All About Hedi Slimane

- A Boston punk band named Keys to the Streets of Fear released a song "Hedi Slimane":

I want pants like Hedi Slimane
I wanna dance like Hedi Slimane
Live in France like Hedi Slimane
I wanna fuck like Hedi Slimane.

Slimane has listened to it but says, “I could not hear or understand the lyrics at all.”

- In 1999, Gucci took over Y.S.L., which meant that Slimane would have a new boss: Tom Ford, the creative director at Gucci, who insisted that Slimane report to him. “It was a totally new idea to me, this story of ‘reporting,’ ” Slimane told me. (His English is good but not perfect.) “I might have never heard the word ‘reporting’ before. Reporting to Tom was not going to happen.” Bergé objected to the arrangement, too. “I was absolutely against it,” he told me. “Tom Ford is not my cup of tea. I don’t respect him, not at all. He is not a designer. He is a marketing man.” After meeting with Ford at the Ritz (“The situation became unpleasant,” Slimane said), Slimane resigned.

- Hedi Slimane can’t drive. He’d like to learn how, but he can’t find the time. While in Paris, he keeps a car and driver on call around the clock, in case he decides to go out searching for models in the early-morning hours. The car is a Jaguar. The driver wears Dior. “It would be a bit strange for him to show up in a funny suit,” Slimane said.

- Slimane’s most recent haircut has not been widely imitated. It consists of a wad brushed thickly forward over the top of his forehead and cropped straight across. It looks, frankly, a little like a toupee. Slimane’s friend Janet Street-Porter, the British writer and broadcaster, said, “He looks like a demented monk.”

-“When I was a teen-ager, people used to comment on how dreadfully skinny I was,” Slimane told me. “I used to take pills to put on weight.” Since no clothes fit him, he began designing his own. His mother was a seamstress, so he knew his way around a sewing machine. “I also always thought clothes looked better on a lean figure,” he said. “Life was not that unfair after all. There was a future for skinny people.”


From 《New Yorker》

Hedi Slimane was born in Paris to an Italian seamstress and a Tunisian accountant. 'My mother was always using the sewing machine, and it was driving me crazy. I was always awake because of the noise it made. I'd have to wake up and have my coffee in the middle of a piece of fabric.'

His mum would make his clothes, which annoyed him. 'When you're a kid you want to look like you're your friends and you just want to have the same dumb labels.' At the age of 16, in pursuit of teenage self-expression, he began designing his own clothes. He did all his own tailoring, seemingly having picked up the skill without thinking about it. He always wore a proper jacket, but even vintage ones didn't fit. 'I was so lean then,' he says, so he had to make his own clothes. And so began the Noughties shape of men's fashion.

From 《The Observer》