Virgil’s Design Legacy and the Case for Demna at Gucci

0:28Hello and welcome to Fashion People. If you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Sheet. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. It's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries. Line Sheet is scoopy, analytical, and above all, fun. Along with me, a subscription to Puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment, media, sports, politics, finance, the art world, and much more. If you're interested, listeners of Fashion People get a discount.

1:02Just go to puck.news slash fashionpeople to join Puck or start a free trial. Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you had a great week. Busy one as usual over here at Puck and specifically Line Sheet. I'm sure you've all heard that Wednesday was Liberation Day. I tried to cover the confusing and murky situation around the tariffs in a way that would actually be interesting and perhaps helpful to readers. Essentially, what I'm understanding is they're still going to have to engage, these companies in Europe and these companies that deal with manufacturing. Everyone needs to work together because everyone needs to make money.

1:47So here's hoping, as they try to negotiate over the next month, that something works out. But the reality is, everybody's going to lose a bunch of money and everybody needs to make a lot of money. So let's just hope they can work it out. If not, you know, I'll see you in two years. I also have a bigger story about the crisis of LVMH and caring. That's not really about tariffs. It's stuff we've covered before, but extremely important and sort of all coming to a head at the moment. And I also get into Radika Jones's departure from Vanity Fair. Everyone wants to know who the next editor of Vanity Fair is going to be.

2:27I got a lot of write-ins from Mel Ottenberg. That was, I didn't mention him on my Thursday email, but if you check out Fridays, there will be an addition. A lot of people wrote it. I just personally think Mel makes too much money. Like the amount of money they pay someone in one year, I assume he makes on like one campaign. And if you do that job, you can't do those other jobs. So we'll see. Who knows? Stella Bugbee was also a favorite, is also a favorite of mine. Many people mentioned Sarah Moonves. I didn't mention her because I believe she will be and should be the next editor of Vogue. So I will also mention this on Friday.

3:11So if you want to read up, check out Thursday, check out Friday, read line sheet for way more intel. And let's get going with Jesse, who texted me this morning to tell me that he sold the most expensive piece at Design Space LA, this event where we had this conversation this past weekend. So Jesse is the founder of Basic Space. He also owns Design Miami through his company. And Design Space LA is sort of like a blending of the two. It was a fair, a design fair, but you could buy pretty much everything. And he said that they sold a Privé gas station, which pretty wild. I guess I would buy one if I could.

3:50So let's get going. I hope you enjoy this conversation. It was our first live event. I hope we can do many more. If you would like to host one or pay for one, you know where to find me. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Fashion People. First time live pod. First time live pod. I'm Lauren Sherman. I am the fashion correspondent at Puck and host of our fashion podcast, Fashion People. And this is Jesse Lee, the reason we're here today. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. So we have, I've never done a live podcast before, so just bear with us. Well, especially not in front of 5 ,000 people. Yes, so many people.

4:31This is a good testing ground. This is a big theater, by the way. You know, I've been to a screening in this theater. What'd you see? I saw challengers here it was cool it was like I don't go to a lot of those kinds of things but I did go to a screening of challengers oh yeah because there's a lot of uh fashion yeah I forget how I got I think I did ask the Loewe people to hook it up I can't really remember I went with Hilary Kerr oh do you know her she's like in the yeah in the um east side school mix so so we start every Friday episode. This is going to run next Friday with the question, what did you have for breakfast?

5:12Some of the people in here already know the answer, which is nothing. I don't eat breakfast. Do you never eat breakfast? On weekends I do. So I'll splurge on Saturday, Sunday, but I have a reason why Monday through Friday, I just drink coffee. Okay. Because I learned years ago, even when I have a salad for lunch, I get tired and I need a second iced coffee, but it still doesn't work as much as, I don't know, not eating. So you, when is the first time you eat during the day? Five o 'clock. Whoa. I thought you said you don't eat breakfast, but you don't eat breakfast or lunch. Oh yeah. So I forgot to say that.

5:51So I start with that. I start with coffee, but I only need one coffee for the whole day. Okay. And then, well, when I'm traveling, I maybe eat dinner even later. But in LA, as you know, too, we all eat early. 530. Yeah. So ideal. But I, but I'll literally eat anything and everything in like three portions. Okay. So you eat a very large meal. Yeah. And then my, I'll have a glass of wine or something. Sometimes I want to call this section of the podcast eating disorder corner. Mine's more for productivity though. Look, I know a lot of people who say they call it intermittent fasting, I guess, but I was doing that before it was called that.

6:30Okay. Anyway, how did you end up in LA? So I actually flipped a coin after college, either in New York or LA. I grew up mostly in Chicago, went to school out there. And at the time I wanted to be in the music industry and essentially picked LA because of the weather. Didn't know anyone and then just drove West. I feel like Los Angeles could be very isolating in your 20s? Because it's not like you can't just go out to a bar. You can't go walk around. You don't run into people as much. No, I actually moved to LA literally at the height of entourage era. And you just met... Were you in an entourage?

7:12But me and my friends would... I mean, at the time, I went out every night. So that's how I know some of these guys, Mark the Cobra Snake, Glenn Jimman, taking photos of us. We were all out. every night wasn't mark in new york at that time though no mark was definitely in la in hollywood where's mark can't see him no so like mid to late 2000s i would say was like peak la nightlife so monday through sunday oh yeah that was when all those like clubs that ended up being on reality television shows were big hollywood back then was completely different and you can get a mix of everything so if you wanted to go to cool indie indie rock you know hipster party on tuesday at cine space or lax on sundays like dj and mark ronson all that stuff but then you can still do the you know bottle service hip-hop clubs on the weekends and yeah some of the friends that i have even to this day used to be in that industry so what did you do when you moved out here did you try to get a job in music i try to get a job at every record label.

8:22None of them answered my email. So I had to apply for an internship, didn't get paid, worked at retail. Actually, the first and only time I worked retail. Where'd you work? I never shared the story, but I'll actually share it with you. So first two places I tried to get a job at on the promenade declined, which I'll get back to in a second. One was Urban Outfitters. The other one was Puma. Urban was hard to get a job. I tried to get a job there in college and it was really difficult. And there was a crazy screening to make sure you never did any drugs. So if you got that far, it was like, have you ever smoked weed?

9:01And I was like, what do you say? That's how I didn't get the Puma job. It's true. They were really conservative. But French Connection hired me. Wow. Remember FCUK? Yes. So I was on the floor selling for a few months. But crazy enough, five years later, when I started my own creative agency, both Puma and Urban Outfitters became clients. So store manager can kiss my. So five years in, you started your own creative agency. What did you went from being a shop boy at FCUK to owning a creative agency? What happened? Yeah, so I went out every night. And part of the reason why I went out every night wasn't just like drink and have fun, although I did plenty of that.

9:43It was to like meet people. So you said, right, was in LA maybe a lonely place or whatever. I didn't know a single person. So I'd go out every night to meet. It sounds really cliche, but quote unquote to network. And within like two years, what were you saying? Networking. Before it was called even networking though. Well, the funny thing is, so I was just an intern and in the mail room eventually and then became someone's assistant all pretty quickly within a year. I would pick up DJs and musicians from the airport, do favors for them, which again, some I shouldn't have to be doing. But I never said no.

10:21And I was all over town. And within a couple of years, a lot of my friends thought that I was from L.A. because they'd just seen me out and about. Jason Stewart, mutual friend, he was working the door at Cinespace back then. I really don't. I barely know what Cinespace is, but it sounds very cool. It's where like the indie rock hipster scene started. Okay. You know, like the Steve Aoki, Frankie Chan, Mark the Cobra Snake, that whole era. So you're interning at a music. Oh, yeah. So I'll fast forward. Basically, within a couple of years, I moved up relatively quickly, I guess. At the time, it felt like I was stuck.

11:00But again, I just kept showing up. There's a story. like I'd call into the office and my boss would be, he would like pick up the phone and put it out and go, Jesse's calling again. Does anyone need him to come in and do anything for you? So that was my motto. And then so went from internship to mailroom, getting like 1050 an hour, was an assistant for a couple of months, learned how to work every day without getting paid much. And where was this? This was a talent management company that managed like Crystal Method and Henry Rollins. So it doesn't exist. I don't think so. But so just doing that.

11:37And then the first big break was I worked at this magazine called Herb, U-R-B. It was an indie music mag, Raymond Roker. And the way I got that job too was I was stalking him on email. I would email him at like 2 a.m. asking for a job because I grew up reading the magazine when I was in college. I was DJing when I was younger too. So he gave me a job that I wasn't qualified for. I was like 24. 25 and I was a marketing manager first time with a business first time with a business card and it was like the biggest accomplishment yeah so it didn't matter how little I was getting paid um so I was there for about a year and a half and then I'd always wanted to start my own company because in college I was DJing and throwing club nights and parties so I knew that at some point I wanted to do my own thing and of course my parents were like don't do it why don't you like get a job and keep moving on up and learn more.

12:28And my logic was, if I don't do this in my 20s, and if I'm in my 30s or 40s and married with kids, it's going to be harder to do it. Yeah. So I just took a leap of faith. It also happened to be in the late 2000s when there were that many great jobs available after the Great Recession or whatever. So yeah, I relaunched my blog called Dub Frequency, started throwing parties at the Standard, doing events at South by Southwest, Coachella, Fashion Week, Art Basel, Miami, and those sponsors became clients. So then that's how DFM and some of the people that also worked with me at DFM. So that was between 2009 and 2018-19.

13:10So what kind of work did you do for them? It was a creative agency, but that can mean a million different things. So what was your specialty? So the first few years was a lot of events because brands would sponsor our events at South by Southwest or Coachella. So brands that you'd know well, like we've done parties with Opening Ceremony, Teva with FK Twigs at Coachella before she became famous. And a lot of the brands then started coming to us and saying, well, why don't you do events for us? And then we were also making content on YouTube and MySpace days and all that stuff, right? Record labels.

13:48And so we were doing early version of influencer marketing before it was called that. So we would have talent and some are still partners of ours on basic space, but we would help discover them, so to speak. So a lot of the DJs and musicians would play our parties for free. And then next year they're playing Coachella. Or on the fashion side, we helped launch V-Files. Remember V-Files? Yeah. So we did fashion week parties with them. And then opening ceremony, obviously. Carol actually, Carol Lim's an early investor of basic space. Oh, cool. So I used to shop at OC all the time. That's where I bought my first like Alexander Wang or Martine Rose.

14:29Yeah. And then started working with bigger brands, whether it's like Nike, Calvin Klein, Gucci, kind of on the fashion side. And then like Spotify, Square, Cash App. on the tech. So when you first launched the agency and you started working with fashion brands, what was your impression of the fashion industry? Because it changed dramatically in the 10 years that you were operating the agency. So I think what was cool back then, by the way, my daughter asked that I give her a shout out for her. Her name's Izzy and her friend, Thea, they have a booth outside. Check her booth out. It's really cool.

15:08It's jewelry, right yeah homemade um for for her brother but um you know the feeling of fashion 10 years ago and i know we're going to come back to the design thing in a second yeah but it just felt so like it's like subversive and cool and there was a mix of luxury felt unattainable you know in your 20s like having a louis vuitton wallet or gucci wallet was a belt was an accomplishment yeah and then you would mix that with, you know, skate, streetwear, sneakers, all that stuff. And then, you know, going back to LA nightlife, the cool thing about LA and New York back then too, was you can go to the most exclusive clubs, but if you look cool, like they let you in.

15:51But if you look like a douchebag and you just have money, they wouldn't let you in. And it wasn't like that in Chicago. Like you can't even wear hats to clubs in Chicago. They make you, if I dress like this and walk to a fancy club in Chicago, they wouldn't let me in. But in New York and LA, if you dressed a certain way or they think you're cool or you have style, they let you in. And fashion was a big part of that. So for me, it just felt very, yeah, like new and you can kind of combine the high-low. And I think that proved, you know, paved the way for a lot of those people from that generation to become creative directors of luxury fashion houses and, you know, all that.

16:32Yeah, I'm Virgil. Yeah, I mean, Virgil, we know him from, yeah, he used to DJ our parties. And a lot of people like that, you know, Jerry Lorenzo also promoted club nights in LA when I first moved here. A lot of people, you know, came from that era. Why do you think that world is, was a sort of, I don't want to say factory, but a resource for the fashion industry during that period? because like music and fashion just interact no matter what and music became the kind of core of influence during that period and so all these people were like rapping about brands and they became more like what do you think the through line yeah yeah so if i take it back to even when i was in college the person that kind of started all in my opinion was pharrell williams back then And so imagine 20, 25 years ago, right before Kanye, Pharrell was the first guy with like, you know, Neptunes and NERD and wearing kind of the skate clothes and, you know, the high-low mix.

17:39I even had Chanel earrings like 20 years ago. Because of Pharrell? Well, no, I think I had him before he ever wore Chanel. But I'm just saying - Pharrell was influenced by Justin. By the way, my wife and my daughter have those as record. I have these two double C Chanel earrings that I used to wear in my early 20s. But point being, though, Pharrell was kind of everyone's style god. Yeah. And then, you know, I know it's a controversial person, but Kanye came along and took it to a whole nother level. And, you know, whether you like him as a person or not, like that was the major inflection point.

18:13Right. Music to fashion, culture and all those guys that you mentioned and people you know well. At one point or another worked with Kanye. do you think there's something about i always make this reference i've probably written this like 15 times but when in the like 1990s 2000s and prior to that too the sort of queuing up culture was all about waiting for an album to drop so it was i think tuesday nights yeah tuesday was the release date was the release date so maybe people would go on monday night and at midnight or 12.01 a.m. on Tuesday, they would get the album. And then it turned in the last decade or in the 2010s into people waiting in line for Off-White and Supreme and all of that.

19:04Do you think that those two things are interconnected? I actually never thought about that, but the drop model does sound familiar to what the music drop model is. I think Supreme's was Wednesday, I want to say, when they would drop. I think it was Thursday. Thursday, yeah. So, yeah, perhaps. But actually, if you think about it, early streetwear brands from the 2000 era had the drop model. And as you know very well, again, like luxury fashion, then started kind of following suit. And then we'll, I'm sure, talk about how that's also now the other direction now. It's kind of swinging back a different way.

19:36But yeah, that's probably there might be some relevance to that.

19:45Well, you mentioned earlier this idea of owning a Louis Vuitton wallet was like an accomplishment. Something changed in around 2018, 2019, I'd say that maybe I think it had to do with the rise of resale, it became more common to own that kind of stuff that like you would put a ton of your income towards getting that wallet or pair of sneakers or whatever, or buying them secondhand or make, or buying a pair on the first drop and reselling them for more money and making income off of it. It just became like not as rarefied to own luxury goods by the end of the 2010s. was that something when you launched basic space which you should explain what it is was that something you were thinking about yeah i mean you know my biggest source of inspiration or references for that matter are people close to me whether it's my wife friends people i work with and you know i started seeing yeah people buy like quote-unquote cool people buy more vintage, right?

20:56And, but part of it, I think is to make it even more simple, um, just like any other trends, so to speak. I mean, nothing lasts forever. Right. So I think with luxury fashion, it just got to a point where it's, you know, like you said, just everybody had it or too many people, um, made it to, you know, I guess like for the lack of a better word, it's everywhere, you know? Yeah. And then like, what happens is just like in other, you know, trends, people like kind of get into the next thing, right? So what's the next thing? So yeah, like it's, I think, all about discovery and sense of style and people started just kind of looking into other places.

21:35So what is Basic Space? Why did you decide to launch it? And how did it get you to the point where you're like hosting this fair on a Saturday in Los Angeles? So it just came out of actually saying, you know, what we just talked about. I knew a lot of creatives that weren't quote unquote influencers in a traditional way of like YouTube video and Instagram, like influencer types. Yet those are the ones I felt like were really setting trends. And so why not be able to pick those people, they're friends of ours anyway, and have them sell directly to consumer. Now, we started with mostly vintage fashion at the beginning because that was the easiest way to get supply.

22:14And a lot of my friends and some of the people you know, they weren't selling on other existing resale platforms because they felt like that it was too common for them to or didn't seem cool to them to do that. But with us, they're selling next to their friends. A lot of them have their own brands. And then we started selling exclusive new products and some of them got into design. And that's how the Virgil Vitra thing, you know, four years ago. And then, yeah, so to me, it's a curated marketplace, but also the term curated gets really, you know, thrown around a lot. And it was for us, it's just kind of like invite only to sell.

22:49And it's our friends and friends of friends selling. And it's kind of expanded into now more design and art. I mean, at one point we were even selling NFTs. We had the controversial, I don't know if you remember the baby Birkenberg NFT. I vaguely remember this. I do remember meeting you via phone during COVID. And I think it was around the launch of the Virgil Vietra thing. So can you explain what that was? Because I think it really... Ties into what we're doing here this weekend. So it was the first COVID winter. And to give credit where credit's due, like both Virgil and Vitra, I think they were just looking for an alternative way to release a product outside of their usual channels.

23:34So our idea was pretty simple because we were only like three months old at the time. We did a pop-up in Miami and our concept was IRL to URL shopping. So we live streamed the experience, had one of our mutual friends, Pedro, who's also part of this DJ and Virgil did the set design and we released it the next day like it's live. It was actually pre-recorded. And then the chair, the lamp and the brick, we sold out in a couple of days on basic space and it kind of gave us the blueprint for what we're doing now on a much larger scale. It's so crazy to think that Virgil is doing that on top of everything else he was doing and just everything he was going through, obviously, in his life.

24:19And when you think about him, he was a trained industrial designer. So what is happening now in the culture, which you've become sort of the poster child of this design is the new luxury idea, it's so much of it is connected to him and the culture he built around himself. I think even working together on that project, you saw how fast and frequent the emails and messages come across our teams. And I always remember, because I would tell my own team, pay attention to even the lines and the spacing in the deck. Because I care about those things too. So it's best if you don't make spelling errors.

25:05You're always kind. All the emails are very positive. it's never like you know i'm sure we've all dealt with a lot of people where their emails are curt and not nice or not cordial but him and his team were always very gracious and that's why we all like collectively work love working together but yeah virgil was ahead of his time or you know in terms of doing design i mean he had done collaborations with some of the the highest like the coolest design galleries one of them um or a couple of them work with us at design in Miami, whether it's Gallery Creo, Carpenter's Workshop. Another mutual friend of ours, Francois LaFenor, has the Privé gas station here outside.

25:42And so Virgil was doing design even back then. And I firmly believe that if he were still with us, he'd be doing a lot more design hospitality and all that stuff. Yeah. So when did you start to see this shift in consumer behavior? Obviously, during the pandemic, people were spending a lot of money on their homes, but they were also buying a lot of luxury goods, like a ton. For a lot of these brands, 2022 was their best year ever in the U.S. in particular. So people were still buying clothes, even though they really didn't have anywhere to wear them. But when did you start to notice that there was a sort of the priority was moving away from having like another bag and instead buying like a chair or whatever you nailed it 2022 because i think if you look at all the financial reports and you know stock prices and stuff right those are market highs and you just i mean it just became again like too overexposed it's so it's not even about money or i think accessibility because that gets thrown around a lot too even with collectible design but people just want something new that's cool.

26:58So design became the next thing because there's some collectability element to it. It requires a bit more studying and having a certain eye and taste and understanding historical context as well as what's new. And I think it gives people more, or let me say it differently, it makes it harder to kind of just like have your style. Whereas like fashion became like uniform. You know, a lot of people started dressing the same where you follow a certain influencer and you go on Instagram, you can kind of copy and paste the look. But furniture, like even if you wanted to buy a privé daybed somewhere on an auction site, there's a very good chance that it's not real.

27:39So you have to understand how to look for the authentic product, the provenance. So it kind of requires a lot more, for the lack of a better term, again, like kind of sense of style, intelligence, like related to research. It takes a little more work. 100%. So I actually also believe in that, you know, the best mode in business is actually doing the most difficult thing, the harder thing that people can't copy. So I think that's why you see more and more people that kind of are into fashion, also transitioning over into design. It's a way to stand out. It requires more work, then it's harder to replicate.

28:13Do you also feel like you work with a lot of the luxury brands, you observe them, you're a consumer, you are around people consuming them. I felt like 2022, 2023, a lot of the biggest brands, which I would call Mastige, they would hate that, but it is like you are selling so much at that point that you are mass. whether or not everyone can access it is a different question, but like enough people can that it's near ubiquitous or near almost generic. It felt like to me that a lot of the bigger brands were minting money so they weren't innovating. So innovation often happens when you... You have to have constraints, right?