Hari Nef’s Hottest Fashion Opinions

0:05Welcome to The Run Through. I'm Chloe Mao and we have another new episode for you today as part of our Paris Fashion Week Bonanza. I am so excited to share Vogue editorial director Mark Waducci and I's conversation with actress, model, and dare I say it girl, Hari Neff. From her controversial opinions on archived dressing to working on her hero's biopic, we had a fabulous chat with Hari. We started it off with Mark describing the very first time he met Hari many years ago. I won't give away too much, but it involves a flower crown. We recorded this conversation last week right as Hari was on her way to L.A.

0:45for the Vanity Fair Oscar party and she was frantically sourcing the perfect dress for the occasion. So it felt like a suspenseful moment to see her wearing brand new Alessandra Michele Valentino looking resplendent on the red carpet. Here's our conversation with Hari Neff.

1:05Hari Neff, we are so excited to have you on the run through. Hari, I was trying to remember the first time we met. And so I went through my phone this morning in a last minute preparation. But how? Like, did you search Hari's face or do you? Because I never know how to look for photos. Yes, my phone recognizes Hari's face. Okay. And so according to AI, the first picture of you on my phone, which I think is probably the first time we hung out, was in July 2016 at a Vogue.com party that Sally Singer threw at the Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village. Wait, it still recognizes my old face? Yes.

1:39That's disappointing. But do you remember that? I was wearing a flower crown that evening. Right. I was living right around the corner at the time. I had just graduated college. I had just come back from L.A. after shooting my first job transparent. parent. And it was like before I debuted as an actress or right after, but like I was still kind of running around modeling. So I was going to a Vogue party one way or another. I was really happy to be invited at that point. Today is Prada Day in Milan. I don't know if you've seen yet. Oh, I already saw. I saw. You saw. Yeah, I saw. And this will air on the first or second day of Paris Fashion Week.

2:22So what is fueling you? What's good? Well, I was kind of thinking that question to myself yesterday as I spent probably like two hours on the Vogue app yesterday because I got my last minute invitation to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Ooh, what are you wearing? Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. And by the time this podcast comes out, we will know. But I was going back through all the shows, as I always do when I have a big event, just like what's feeling correct right now and what would make sense for right now. I mean, I saw the Prada show. I loved that show. I loved how just like tired and rich everybody looked.

3:04Like I related to it. It's just like one piece. You're wearing a nightie underneath. No hair. No makeup. Raggedy. But rich. Rich. Opposite, but still rich. I really love Fendi, actually. Uh-huh. I thought Fendi was like the lady that was just twisted enough that it wasn't old lady. Yeah. Tell me what the vibe was at New York Fashion Week for you. Walking the Kalina Strada runway. Yes. The vibe at New York Fashion Week was only essentials. Let's do the essentials. Let's make money or support our close friends and nothing else. That's kind of the approach that I take to New York Fashion Week right now.

3:49Obviously, we've all got to make a living. And if it's, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that to appear somewhere, we love that. But also, you know, there's always opportunities to present something fun and support your friends. And that's what Hillary is. And I love having a little pit stop into her world. Hilary Tamor is the designer of Clean Estrada. Yes. Hari, what do you think is the purpose of New York Fashion Week right now? Like, for a long time, well, it used to be something else, but for the past few seasons, like since COVID, I was saying that I felt like in the way that London exported talent, you know, you found like young designers who would go on and take great jobs at storied houses, that New York was exporting ideas.

4:33ideas about whether it was casting or community or like the way that the you know it was just an experimental place but I feel maybe that's shifted again I don't know what do you think what do you think the purpose of New York is right now I try to figure that out every New York Fashion Week it felt so coherent and clear what New York was about when I first moved here When did you move to New York? I moved to New York in 2011. I was sneaking into Fashion Week as early as 2010 or even 2001. Okay, set the scene. How were you sneaking? I got kicked out of a Proenza Schooler show, girl. Love. I would meet up with my friends from the internet, from Fashion Live Journal, previously known as ONTD Fashion Fags.

5:22Oh, wow. I'm not familiar. Both staffers came from there. Hmm. You know, wait, what were we talking about? We were talking about the purpose of New York Fashion Week and what it used to be. What do you think it was and what do you think it's become? I think it was absolutely a testing ground for ideas about casting and conversations that could be implemented through clothes. You know, we weren't so much experimenting with like form and line and, you know, like setting the trends. But, you know, like Hood by Air was doing the, I'm doing the biggest, corniest air quotes because I'm so tired of it as I'm saying this, the gender fluidity thing, like long before my dear friend Alessandro Michele was doing it.

6:15You know, them and Telfar experimenting with technology and the way clothes interact with the internet. New York is a conceptual place, I think, because it's the nexus of, you know, the American art world, the American media landscape and fashion all at the same time. Now it feels very fragmented. It feels very, like, dash core. every major New York designer is capitulating a to the department stores and you know the ladies on either coast and in Texas and in Chicago that fuel their business as they always have or they're survival mode yeah or they're trying to burrow into their hyper specific internet savvy thing you know like hillary has her lane of like artsy millennials and zoomers who like aren't ready for the kind of like arch like rooks under phoebe celine art gallery thing yet they're still wearing hoodies sandy lang is miss ballet you know the girls are doing their their thing.

7:34And it's enhanced by the algorithm. And I think that there's maybe less freedom to experiment the way there might be in other cities just because the financial demands are pronounced in such a specific way in New York. New York is really about selling. You know, it's about sticking around and getting those stockists. I mean, I guess it is everywhere else, but you have these London kids who show four fab collections that are never to be heard from again. But we still talk about Meet Em Kirchhoff. We still talk about the girls. The girls are gone. They didn't keep their businesses around, but we still talk about them.

8:16And New York doesn't really have that reckless energy. People are trying to make a living here. It's true. It's missing a recklessness.

8:29The Run-Through will be back in a moment.

8:54but only one can be Oscar nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

9:19And we're back. So you are the ringleader of a group chat. Ooh, here we go. That's famously called a famine of beauty. It is called that. Mark was kicked out of it. Mark was kicked. Because he was giving lurker. I just kicked out a handful of other people, too, because they were giving lurker. And listen. Look, I have a day job. I could not contribute as much as others. It's no shade. it's just kind of this mutually assured destruction thing of like the deeper you are into the guts of the industry and in order for all of the other industry people in that chat, like the deeper you are, the more you have to participate or else there's like...

9:59That's true. That's true. How many people are we talking? Skin in the game. Might be like 14 people. It's a mix. There are editors and critics. There are internet girls. It's just a mix of people I know who like fashion. What's an example of three of the last topics discussed? You know, Prada, but also we're obviously so just like fatigued and over the designer musical chairs. Every single rumor gets floated in there. You know, people who are more experienced, let's say, than the three of us have told me that they have never experienced or seen a moment like this in our industry. when all the cards are in the air and it's unclear where they're going to fall.

10:45And it's really interesting to think about, especially as the industry's struggling from a bottom line standpoint, that in a couple of years, the cards could have fallen in a totally new scenario. And whatever we think is the biggest, most important, you have to remember, before Alessandro was at Gucci, it was a healthy but not a massive business in the way he made it to be. And that kind of a moment, you know, I try to think of everything as an opportunity, and it could be a really exciting thing to see what is currently, you know, who knows what Givenchy will be in two years? Who knows what...

11:22I think we're getting some clues about what Givenchy is going to be in two years because of these pulls that Cynthia Erivo has been doing. I do not think it is a coincidence that she's wearing McQueen Givenchy at the SAG Awards and she wore it to this other thing last night, and Sarah is going to Givenchy. I think those archive polls are clues, honey. I think it's going to be fun. But that was beautiful. The Cynthia. My favorite look of the entire award season. Heaven, can you describe it? It was like a raffia, kind of silver coat with this high neck. It's like fringe woven wizardess. It is very wizardess.

12:04Yeah. She looks so cool. And, you know, it just it actually plays into something. Yes, it gives clues to what Sarah Burton might be thinking about. And that's very exciting. But also it's like we've been talking about this at work a lot that the archival revival, this idea that the right vintage look is actually better than custom. Like if you can that there's so much. No, no, no. No. Okay. She disagrees. This is the rare exception. Like, these clothes look fresh. They look supple. They look well-preserved. I think a lot of these girls are coming out in these garments, and they just look like musty garments.

12:42These garments need to be so well-preserved. And I feel like they look droopy most of the time. And this is not a Zoomer mentality. This is not a cool mentality. Like, I'm cooked and washed and old for thinking this, but, like, it's just not as fab to me to, like, you know, pull the archive piece from the archive dealer with 30 ,000 followers on Instagram as it is to have the house make you a garment. Okay, but what if you're going into the, like, perfectly preserved Vatican-like archive of the house itself? Well, then we have Zendaya and Mugler. Then, I think. I mean, I don't know whether Cynthia is from an archive or from Givenchy.

13:29I feel like it looks so good that the house would have a hand in it. And, okay, I actually will say it's kind of fab and kind of cool that these ambiguities can still exist around celebrity dressing with the vintage thing. I think it's cool not to know how a girl got something. That is cool. It inspires me if it looks good, but it so rarely does. Okay, so other than Sarah Givenchy, what is interesting or intriguing to you or the rest of Famine of Beauty about Paris? What are you looking forward to? I cannot speak for Famine of Beauty at large. As fatigued as I am around all of this fan fiction and all of this speculation, I think that someone, somewhere, or maybe all of them collectively, like, it's time to give birth to something new.

14:20it's time to figure out the due date is here what the fulcrum is what is the look what is the vibe what are we going to orient ourselves around or against hopefully because that's always fun I think it's fun when there's a dominant look there's a dominant reigning designer whether you know it's like Phoebe Filowicz-Celine Alessandra Micheleaguchi Demna Demna was the last person to reinvent the way we all dressed. Demno is the last person. We are due. To, you know, like. It's time. We took the shoulders out here. We cropped the jeans here. The shoes were like this. The sunglasses took up our whole face.

15:02Like, nobody has set an agenda the way he did. And that was, like, 10 years ago. There hasn't really been anyone since. You know, we have, you know, like, brilliant, you know, artists like Jonathan Anderson who are giving us these conceptual extravaganzas, but it's less about the day-to-day ready-to-wear in the shows. It's more a concept. Well, luckily, we have many very talented people at new venues where they will be able to— it's almost they're mandated to try to give us something new. So let's see. Let's give birth to something, honey. I want to know about the other group chat I've heard about, the Drag Race group chat.

15:47Oh my God. Can I get in that one? No, yeah, come through. Do you have an all-time favorite Drag Race contestant? Oh God. Who's at the top of the pedestal? Oh my God. It's so hard to pick just one. Top three, I would probably have to say... Sasha Colby. Sasha Colby. Sasha Colby. Raja. Mm-hmm. And I'm going to throw a curveball in there and say Nina Bonina Brown. Wow. Nina Bonina Brown is like really, really slept on. And I just think that there's a reason why she won episode one of season nine where Lady Gaga was the judge. Because she came out there dressed like a peach. She did. She turned her head into a peach.

16:40Oh, wow. With paper. She blended her face into the paper and came out as a peach. And Stephanie Germanada said yes. Yes! The Run-Through will be back in just a moment.

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17:37Moving on to your acting work, one thing that I know that you have been working on that's been announced is a biopic of Candy Darling. Yes. How would you introduce Candy Darling? I would introduce Candy Darling by saying that she was an actress in the late 60s and early 70s. She was amused to Andy Warhol. Lou Reed wrote a couple songs about her. And she was the first transsexual to almost kind of bridge the underground to a legitimate career in film, fashion, and beyond. And she is my hero. She's an icon. She's a legend. I've wanted to play her and help tell her stories since I started acting.

18:36So did you manifest this project? Oh, yeah. No, I heard they were making a movie about her. I knew one of the producers, who is now also the director, Zachary Drucker. I literally just like banged on their door and was like, hey, can I play Candy? And they were like, sure. There was a script. They were trying to move things along and maybe access something different with the script. So I actually volunteered to write a new version of the script. Wow. Did you write it? Yeah. Oh, my God. I didn't know that. No one knows that. Oh. I kind of just proposed an alternate version of it. And my ambition for the longest time has been to write for myself to act.

19:29You know, you don't always feel like the parts that are available to you are the parts that you want to play. I think every actor feels that way. And it would be my first starring role. I've never been number one on the call sheet. I've never played the lead. I've always been a supporting character. And we're now casting. And so we're trying to get some stars. All right. And I'm really hopeful that we'll find some fabulous people who want to come on this journey with us. Have you spent much time with people that knew Candy? It was very important for me to get the blessing of her best friend and the executor of her estate, the late Jeremiah Newton.

20:13he passed quite recently actually and I was blessed to have met him and to have sat with him he is you know we have her life rights we have her archive and he was the mediator of all of that and he gave me his blessing he says you're beautiful like candy you're smart like candy and you're the right height. And that was one of the most magical, like, New York afternoons I've ever spent in his, you know, tiny apartment in Alphabet City, just filled with boxes of her stuff. Are there any lessons from Candy that you feel are helpful for navigating this political moment? Yeah. And this is hard. I finished the script this summer.

21:03I parked myself on Fire Island for a month and I wouldn't allow myself to leave until I finished the script and I finished it like three days before I was supposed, before my rental was up. And it kind of plunged me into like a really, really deep depression to finish it. I could like barely move. I was so sad when I finished the script because it had built toward this conclusion that I almost had prevented myself from really looking at head on, which was the fact that Candy died young of an illness. How old was she? She was 29. Wow. That is wild. She was 29 when she died. She died of lymphoma.

21:41The causes of her lymphoma are not as clear as people seem to think they are. You know, it's published in several different papers of record that her hormone therapy caused this cancerous lymphoma and gave her this tumor. But I've consulted with medical professionals, transmedical professionals even, and they would see no correlation between the hormone treatments at the time. and her diagnosis. So it's sort of this like transphobic idea that she, you know, ended her own life by pursuing her authentic self. It's like the messaging that we're getting from the health department right now. And that's not actually the case.

22:25But what kind of is the case, and I didn't even really realize this was the case until I had to finish writing the film, which has to have a sad ending, is that this illness was manifesting in her body as early as, you know, the late 60s. She had a visible tumor in her stomach and she didn't pursue medical attention. During those years, she was hustling day in and day out trying to become the old Hollywood movie star of her dream. She was obsessed with, you know, Kim Novak and Jean Harlow and Joan Bennett, Marilyn Monroe. Me too. Yeah, I mean, girl, you know, from my perspective, she was so fixated on manifesting her dreams.

23:18She was in with the factory. She was getting cast in Andy Warhol's films. She was getting cast beyond that. She was doing art films in Europe. She was going to her big premiere. She was successful. Yeah, she was successful. She was blossoming 1970, 1971, 1972, and she was dead by 74. And she was so fixated on achieving her ideal, and the stakes were so high, and the window she saw to get there was so slim that she didn't get the help that she needed. It's not that she didn't take care of herself. It's not like the hormones she was taking were, um, you know, hurting her necessarily. She wasn't up and down on speed and alcohol the way her peers were.

24:08It wasn't as extreme. She just didn't give herself that grace, it seemed, to take a moment and take care of herself. And, you know, as the writer, I had to kind of get into all of that and like, you know, was it an issue of self-love? Was it an issue of self-worth? Had she already resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn't survive? right now in this moment there are feelings of helplessness and hopelessness everywhere I just think like it's it's so corny and so broad but you know coming back to the brass tacks of like life is long there's a big picture take care of yourself take the time seek the help you need whether it's medical help or you know help for your mental health and I think that's maybe a lesson to take away at this moment.

25:05And rant. Sorry. I want to know what you are reading, listening to, watching right now. I'm rereading A Midsummer Night's Dream right now because... That's a nice idea. Yeah. I want to write another screenplay, and I want to write something fun. And I'm also reading this novel, John O 'Hara, Appointment of Samara. It's fantastic. It's so good. My friend gave me a really old copy of it years ago and then I saw a shot where the book was featured in Queer. Oh, funny. And I was seeing it with the friend who gave me the book, so I'm like, this is a sign. I've finally got to read the book. I feel like my visual, like, sitting down to watch something diet, I'm either watching a capital F film or I'm watching garbage on YouTube.

25:49I am watching a scripted TV show right now. I'm watching Queer as Folk for the first time. No way. The first time? Yeah. The original? Yeah. Well, not the British original, the American original. The American original. It's so fun. Yes. Yes, it is. Queer as Folk taught me I was gay, too. Queer as Folk is like, yeah. It taught my friend in middle school he was gay. Like, even before I came out, he was like, I found this show, Queer as Folk, I'm totally gay. I'm like, that's crazy, sister. Like, let's... And I remember watching it being like, okay. I wasn't ready to go there yet. And then two years later, I had a boyfriend.

26:25Go figure. Go figure. But it's fun. Hari Neff, thank you so much for coming on the run through. Thank you. We can't wait for candy. You're a Vogue girl through and through. Something I say every day. Wow, we really covered everything, didn't we? We covered a lot of ground.

26:50That's it for the run through. See you tomorrow, everyone.

26:57The Run-Through is produced by Chelsea Daniel, Alex DePalma, and Joanna Solitaroff. It's engineered by Jake Loomis and James Yost. It is mixed by Mike Kutchman. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of Global Audio.