” It was embarrassing. I quit and joined the Drama Club.
Are you finally a cheerleader yourself now in your job at CFDA?
Patrick Robinson when he was the head designer at The Gap once referred to me as a kind of gym teacher or a coach. I think it’s more of that than cheerleading. I mean, there is an element of the ra-ra to my job. I’m constantly promoting American fashion or posting about it. But if you look at it from the team perspective, it is more the strategic, maneuvering, or planning and activation of something that reflects my job. Patrick also said that I was like that teacher or that coach who as the kid was walking by him in the hallway you wanted to make sure you were doing the right thing. I don’t know if that reflects me so much. But it is more about how we orchestrate things for a goal or a touchdown.
You use the word “nurturing” a lot when talking about your job. Why haven’t you and your husband Jay had children like so many other gay men of your age and stature?
I’ll be sixty this year. But it took me a little bit longer to hit my pace and take life seriously. I enjoyed going out more and focusing on partying and clubs. I always showed up for work. Don’t get me wrong. I did get the perfect attendance award my sophomore year in high school and got a copy of The Catcher in the Rye as the reward. I just think I was slower finding my footing in my career. I just wasn’t ready financially or emotionally. Fast forward to today and its standard and common. I don’t think I’m ready to give that part of myself. I’m looking at the next 20 years of my life. If it had lined up at the time and I had been financially and emotionally capable of it 10 or 20 years ago, I would have definitely done it.
How has COVID affected your work at CFDA?
A big change was a commitment to building the direct-to-the-consumer part of a business. But these are conversations we’ve had for a long time in the industry about the supply chain and how much stuff is really needed and shows going from New York to Palm Springs to Doha to Shanghai. We focused that conversation around climate and sustainability and put some action behind that. And that’s going to pillar out work for over a decade going forward.
We have one of the most comprehensive, open-access resources on sustainability on CFDA.com for students, designers, and business professionals. We have a materials hub that will connect the industry to innovation around material development, which is a core part of sustainability. We did a report about the future of Fashion Week looking through the lens of how it can be more sustainable. A lot of that talk about sustainability became an actionable movement. A lot of designers began to rethink their collections – how they show them and many they do. They are beginning to shrink down and not show so many collections. Not all of them did, but many of them.
We also did something at CFDA about the Fashion Calendar. You had September and February. Because brands were starting to want to show collections at different times or different locations, we created this umbrella above NYFW and we call it the American Collections Calendar. Christopher John Rogers, for example, feels his brand is best served showing closer to his shipment to retailers. So he’s not showing in September. He’s showing at a later time. So this American Collections Calendar allows us to glue together collectively the different approaches. That was something that came out of the pandemic – this need to do that. Michael Kors did it. He showed in October the season before this although he’s showing in September this time probably because for the Met Gala.
So I think the flexibility of showing the brand when it supports the commerce of selling the collection has been a result. The great thing about the new American Collections Calendar too is that we could never count Ric Owens although he is a proud member of CFDA. He shows in Paris. But now we stake claim for that creative American working in Paris. It shows the breadth of American talent.
But what it doesn’t do is diminish the power and importance of NYTF because it is still the coming together of a community – a lot of energy and creative thinking and economic import comes from that. So with the American Collections Calendar, the NYFW will always be the core or foundation or the heart of that. We work with IMG very closely. We are the official scheduler – we are the air traffic control – but we are not the producer. So together we are working very closely with IMG on that heart and that core which is NYFW.
You love Elizabeth Taylor. You have several images of her in your home. Is she your gay icon?
Yeah. I love her. There are the three women I love: Elizabeth, Audrey Hepburn, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. But Elizabeth is number one. I love her personal life and how she handled being such a target of the media and paparazzi. For someone who was a movie star, she was so human. I also love how kind she was to Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. And what she did for HIV/AIDS. I love the companionship and friendship she brought to people who needed it and how honest and direct she was. My Instagram profile has a quote from her film Butterfield 8: “I’m not like anyone else. I’m me.”
