Fashion Moms

0:29Hello and welcome to Fashion People. you are doing well this week. I am back in Los Angeles. I'm planning to stay here for now. Still very scary, but it feels like those of us who are lucky enough to be in our homes are ready to help others out. So need some help. Message me. This is a unique Tuesday episode, not only because of what's happening around us, but because Sarah, our guest, is not only here to discuss the news of the week, more of which you can read online Mindsheet, but also because she's here to talk about a book that really has nothing to do with fashion. We kind of get into some mom stuff.

1:07So if you're not interested in that, you might want to fast forward over that part. But it's all, everything's connected. And it was really one of my favorite interviews that I've done for the podcast so far. And I hope to have Sarah back on another day. And I wish her the best of luck promoting this book, which publishes today. I hope that you buy it because it's really interesting. It's if you're a mom, if you're not a mom, all that. It's just she's lived a very unique life. And so that part of it is fascinating as well. Let's get going. And thank you all for all the nice notes and things you sent to me.

1:48It really means a lot. And I hope you are OK wherever you are. Sarah Hoover, welcome to Fashion People. Truly an honor to be here. Don't quite consider myself a fashion person, so I'm excited. It's my chance to prove myself. I think you have great style and you understand ecosystems and the way worlds operate. And so the fact that you are an art world person who also likes fashion and you mix with fashion people, I consider you a fashion person. Oh, thank God. You might be the only one. You're my mom. But OK, great. I'm glad I'm allowed to be here because this is really exciting for me. You know, I'm your number one fan and a huge fan of book news.

2:35Well, I just want to tell you that after reading your book, I think I might be your number one fan and also absolutely need to meet your mother. Thank you. I hope you do meet my mom. We got to get that together. That would be she's really because she's a former prosecutor. You would have interviewing skills on par with one another. You know, I'm sure she she could beat me any day. But how are you doing with all this? I mean, we're we're recording on Monday morning at noon Eastern 9 a.m. Pacific. And we were just talking offline about everything that's happening here in L.A. with the fires and and pretty much anyone who lives on the coast or there's probably almost everyone in this country knows someone who was affected by this.

3:23And we both know multiple people who have lost their homes. And it's, yeah, it's really heavy stuff. It's a terrible time. I mean, it's such a reminder. Like when you are doing something like I'm doing, putting a book out, which my book comes out tomorrow, like you're constantly faced with rejection and reasons to like feel sad and bad about yourself. But the events in L.A. are like really good at putting everything into incredible perspective because just nothing compares to that level of pretty senseless destruction and loss. It's rough. Yeah. We were talking about how people in the city are reacting to this.

4:05And you asked me whether it was similar to Hurricane Sandy, where if you were affected, you were affected. And if you weren't, it was business as usual. and I would say that, and I mentioned that like, I think the difference with this is a, the way it really affected Altadena and the Palisades in Malibu and, and there are winds picking up. So who knows when this publishes on Tuesday morning, what will happen, but that's entire neighborhoods that I live pretty close to Altadena. I go to dinner in Altadena know, once a week, we have lots of friends that live over there. Uh, and Palisades, I know tons of people who live there.

4:49Don't go there as much cause it takes about an hour and a half for me to drive there sometimes. But, um, because the smoke, especially when it first happened, it was so smoky. You've, you just know that it's going on. And so I think that was the biggest difference. like everything got canceled, all meetings got canceled. And there is this sense of, okay, these are, this isn't just individual homes or like little areas without power. These, this is, and also just the health, your health when with the AQI stuff, it does feel like the city, it's interesting as a city that's so isolated, you feel so isolated here.

5:35People don't really leave their neighborhoods. You don't go out to eat as much. People have people in their homes. Like one of the reasons I like living here is because I'm so detached, whereas in New York I'm out to four things every single night. It does feel like everybody is trying to help each other out. And because there is a little more time than there normally is, and there are less meetings and all that stuff, people are mobilizing and spending that time organizing things and getting stuff. Like I just got a text from a friend who's a friend of a friend who lost their house. So I'm just asking me, is there a list of brands that are sending to individual homes, that sort of thing?

6:20Which there is. I've seen that list and it's so generous and wonderful. I mean, that's a silver lining. And like we were saying earlier, the reality is this is going to be the new normal. There will be catastrophic climate events that happen more and more often. So to kind of set the precedent for the kind of politeness and care that we are expected to show our neighbors, I think is really important. And I'm heartened to hear that LA is doing it so beautifully, which I had no doubt about because everyone I've ever met in that city, I love. It's such a special, beautiful, haunted, incredible place, all those old trees and old homes.

6:53It's such a special, special spot. Yeah. And you write about it beautifully in your book, which we're going to talk about immediately. I have one more little thing to say. And that is that I wrote this in line sheet. I don't know if it's going to end up getting edited because we're all very emotional right now. But I have no reason to live here. I should live in Paris. If I was focused on work, and honestly, it's a great place to raise kids. I should live in Paris. I lived in New York for 15 years. It would be easier for me to live in New York. Last year, I think I flew. It was a little bit crazy year because of book promotion too.

7:39But I think I flew to New York eight times and spent, it's not like I go there for two days. It's like two weeks. And we moved here during COVID. It's trying to escape another natural disaster. And I loved it here. And that was one of the reasons we moved here. But now I just can't imagine leaving. And I'm not the person to describe why. That's for Susan Orlean wrote a really nice thing in her newsletter this week about it. And everyone can read the Joan Didion essay about the Santa Ana wins. Of course. If you haven't already. Stephanie Dandler also writes beautifully about weather in the opening passages of her memoir, Stray.

8:21It always reminded me of the Didion. But yeah, other people can do the literature part. Yes, yes. But there is just something about this place that... It's haunted. It has ghosts. It's old Hollywood. It's got it all. You believe in ghosts. Okay, so let... Of course I do. It's the edge of Western civilization. Crazy things happen out there. That is true. So I still wanted to have you on today because you do have this book coming out tomorrow. I really, really love the book. Thank you. We were talking at the W party the other night, but the thing I finished it finally this weekend. The thing I would say that you have is an ability to write about things and be open and not it does.

9:09It feels like you're not super worried about what people think about you. And even if you are, that's not going to stop you from being honest. I mean, I think no one likes getting their feelings hurt. So you have to be careful about reading the comments. But at the end of the day, the urgency I felt towards these topics surpassed what strangers think of me on the internet. So tell me, you're a lifelong journal writer. So it makes sense that your first book would be a memoir. But tell me how you decided to write The Motherload and what your sort of mission was in getting it out there. I did toy, by the way, with turning it into fiction at one point because I thought it would allow me to go harder at these people who I had felt sort of wronged me and that it would offer a layer of protection.

10:01But I ended up deciding to make it memoir because I wanted people, I didn't want anyone to be able to say, yeah, this girl had postpartum depression and her birth was kind of traumatic and men were dicks to her and whatever, but it's fiction. So she probably exaggerated. Like I wanted people to know that this is a really standard occurrence for women and it's sort of the status quo and that like none of that is hyperbolic, right? The book is essentially about like the, my year of terrible postpartum depression after I had my first born and the identity rupture that it caused. And I had gone through that in real life.

10:36And in order to emerge from it, I'd gone through a lot of therapy and a lot of different kinds of therapy. And I'd gone on SSRIs and like, you know, done the whole runaround to sort of get my shit together. And one of the therapeutic practices that I've like used a lot in my life is journaling every morning. And so I had just like pages and pages of writing about postpartum and going through postpartum. And when I decided to start writing a book, I wrote it like I couldn't stop myself. Like it was going to come out one way or another. The writing was so easy. It just like poured out of me in a way that felt really natural.

11:14So I sort of didn't have a choice. The book in a way wrote itself. But I always say that I wrote the book that I wished I had had when I was going through it because I was so desperately searching for answers and searching for ways to make myself happy and searching for a light at the end of the tunnel and someone who could prove to me that my for the rest of my life was not just going to be living in this like darkness and that there was going to be joy for me on the other side and I couldn't find a narrative that made sense I tried to read every book I could find on then reach the end of the internet and any corner that discussed postpartum depression or anxiety or anything.

11:51And I never felt spoken to and I never felt like it was explained or described in the way that it was happening to me. And I thought that to provide even one person with a narrative that made sense for them and made them feel seen would make it all worthwhile. So I wrote the book that I wish I'd had. It's a great example of how specifics become universal. and I would say coming out of this book, like my impression is that you've had an extraordinary life and you're an extraordinary person and it's, I can't wait for the sequel, whatever you're compelled to write about in 10 years or five years or 20 years and how the rest of your life unfolds because it's fascinating and also it is so relatable.

12:39You know, I didn't have postpartum depression. I've struggled with that stuff. I have generalized anxiety disorder, I'm sure. Who among us doesn't? Who doesn't? Like, that's the thing I don't understand. I was talking about it with someone. I was like, doesn't everyone have really bad anxiety? You just learn how to manage it. But anyway, the point being that even though a lot of your experiences were the complete opposite of mine. Like there are small things like the thing that I found after having a baby is that no one explains what it's like and it's different for everyone, but no one talks about it.

13:19Like I had trouble. I have a low milk supply and I, I thought this breastfeeding stuff I really connected with cause I, I enjoyed it. And, uh, like my kid liked it and all that, but like, I couldn't give him all the milk. And that was, I didn't know that was a thing, but no one talks about the stuff. And what I think you did was you put it in the context of your greater life and showing that like, you have this rich life, but you've also had a lot of traumatizing things happen. And as a whole, it's still extraordinary, but you can't act like the bad things didn't happen. Whereas most, I think our culture, the tendency is to not share those things because it makes other people uncomfortable.

14:12And you share them in a way that there was never once where I felt like, oh, I can't, I need to stop, that it was too much or anything like that. I mean, what I've experienced is that a lot of those things in that book at the time when they were happening to me, I felt incredible shame about. Like, I was deeply embarrassed that it wasn't natural for me to be a mother and that I couldn't, like, access my maternal instincts if they even existed. I was horrified by myself that I didn't love my child when he came out of my body. I judged myself for not breastfeeding. I like had help at home which is not you know it's not how I was necessarily raised like my I didn't grow up with nannies there were all these reasons that I felt like an absolute failure of a woman and what I realized in the writing of it was that the more I like came out with those embarrassments and told them to other women there was always a moment of that wasn't exactly my story but I was embarrassed about x y and z I'm like thank you for saying it so I could say mine and it just helped me like engage with people and relate to them so much and it feels so much less alone that it felt worth it to me to like put it all on the table because there is not a single woman on this earth who hasn't felt judged and like she doesn't measure up to some standard that she didn't get to make for herself that like the culture around her made and I think who can't relate to that no and if I could just like change one person's trajectory and allow them to feel like they can judge themselves less.

15:46Like we're all flawed and we all have difficulties matching up to cultural narratives. Like that's so worth it to me. That was the most important part. A lot of this book, it's your personal story. It's about motherhood. It's about going through all that stuff, but it's also cultural commentary about like where our society is right now. And, And that part of it is, I thought was, it just, I think that it will stand the test of time capturing a moment in the way we live as well. Oh, I hope so. I mean, it's like dark, you know, but you're right. When you're in an industry that's so all-consuming and you're at the center of it because you work somewhere like Puck or you live in New York City and everything's so fast-paced, you get really myopic.

16:35like you just you can only see what's right in front of you it's hard to like pull back and look at a really a macro picture but there's so much like pernicious i don't know like instagram and reality tv it's like it's such a small slice of how people actually like live and feel and look and I know no one not a even part of a percentage of the people who watch the Kardashians will read my book but I do try every day to like build the world that I want to live in and I really believe in honesty of emotion I probably got like dates and times and stuff wrong in my book but I know that every feeling I wrote about in there I absolutely felt and if I felt it other people feel it.

17:26And I just like don't want to be embarrassed about any of that. I just feel like it's a nice antidote to the worlds that we operate in on the other side, which are so like anesthetized and CGI'd and AI'd. Yes. And it's easy to forget how much they are. I do want to talk to you a little bit about art and fashion and all of that stuff. But before we get started on that. The book doesn't come out until Tuesday, which is when this is publishing. You should all order it. But I assume you've started to get feedback. You had an amazing style section cover story this past weekend, I believe, or I don't know if it was Thursday or Sunday.

18:10But and also I just know a lot of people you you were really good about sending it out to people. You sent a handwritten note, which sorry, I did not do that when I had my book. I just sent like four to people who blurbed it six months later. But you've been great about that. What has the feedback been so far? And what are you feeling about the sort of way people are going to react to it? You know, in my typical like paranoid anxiety brain, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I haven't gotten like a review yet. You know, it's only been sent to, you know, friends and journalists and that I know and who I had an ability to connect with and be like, what's your address?

18:57So it's not in the hands of like total, total strangers very much. And I await a negative review and I await trolls on the internet, of course. But in this moment, which I'm sure is fleeting and brief, I have received such wonderful feedback from people who feel really seen and like acknowledged. And it's just highlighted for me how much women deserve to be seen and how rarely they are. And like I've become a repository for other people's stories of birth trauma and trauma as a woman existing in the world, which I do not mind at all because it's like my great fascination and hopefully can become, you know, my life's work from now on.

19:38But I am mostly receiving feedback from women who are just like, oh my God, thank you for saying the thing that I couldn't, which is a total dream for me. And I don't know how like a smart literati will review it. I have no idea if I'm like a good writer or whatever. I don't necessarily even care about that. I want like real women who live real lives and raise children. I want it to make their world like a tiny percent better and make them feel like acknowledged. That's all that matters to me. And so far, I feel like I've been doing that. And that that's been like the best possible feeling, because by the way, publishing a memoir is so scary.

20:15Like you have my diary. It really is like it feels so honest. And I'd say that one thing is good writing is extremely subjective. So some people, if someone says they're a good writer, I'd never listen to anyone because it's very difficult to objectively say that. The second thing is you are a good writer. and the thing that you are, it's not, um, it doesn't feel put on at all. Like that was the thing that was amazing to me was as, as a first time book writer. And, and also it's not like you've been it, what it kind of reminded me of, it felt like you had been writing a personal blog or a newsletter for 15 years.

21:03Like I was like, I can't believe she never did. Did you ever have a blog or anything? No, I never considered myself a writer at all. I mean, I have such imposter syndrome. I still don't consider myself a writer. I'm just like a girl who worked in art who also wrote a book, you know, but I never, I had only written like art history texts and press releases and academic things and industry things. I had never written anything for other people to read that was even close to literature. What people tend to do if they feel what you say you feel, imposter syndrome or whatever is to make the writing increase the sort of floweriness or the they want to try to make it sound sophisticated.

21:42And there wasn't one moment in the book where I felt that from you. It felt extremely natural and it felt like your voice. It felt like it was coming from you. It didn't feel like you tried to use big words or or descriptions that didn't make sense. I mean, I don't have any big words in this brain. I have an eight-month-old, like my brain's Swiss cheese. But I also like, I really wanted, my favorite books that I've ever read, I have the sense that the voice is the voice of the writer in real life. Like they write how they talk. And I was like, I just want to do that. Turns out that is so hard to do.

22:20It's not like, it doesn't come out of your brain the way it sounds in your brain, no matter kind of how hard to try and it was like I had to force myself I it was a real learning curve to learn how to do that but it was my ultimate goal so thank you um I just wanted it to sound like me I'm like all I have at the end of the day is my own story and the way my own brain works at my own voice and they're going to be people who hate it and people who judge it but it's mine and like I can't change that but I don't know how to I don't know how these fiction writers who write in other people's voices do it like I'm not that skilled I'm not that's a prodigy level thing to me I'm not one of those people I just wrote the way I talk.

22:57That's all I could do. Well, you did good. Thanks. So congratulations. Thank you so much.

23:37It feels a little weird to transition to less serious stuff than fires and motherhood. There's room for both. So one thing in the book that I thought was really interesting is you kind of, by telling the details of your life, you talk about the art world. and your experience and you worked at Gagosian. It's Gagosian, correct? Not Gagosian or - I hear both, but Larry himself says Gagosian. So, okay, thank you. Let's follow what Larry says. Yeah, okay. You worked there for 14 years. You climbed up the ranks and essentially your gig, it sounded like was, you were an art advisor. So you had clients and you would tell them like which pieces to buy, that type of thing.

24:25I sold works to clients. I also managed artists. Okay. And so I worked on kind of both sides of the fence. There are some galleries in the world where you can only do one or the other. That's what the corporate structure details. But when I worked for Larry, I did both of those things and it was incredibly dynamic and fun and exciting. So because of that job and because of the kind of person you are, that means that you were sort of in New York culture and in and around in the mix, going to parties, meeting different types of people. And that means that you are interacting with a lot of people in the fashion industry as well.

25:03And obviously art and fashion are very closely connected and especially Gagosian. A lot of the clients and all of that are fashion industry people. It's just very, very closely connected. In terms of how the two worlds operate, because I don't know much about the art world. How is it the same and how is it different? The art world is much smaller. It's especially like I haven't been at Gagosian for, you know, several years. So because I I loved when I started writing my book, but I and the art world has grown in that time because of the Internet and Instagram and the way trends work. And there are more artists collaborating with fashion brands and their names are becoming more mainstream household names.

25:50But especially when I started there, I mean, I started in 2007. So it was before Instagram and Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince had made collections with Louis Vuitton, but that was not now every fashion house has done a brand collab with an artist, if not 20. So, but that wasn't de rigueur at the time. And the art world felt tiny. There's a list that's published every year I think it still is published of the top 200 collectors in the art world and I remember I made flashcards with them so I could identify them when I worked at the front desk which like any front desk girl in any gallery has probably did in that time period because like we had Facebook but we didn't have Instagram so you wanted to be able to identify Eli Brode when he walked in the room but you know so I remember like making flashcards so I could remember their name, their face, the city they lived in, the industry they made their fortune in, the types of art that they collected, etc.

26:45But the world was small. There were those top 200 collectors. There were, you know, 30 or 40 curators at the world's top museums. There were 10 gallerists that worked at the really, you know, highest end internationally. And then there were artists. There were four critics that we cared about. But you can't, you're not allowed to give critics catalogs or anything when they come to visit the gallery because they have their code of conduct for whatever journalist, you know, whatever paper they work for. So what is, can we talk about that really quickly? They can't see the catalog because they don't want to know how much the stuff costs.

27:21They can look at catalogs, but you can't gift them things because, you know, normally like if a collector comes into a gallery and is looking at an exhibition that a catalog has been made for, you would say like, oh, please take this catalog home with you. Like, you know, flip through would if you you know change your mind about a painting now you have all of them illustrated in one place but often critics can't accept gifts because they have codes of conduct at different publications they would consider the catalog a gift that's so interesting yeah I mean I think you just want to be like very careful with those things of course you know and I like revere I mean one of my favorite writers in general in this world is Jerry Saltz who is the art critic of New York Magazine.

27:59And he has like such an incredible viewpoint on life and culture and such an interesting personal history. And he's just like one of my favorites. But if you're looking for other art world writing like that, like the Calvin Tompkins Life of the Artist books is so that they're so amazing, all of those essays. But yeah, I would never give catalogs out to critics when they came in. Oh, that's so interesting. So what are your observations of the fashion industry as you your profile increased and you started interacting with those people more and you start I don't know are you a Chanel ambassador no I'm not like a formally involved in any way I don't even know if they how they how that works but so my thing was like I when I the thing about the art world is in fashion because it's so corporate because the corporate companies are so massive.

28:53There's this entire like level of people that do PR and marketing and communications. And until like very, very recently, none of those jobs existed in the art world. Like there was probably a PR person who worked at a gallery who wrote press releases and made sure the New York Times knew when a show was opening, but there wasn't a machine behind it. And even a small fashion brands now has PR, you know, and has some version of a machine behind it. So there are just hundreds more people involved in fashion than there are in art because there's never like that layer of infrastructure. There's the art dealers and the artist liaisons and some of them have assistants and you might have like a PR person and an HR person and someone who works in accounting.

29:38But like that's the gallery structure. There's just not that many bodies. And in terms of like galleries that matter, whatever that means worldwide, galleries that, you know, alter art markets and nurture artists and make them big and support their careers. There's what, like a hundred of them that, so it's just, it's a very small world. That of course changed a lot more when Instagram, you know, became the huge behemoth that it is. And also during COVID for the first time, collectors couldn't, and viewers in general, couldn't see art in person for a while and became much more familiar and comfortable with buying stuff over jpeg or online and most of most of the galleries developed like online viewing platforms to support those sorts of transactions so through that they're just the access to even just seeing things became much greater and a lot less opaque um i knew people i mean i had gone to college in new york so like i had a pretty entrenched network already i knew people in college who had interned at vogue or interned to different fashion houses so i had like assistant level friends at a lot of places.