GENE KRELL, FRONT ROW AT THE FALL ’13 NINA RICCI SHOW IN PARIS.
Gene Krell’s list of titles is long—he is the international fashion director for the Japanese editions of Vogue and GQ; the creative director for the Korean editions of Vogue, Vogue Girl, and W; and a creative consultant to Allure and GQ Korea—but it’s rivaled by the length of his entire back catalog. Raised in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, he left for London in the seventies, where he worked at the landmark psychedelic glam boutique Granny Takes a Trip. From Granny’s, he befriended Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood—then installed at their shop just a few doors down the King’s Road—and became Westwood’s right-hand man as she went about launching her namesake line. From there, it was back to New York—and Barneys New York—and then to Asia, where he oversaw the launch of Korean Vogue and eventually ensconced himself in Tokyo as a sort of Our Man in Asia for Condé Nast. (All this doesn’t even touch on his other passion: surfing.)
Impeccably dressed (Krell was attracting street-style attention long before street style, for which he has limited patience, and calls Bill Cunningham a close friend), impressively maned, and possessed of a resonantly nasal brand of Brooklynese, Krell defies all definition. It’s been a long time since punk—a movement, he says, that failed—but he may go down as its most voluble eyewitness. Here, he speaks with Style.com about punk’s politics and promise, as well as life with Westwood and McLaren.
There’s been so much interest in punk with the Met exhibition coming up. I’m interested in your take, as someone who’s experienced it firsthand.
What they’re talking about has nothing to do with punk.
All the more reason to go back to the source.
It’s a bourgeois, dilettante idea of punk. But there you go. That’s part of the equation, you know. [But] I’m in an unenviable position because I’m actually very much part of the equation. I mean, I work for Vogue. But I have to say quite clearly that they never ask to exercise any, or implement any, control over my work—within reason. I don’t know if there will be any punks there [at the Met ball]. I might be wrong, but you know. That’s their idea of punk, I guess. I don’t want to sound pious. It’s just bizarre to me. It’s like an oxymoron.
Maybe we can start with your experience at Granny Takes a Trip, and how you became involved with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the seventies.
Well, the thing about it is that Vivienne and Malcolm and I, we weren’t politically at odds, but socially we were. I was sort of like a glam-rock guy, and the very foundation, the cornerstone of [their] shop, was in direct contrast to that. They saw us as these bourgeois elitists making clothes for people who sip Champagne while writing letters of protest to Jacques Chirac. They were about some working-class yobbo from Glasgow. But the conduit was the music. You know, I was from Brooklyn; I grew up with doo-wop and so on. Malcolm was a passionate advocate of that genre…[and] growing up in Brooklyn, this musical designation was very much part of my DNA. We quickly found common ground in terms of art. Malcolm was remarkably articulate, and he never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. I always admired that about him. Like, his “friendship” with Guy Debord of the Situationists. Guy Debord is like forty years older than him, but that was very much how you characterized and then defined him. I love him, and I miss him every day. [Editor’s note: A representative of McLaren’s estate clarified that Debord was actually fifteen years older than McLaren.]
Walk me through how you made the move from Granny’s to working with the two of them—with Vivienne, specifically.
I just began to broaden the narrative and broaden my perspective. You know, I wasn’t in the best of health at the time, and Vivienne was well aware of that, and she fundamentally saved me from myself. We just began to initiate this idea of how we could sort of change people’s concepts and change people’s ideas and change their focus…it was really a growth, a maturing. Granny’s was never politics. Far from it. It was more of the social revolution taking on. You know, Malcolm was involved vicariously with people like Cinque DeFreeze [of the Symbionese Liberation Army] and Angela Davis. These were the people that sort of fascinated him. And he was always attempting to create this polemic.
I was moving away from the people who were very heavily involved in drugs and so on, and I was moving away from the attitudes that were so pervasive at the time, and I just sought solace with them, and it was a very easy fit. And we would engage each other. I mean, more often than not, we couldn’t really agree in how we saw the world, and I think you learn more from people who offer different opinions than people who offer the same opinion.
I gather it was a heady time, hanging out at the shops back then.
The thing a lot of these kind of punk kids found attractive was that I was from Brooklyn—for them, that was the sort of pinnacle. That was the epicenter. That was nirvana. Still, I run into kids here [in Japan] that wear Brooklyn T-shirts. I remember I was at a shop [here], and the name of the shop was Brooklyn. I never bothered to tell the girl there, “Have you ever actually been to Brooklyn? It’s a place I tried to escape desperately from when I was a kid.” I saw things that people couldn’t even imagine: stabbing, shooting, routinely. I grew up in Brooklyn in the fifties in Brownsville, which had the distinction of having the highest crime rate per capita of anywhere in America.
