Gabriela Hearst
Elsa Schiaparelli, for sure. I don’t know if people know this, but one of her first collections was done with Armenian refugees. It was a knitwear collection.
It was women leading the design charge in the ’40s, ’50s. You had Jeanne Lanvin, you had Gabrielle Chanel, you had Schiap, you had Gaby Aghion , Madame Grès, Vionnet. It was really a women-led force. But undeniably, it’s Vivienne Westwood for me. Both Schiaparelli and Westwood worked from a timeless perspective. You look at the Pirate boot from Vivienne Westwood, right? That last, it’s a last from the 1700s. It was created in 1976. So we’re talking about 47 years of a boot that looks cool. That’s just from the design perspective. And then her stance in everything, and how radical she was. I think both play with their radical attitude in different ways. From living designers, I would say Miuccia Prada, for her steadiness, and her ability to evolve.
Willie Norris, Outlier
I first came across the name (and work of) Isabel Toledo in 2005. There was a photo of her and Ruben photographed in their New York studio photographed by Norman Jean Roy and published in Vogue. I was in junior year of high school, and I was just beginning to realize that clothing spoke to me and that I could speak (and sometimes scream!) to the world through clothing. As I learned more about her, I began to think of her as a silent mentor—a fellow self-taught “immersion learner” that I could watch move through the world. I love how much she embraced being an “American fashion designer,” and how she loved mass-production and machinery as much as she loved couture and handwork. She was, in my opinion, the truest heir to Cristóbal Balenciaga. Her designs were playful and rigorous and oh so New York. When I began transitioning, I gained a new appreciation for how she designed for herself in a way only a woman really can; a way that leaves the thinnest of veils between a woman’s person and a woman’s work. She tragically died in 2019 from breast cancer and, while I never met her, I feel like I know her through her work and continue to learn form her. She was peerless, contrarian and obsessive—like the best designers always are. When I’m feeling timid or feckless, or like my talent is linked in any way to industry-accolades, I think of her and return to my work.