Todd Oldham (Q5771)
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Todd Oldham is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Todd Oldham |
Todd Oldham is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The spring shows, we made them in the fall, so the shows were when the fair was on in Dallas. One night I was at the fair and I was looking at those cheesy airbrushed t-shirts, so I made friends with one of the airbrush guys and we had all the girls’ names done and gave them to them. They wore them in the show and then just wore them home. Nadja Auermann, Claudia [Schiffer], Stephanie Seymour, we worked with so many beautiful girls, we were always so grateful they did our shows.For looks like the one on Carla [Bruni, look 68], I had everything done on white and then hand-painted those stripes on the back of the fabric, then the dyes ran up between the beads and tinted them. That shirt on Debbie Deitering was this incredibly intricate yarn-dyed chenille woven, and it’s transparent, so there were bands of chenille and then mesh. It’s shorts and a t-shirt, it’s just like a normal thing, butnota normal thing. That’s the magic trick. Designers tend to be pretty sophisticated folk. We don’t get recognized for that part because I think fashion can be so silly and vapid, and we can sound like clowns when we’re yacking about it too, but what it does to people is very real.All of the dotted looks were called Dotti von Furstenberg, because they were very clearly in homage to Diane. This was when Diane was not designing, she was having a coffee break, so it was really fun to pay homage to her through reconsidering her wrap dresses here. I love her. Then there’s that dress on Tyra [Banks, look 59] from when we started working with sublimation printing. I loved it because I could do photographic stuff. I have a massive collection of cake decorating books, I love them, this was a homage to all the insane cakes.These [19-27] are my executive looks, you know, we were trying to help women dress for success [laughs]. We found this manufacturer that used to make sequin tube tops in the ’70s and had them make these little skirts in wool. The shirt on Veronica [Webb, look 18] is where we just fucked with every proportion. The shirt was so shrunken and so tiny, and I bought a boy’s blazer and started altering. I just pulled the waistband up, stapled the sleeves, moved the shoulder lines in and just played with it to make it really misshapen, and it looked so cute. We kind of totally annihilated every normal proportion, but it ended up coming back together.These Swarovski crystal skirts [on Amber Valletta and Shalom Harlow, looks 91 and 92]...
the skirts were mesh and the crystals were prong-set onto the mesh, so they were a little transparent but also completely pavé with stones. [Ed’s note: The look on Harlow inspired Zendaya’s look for the 2022 Oscars]. I always see when people tag me in the videos of Shalom passing Amber, the memes are so good. The funny part is that those two are still delightful friends, they love each other, so it’s funny that they appear as if they’re rivals.This was a fun show. I didn’t have a really good time on all of them, but this was one of them that was super fun. Every season we wanted to get a new tool kit and throw a curveball, because no one would expect us to do this stuff. You have to honor expectations to some degree, but it was really important to me to try to subvert them whenever possible.
24 October 2022
This one was called “Daniella Boone,” and it was based on my sort of romantic ideas about Daniel Boone. I remember as a kid all these Daniel Boone stories and his hat with the raccoon tail, I liked that wilderness aspect. It’s hard to spot those exact references here other than in some materiality, but that’s kind of where it started.Those rainbows. I just love stripes, and it was always fun to get, to see how far I could push things. The knitter would tell me I can only use five colors, so I talked them into 12 [laughs]. Thatlifesaverdress on Veronica [look 67] is non-repeating colors, it looks a little bit like it’s repeating, but we shifted the tones. We were very intentional with the line placements too, like where to place the black so it’s flattering.This was also the first season I got to work with Helen, this incredible dyer. She had these exquisite tie-dye t-shirts that were clothespinned to the basketball court on Houston Street. I was walking around one day and just screeched to a halt when I saw them and started talking to her. She just did shirts, but we started talking about what we could do together. We worked with her for decades! All that tie-dye velvet, that’s Helen. It’s something you just hadn’t seen before; that dress on Cindy Crawford is all hand-dyed velvet that we’d then send to India and have embroidered. The thing on Kate [Moss, look 74], same thing, dip-dyed to look like an iceberg.The piece on Angelica [look 65], that was hand-knotted 24-karat gold bullion threaded with pearls. It was made as traditional fishing nets. So complicated. There’s also a beautiful velvet that Etro made for me that we had stamped in gold, so it was kind of crunchy [look 66]. You can see that hands made these for sure.We never involved ourselves in animal products like leathers or furs, so we were constantly finding alternatives. So many buyers found it ridiculous that we weren’t using real leather. So I went to Springs Industries, who at the time were the people that had made all of Halston’s Ultrasuede, and I got them to bring it back out for us and they remade it for looks like Amber’s [Valletta, look 50]. Ultrasuede was very dead, it had tumbled through the Halston years into being like a cuss word by the time it ended up in JCPenney. But I really liked it, and it didn’t cause any harm. Same with the animal prints like Cindy’s coat [look 55].
Unfortunately, when we got it all back out of the archive for the retrospective [at RISD] a few years ago, almost everything made it, except for that stuff. All of those experimental vinyls were just… they turned into powder. This was at the beginning of these things and they were just not fine-tuned, but they looked great in the show and for the few years I guess anybody wore them afterwards.That shiny shirt that Veronica [Webb, look 4] is wearing, that was a wild experimental fabric. It’s silk charmeuse, but we had it made with elastic so it’s actually springy like a swimsuit fabric. It was outrageously expensive fabric, but we sold so many. It was a miracle shirt for us. It’s a skin tight shirt, but I pulled a trick–I undercut the front so that the buttons would bow. It always looked like you were about to explode outta your shirt. They were so sexy, and the models loved them. We made many of those for the girls.There’s also all the pompoms, and the fair isle. There’s also that six-wale corduroy, but we had it made with a Lycra backing, so it was super springy and we could do skin tight gowns in them. We always, always tried to find a way to take the normal thing and turn it into something else.
24 October 2022
The opening of the show was a video. Michael Economy, the illustrator who did all the Deee-Lite album covers, illustrated every model, it was like the opening credits of a TV show. This collection was called “Fair.” I lived between New York and Texas, and our factory was in Dallas. The Texas State Fair was on for three weeks and I would go so many times! Between the people and the incredible art deco extravaganza that it was, I just loved how charismatic it felt. The feeling of the fair is what fueled this collection, but like everything I ever did, it was really just a large collection of ideas that somehow I could get to mingle.We had started a few years before this, and it was going very well, but it was still hard to get fabrics custom made. This was the first season I got to work with real mills that were willing to cooperate with us. We found this English tie manufacturer that had been around making school boys’ ties for a century—that’s all those silk jacquards you see in the collection. It was also the first season I started understanding the beading and embroidery possibilities. Many of our materials were unfathomable! We were using 300 year old lockrosens and 200 year old gold bullions that had oxidized. I got a whole new toolbox for this show.Everything was so intricate. I know it looks kind of simple, but there are things like the shirt Veronica [Webb, look 17] is wearing, that were two layers of black silk organza and we had harlequin faggot-stitching done to bond the two layers, and then one layer was hand-trimmed out so that it became more transparent. The levels of insanity of manufacturing were just nuts. This was also the first season we showed panties as reasonable outside clothing. Just about every single female singer performs in underpants now [laughs], but this actually looked kind of startling at the time.We always landed a spaceship at fashion week. We somehow managed to be proximate to trends, but we always were off on our own thing. My personal taste is very plain, so it was interesting working with design when your personal taste is narrow. I was never that daring with the form, more so than in the execution and the proportions. There’s a practicality to the shapes that allowed me to be really experimental and still have it land as an object that you could recognize.
That piece on Tyra [Banks, look 29] is just a button-up shirt, but we printed the harlequin pattern on silk charmeuse, which was very popular at the time with all those executive ladies. We printed it on the backside [of the fabric], so the shiny, slinky part was against your skin. I always designed for the wearer, you never saw that unless it was yours. This is all pre-digital, a computer never touched anything I ever did.Oh, and the models! Billy [Beyond, look 22] is still one of my dearest friends. I first became aware of Billy as a model when David LaChappelle shot him forInterview[in 1985]. When it was time to do the shows, there was never a doubt to have him. I wanted the model that mesmerized me, it just happened to be a guy, there was no political statement. He was exactly the same size as Christy [Turlington]. Here he’s walking with Diane Dewitt. During this time period, every single store you went into had a mannequin that looked just like Diane, she was a megastar all through the 1980s. We would coax models that were having quiet moments or retired, and Diane was one of them. Tyra, Christie, these girls all were complete originals.Our music was also killer, we debuted all kinds of music. My friend Monica was the president of Tommy Boy records. Tommy Boy was Queen Latifah, Naughty By Nature, and all those people. The first time anyone heard “Supermodel” by RuPaul was on this runway.
24 October 2022