We always chose our own clothes and put things together ourselves. I remember the first time we encountered a stylist was the late 1980s. We hadn’t had a clue that people like this existed. [Before that] it was all very naive. We didn’t really have to think about it. We’d just go and find things that we liked and somehow we grew together. It’s like being in a gang, being in a band. Nothing was manufactured as many things are now. We got together from school . . . . It was definitely in our mandate [to find our own look], but we weren’t looking for something unnatural. We were actually just searching for things that we thought were cool and often we’d find women’s clothes, because actually men’s clothes weren’t particularly flamboyant at that time, so we’d literally go to small women’s boutiques and buy jackets off the shelf or a shirt that buttoned the wrong way for us, but it didn’t really matter. And you’d mix that up with leather trousers that you’d managed to find in Birmingham or from a biker shop or something, and then you’d find a shop like Kahn & Bell, which was a dream, because everything they made we wanted to wear.
Probably [John] and I subconsciously guided where we went stylistically as a band, but everybody in the band, without exception, had their own vision and style. For example, Roger and I always laugh now when we arrive at a photo shoot and there are rails of clothes there. I can literally go through them, as he could, and pick out something: “Oh, that’d be for John; oh, yep, there’s a Roger one there; yeah, that’s mine; okay, Simon will like that” and literally separate them all and when everybody arrives it’s very rare that there’s a squabble over a jacket or a pair of shoes or something because we are pretty much defined in the things that we like. There could be a little bit of a fracas over a Saint Laurent jacket at the moment—that’s for sure.
duran duran
I read that you have saved all of your clothes. Is that so?
I did save all my clothes. Funnily enough, I have David Bowie to thank, very personally, for this. When I met him, very early on, when I was still a teenager, he’d been a very influential and important artist to me, and certainly to all of Duran Duran. And we met him and he was very charming, and wanted to talk to us about what we were doing, and what the band was about. I couldn’t think of that many things to say to him because I was so surprised that we’d suddenly met David Bowie. But the one thing that came to mind is I said: “What did you do with all the clothes?” because I’d remembered all these astonishing outfits from the ’70s—all that Kansai [Yamamoto] stuff that he had. I said, “What did you do with them?” And he said, “Oh, well I’ve got them all. They’re all in storage, and yeah, of course I’ve kept them.”
It was at that moment that a little bell went off in my head. We’d just about had our first hit. I didn’t know how long the band was going to be around or what we were going to be doing, but I did think to myself: “I’m going to keep all my clothes.” And so from that day very, very early on I have kept everything from the first pieces we had, which were actually made by students at Central Saint Martins.
duran duran
Who have you worked with, fashionwise?
We came to London and we said: “Hey, where can we go? What’s the place? Where are all the coolish young designers are going to be? We don’t really have a lot of money.” So we went to Saint Martins and gave them a project to design clothes for a new band. And I’ve still got those. They came up with some pretty extraordinary things, actually. I’ve got satin jodhpurs, they are sort of purply-blue satin jodhpurs that are possibly the widest pair of jodhpurs you will ever see, and a little bolero jacket that goes with it.
