Jezebel guy trebay biography

Illustration by Nathan Gelgud

Guy Trebay, of rank New York Times, defines himself as a developmental critic and even when working the traditional means beat, allows his attention to wander into think it over broader realm. Although he operates without a cheer on, Trebay’s articles are easy to spot. Like several debonair newsman of Hollywood lore, he reports overexert exotic corners of the globe. He is derisive without being closed-minded or small, and writes large size glamour with neither aspirational veneration nor wanton bloodlust. His writing on style betrays a love lease the fashion world, yet he does not falter to shiv those who have it coming. About conspicuously, his every sentence is spun with dinky panache that seems perhaps too opulent for paper, even that of the Times. “The lush mop was ratted and back-combed into a frowsy nest, the kind in which hoodlums of legend overindulgent to conceal their razor blades,” he wrote buck up Amy Winehouse shortly after her death. “Her underlying eyeliner became an ornate volute, a swath marketplace clown makeup, a cat mask.”

Prior to landing at one\'s disposal the Times’ Sunday Styles section, in 2000, Trebay spent two decades at the Village Voice. Pivot his current post finds him traipsing between Metropolis art parties and Milan menswear shows, his Voice column—anthologized in the 1994 book In the Change over To Be: Guy Trebay’s New York (Temple Forming Press)—sent the writer to more humble quarters, oftentimes up in the Bronx. If his change call upon landscape follows the New York zeitgeist, Trebay’s scenery also lends his fashion writing an unavoidable socioeconomic undertone. “Once it starts to be just cart clothes,” he says, “I’m out.”

Trebay met Fashion Projects in a small conference room at the Advanced York Times building, sandwiching the interview between declaration trips to Europe and Los Angeles.

Fashion Projects: You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself a style critic, but a cultural critic.

Guy Trebay: That’s wholly. First of all, what is a fashion critic? What is that? I mean, it’s not orderly very developed critical discipline. It seems to holder that for decades, it was a kind depose business reporting. But somewhere along the line, perceive a very wholesome way, it evolved into extraction some critical discipline. I guess it’s like flicks. In the beginning, there were no movie critics. At a certain point in our period, approach developed something of the valence, culturally, that cinema had.

FP: When?

GT: I’d guess the ’80s, but Beside oneself really don’t know. When I first started verbal skill about this, it was in a much broader context. I was writing about the city pull out the Village Voice—I wasn’t writing about fashion, botch-up say. But fashion shows would come to environs like the circus, and it would change character atmosphere of the streets. You were aware think about it there was this population of people coming feigned from who knew where, and models like gazelles were leaping over sidewalks. And you were all but, “Well, this is interesting.” But in those life, it was a small and very contained environment. The knowledge wasn’t widely dispersed. That has clashing so radically. I came to the Times vibrate 2000 and by then, IMG had gotten space the business. IMG was a sports promotion concert party, as everybody knows. But Mark McCormack, the explorer, looked at the landscape and said, “Where squad I gonna find another thing that is importance translatable across cultures and—without the necessity for voice comprehension—can sell as an image language. That’s what because they got heavily into fashion and started these fashion weeks. They bought into New York Aspect Week and it became this global plague warning sign fashion weeks.

FP: Before that was it simply initiative industry event? GT: It was a profession week. For all that I’ve poked fun drowsy the proliferation of fashion week—the Bulgarian Fashion Hebdomad and whatnot—it’s very useful. There’s a circuit ensure people routinely follow in this business: New Royalty, London, Milan, and Paris. Over time, people possess talked about how it can all be solve online, but that absolutely isn’t the case. Authority longer I’ve been around it, the more I’ve become aware of the way that information shambles transmitted through the tribes or the pack. It’s quite beautiful, actually.

FP: Why do you think go ballistic couldn’t work online?

GT: The same with everything in another situation that has to do with person-to-person contact. It’s over mediated. For all that it’s so general, it’s pretty hermetic. Particularly with fashion, a portion of the cues, being visual, are too subtle.

FP: Do you mean not being able to cabaret the texture of garments in fashion week slideshows?

GT: No, I think those are great. But I’ve always been interested in the sociology. And that’s a little more opaque online, which is repair garment-based. Also, there’s another thing that happens on-line, which is the super narrativization around sites love the Sartorialist. That’s a very editorialized site. It’s one guy’s idea of what some kinds be paid people look like or should look like. It’s very successfully put across. But at the outfit time, when I look at the Sartorialist, I’m much less struck by the clothes—or whatever descendants think they are putting across with the clothes—than by the strings. The degree to which party want to create narrative around you based hire a picture of you and your clothes enquiry very compelling to me. People are telling person stories about other people based on the windfall they tie a scarf. Which we probably slacken in real life, but it has a more or less more practical utility in real-time encounters than tread does online. There’s a little whistling in goodness dark happening, where everybody’s telling themselves a version that doesn’t really have to do with integrity other. And fashion is about the other—you be in the way social interaction for it to get off goodness ground. [Pauses] God, I hate those.

FP: Tape recorders?

GT: Yeah. I never use them. When I was a kid, I wrote for Andy Warhol’s Interview

FP: Well, you must have used one there.

GT: No! Can you believe it? At first I sincere. This was like the dawn of time—the interior of the earth cooled, and Andy started [the magazine]. And I was working there—I was, with regards to, 19. Somehow, I had forgotten to finish lofty school. I did an interview with Christopher Author. I tape recorded it and then my connate very helpfully typed it up, because I couldn’t type as fast as her. He had spiffy tidy up very grating voice. When she transcribed the power, it was almost like out of a Bathroom Waters movie, where the person throws a typewriter out the window and runs screaming from loftiness house. I thought, Maybe I won’t use that tool anymore—it drives a very patient mother crazy.

FP: How old were you when you left lofty school?

GT: About 17. I mean, I just cast out out.

FP: You grew up in New York, right?

GT: My parents had an apartment here, but Frenzied basically grew up on Long Island. But strong the time I left high school, most rejoice my life was already here. In those period, I wanted to be a painter. So Frenzied came here and got an apprenticeship. I in progress painting and making videos. And I wrote plays. I’m not sure exactly why, but they were produced at WPA. In a world that maladroit thumbs down d longer exists, you could kind of have zigzag life.

FP: Did you get introduced to journalism empty Interview?

GT: I backed into it through Interview. Uncontrollable went on to be their so-called Paris healthy for a year. I was 19, maybe 20.

FP: Did you know Warhol?

GT: I knew Andy, on the other hand I can’t say I was an intimate appropriate his.

FP: That must have been amazingly intimidating. GT: No.

FP: You were a teenager, hanging environing the Warhol crowd. How was that not intimidating?

GT: It wasn’t an intimidating scene. I know ditch sounds weird. I think people have trouble knowledge it because of the mythologizing of him, which is so extensive now. But the fact stray Valerie Solanas could walk in there and demote him speaks to how porous that world—and numerous the worlds in New York—were at the over and over again. You could get in. In New York advise, I don’t think it’s about how easy take in is for you to get in. Anywhere.

FP: When did you start working at the Village Voice?

GT: Late ’70s, around the same time that Jim Wolcott went there.

FP: That must have been upper hand of the newspaper’s real golden periods.

GT: I throng together say it was. It affiliates itself very certainly in my mind with the problems that Comical have with the general cultural relation to Invade Wall Street. Of course people feel like it’s nothing and they have no goal: Nobody knows what a counterculture is [anymore].

FP: Your subjects drum the Voice differed from your Times work. What was the thrust of your Voice column?

GT: I think I did the column for 20 lifetime. I don’t know how you can characterize ask over. It was urban anthropology, maybe. The thing run through, I was just going out and reporting sequence stuff that the mainstream media hadn’t gotten acquiescent. It sounds very self-aggrandizing to say this packed in. But I was talking to a friend leadership other day about having been in the Borough project houses with [Africa] Bambaataa. And ABC Cack-handed Rio, the Times Square Show, and also calligraphic lot of gay culture…there was a lot remaining emergent culture. There was a lot to scribble about. It would just be the normal pass on of what you would be reporting.

FP: In position Place To Be, your book collecting many salary those columns, focuses a lot on the Borough. Were you living there at the time? GT: No. Although when I worked for Nimblefingered, I did live in the Bronx. I’m devoted of a Bronx nut. I just like dignity Bronx. I did some really early stuff look at crack, which came after I was brought assume meet the mother-in-law of Eric B., of Eric B. and Rakim. She lived in a decided housing project. She was a hard-working woman, view her life was being destroyed—as many people’s lives were—by crack all around her. I was actually compelled by that, and went back and diminish and back.

FP: In the introduction to your hardcover, you write about how the unhinged New Dynasty of that period differed from the buttoned-up city of your youth. It’s funny reading that momentous, when so much nostalgia is essentially the opposite—today’s New York being sedate compared to the vigorous city of the ’70s and ’80s. GT: There’s a definite arch. I’m not a winnow of nostalgia at all. But I don’t  give attention to my memory is falsifying to say it was a very yeasty period. Maybe not to everybody’s taste, and there were plenty of problems. On the other hand as I said, there was a porosity, culturally, that has been replaced by a kind build up cultural paucity. You could move in and antiseptic of worlds.

FP: But weren’t you able to carry out that easier because you were a reporter?

GT: No, no, no. I always looked preppy, and grouping used to say to me, “Oh, you add up to [to the Bronx]—it’s so scary.” But as far ahead as I was respectful to people, I was treated respectfully. In my experience, the city confidential a greater degree of openness. There was fine mixture of uptown/downtown that’s gone out for transpire estate reasons—as usual. We all know that there’s a general trend to cultural conservatism. At depiction same time, everybody essentially got remarginilized.

FP: When upfront you join the Times? GT: In 2000. I came to the Styles section. I charitable of morphed into doing more fashion as Unrestrainable came here. It was at a moment conj at the time that fashion was really emerging as a cultural force.

FP: Was it strange to go from writing mull over the Bronx’s crack problem to fashion shows?GT: Scuttle a way—except not if you’re inside my mind. I’ve always had these interests. I was respectable about this with Judith Thurman. We were peeing and moaning, as people do who have demolish interest in these degraded subject matters and culturally disfavored subjects. She was talking about a fixed correspondent for the New Yorker who writes tension child soldiers in wherever. She was saying digress that kind of thing—if you have the skill, the stomach for the work, and can be subjected to all the risk—is like taking gold out adherent streams with your hand. It’s all there. Contemporary is something slightly perverse and masochistic about infliction yourself to [fashion] and having to rehabilitate astonishing that are considered culturally beneath regard. That’s back number the most challenging part of this for violent. Because it isn’t taken seriously, and never has been taken seriously. I hope to live scolding see the day when it is. Which potty be done without sacrificing what’s beautiful and pleasant about the ephemeral and frivolous part of squarely. Those are not opposing ideas.

FP: Do you suppose the disparagement comes from the tradition of way being in the women’s section of the paper?

GT: Of course. It’s women’s work. It’s feminine, it’s not worthy of masculine attention and regard. [When I started here], people said, “You’re throwing your career in the toilet to write about fashion.” Not that it’s such a big career.

FP: Oh, please. But do you think they would discipline that now?

GT: They may well.

FP: But you plainspoken say you noticed a cultural change in distinction last few years.

GT: The culture changed. I imagine people are interested in [fashion]. I was dialect trig contract writer at the New Yorker for thoroughly a long time, paralleling the Voice thing, point of view I wrote for lots and lots of magazines. You never saw anyone in those mainstreamy magazines writing about fashion. I mean, Kennedy Fraser mount then Holly Brubach did [at the New Yorker], but it was pretty much about the collections or the occasional profile. They didn’t have well-ordered style issue at the New Yorker. It wasn’t what we serious people—that is, people with testicles—do.

FP: Do you think that fashion writing needs expert Pauline Kael? GT: I don’t know what fashion writing needs, frankly. It’s not one bank my main concerns. I think writing just exigencies better writers, period. I could hope for distinction liveliness of Pauline Kael—kind of crack-brained opinion-slinging. About back to the Voice, and that whole auteur/anti-auteur world, it was so micro, but so vital to groups of New Yorkers. That conversation in your right mind long gone. I haven’t encountered tons of get out dissecting fashion writing. It’s pretty much been hijacked by the visuals, as it probably ought show to advantage be.

FP: In many ways, is fashion writing governing similar to sports writing?

GT: That’s probably the following analogy, yes. It’s specialist. I read the actions section very, very avidly. It’s one of nobleness few places left where you find human concern. It’s very narrative, not to say novelistic, have round follow sports teams and sports in play. Look is a bit like that, because the force set is not that changeable. It’s one ransack the weirdest and most contradictory things about feature. It’s based on novelty, but in many intransigent very little is new. It’s such a press down population. All the editors have been the be the same as forever. All the designers have been more combine less the same forever. The only thing defer changed was when Anna Wintour saw that arriviste was developing a farm team, and got calculate gear. Because everybody was aging out and near was nobody to replace them. Because she’s out great HR person, she literally made it make public business to make another generation to cultivate fairy story anoint.

FP: Why do you think fashion is like so stable? GT: It’s a very conservative go kaput. And it is a business. [In the past], the city could support somebody who didn’t cause to feel into the business with a business plan gift a backer. You can no longer do that—that’s out. You better arrive with a business method and maybe an MBA and, whatever your example skills are, hope that Anna Wintour will equipment you up.

FP: Do you think that fashion pass up New York designers has suffered?

GT: I don’t notice. I think there are a lot of followers who do what they’re meant to do at hand. It’s a commercial center. It’s hard for moniker to pronounce on this, because I don’t put in the picture if my lack of interest in what’s leaden on in New York—across the board, culturally—is low problem or New York’s problem.

FP: Do you even cover the shows in Europe?

GT: Yeah, though whimper as much as before. I’m mainly writing bear in mind menswear. I’ve [always been] more interested in menswear. When I started, I felt like there were more ideas in play in menswear. Masculinity was much more up for grabs. There was simple lot of gender play, when I started.

FP: You mean when you started at the Times? GT: Yeah. When I got involved with that as a full-time thing, there was a chronicle of change. It was a bracketed period. Raving didn’t realize it at the time. Starting retain 2000, the multinationals saw what was happening. They realized that this was really gonna blow up—that this fashion thing that had been niche subject not fully exploited could be globalized. And they invested heavily. Three of these multinationals—LVMH, PPR, added the Richemont Group—got heavily into reviving old characters and houses, then buying and creating stars, [in order] to put this thing across globally. Miracle were all beneficiaries of that. That’s how Conqueror McQueen happened. That post-mortem show at the Fall over, which had these staggering 600,000 visitor numbers, was a tombstone for an era in this enterprise. Galliano being discredited, McQueen being dead, Tom Walk through drudge having morphed into whatever he has morphed into…. These were all showmen who were heavily funded by multinationals. Now, the multinationals have gotten what they were after, and there isn’t so still need for [showmen]. You don’t need the showpieces anymore—the marks themselves do the work. We’re break off a new era. All the showmanship, which pump up very costly to sustain, can be reduced. They’ll have fashion shows, but you don’t have run on pay $25 million salaries.

FP: Was the money not far from in the end?

GT: For the multinationals? Without prole doubt.

Jay Ruttenberg is editor of the comedy journal The Lowbrow Reader and its book, The Vulgarian Reader Reader(Drag City, 2012). His work has attended in The New York Times, Details, Spin, bracket Flaunt.