The Style That Binds Us podcast

• What is the scribbling technique, and how did you come up with it?
  • Accidentally stumbled into. She draws into a hyper realistic style and sometimes people mistake her work for photographs. It could be a mix of cross-hatching from when she was studying architecture, but she doesn’t have to lift her hand off the page
• How did you make the decision to drop out of college? How did this go over with your family?
  • Come from a traditional old-school family. Her mom is a teacher and dad works in computers and they are both hard working. Her parents let her figure it out when she told them she wanted to drop out and pursue fine art. 
• Why did you decide to not work with an art gallery? What are the pros and cons of working with an art gallery?
  • This wasn’t intentional. The goal was to work with a gallery, and is open to this at some point. Things have snowballed into the next thing, but at some point she will be open to working with a gallery. A pro is getting to work at the speed she wants to work at. She enjoys every aspect of running the process and has a very supportive team. Galleries have relationships and access to the right people, which can be a pro. Doesn’t like to push her art on others. Getting her art in a museum is part of the process. Artists focusing on getting pieces in a museum can be tricky because they will create museum art. Focus on making something that people haven’t seen before. Some artists tailor their career around a prize, which keeps them from progressing in a way they could. 
• With no formal art training, how did you discover you had a talent for this?
  • Discovered the talent at age 11 and had the ability to draw. The school she went to was more professional qualifications and took a long time to realize art could be her full time career.
• How do you decide what to draw?
  • Used to draw high-end subjects: draw Chanel bags or dip an Hermes Birkin Bag. Subjects are now slowly moving away from objects and are going more to abstract. It is determined by what she is interested in at the time, and wants to show a progression. The Marlboro Man series came about because she is fascinated with Richard Prince. He did something inspired by The Marlboro Man and she wondered why it had to be so masculine. So she drew cigarette butts with Chanel lipstick on the ends, because this is what brand she wears. It wasn’t fun to get the subject, but something she had to do to get the picture! 
• How long does it take to create a piece of your artwork?
  • A couple of weeks or months. She is in the studio 7 days a week, and work all day long, so she can make the work quickly!
• How do you determine the pricing for your artwork?
  • Something costs what people are prepared to pay. She only does 1 of 1, there are no replications, so there is value in that. She can only make so many works per year, and she is making less and less. There is a 2 or 3 year waiting list for her artwork.
• What is your view on collaborations? (Fashion brands, other artists, etc)
  • They are great if it is the right partner. She collaborated with Christian Louboutin, which was a great experience. Last year, she drew Pantone chips, but she didn’t collaborate with Pantone 
• What direction do you want to go in? Produce as much art as possible or something different?
  • Going to continue to make the shows and they will get bigger is what she can control. There are lots of people who can dictate where your career goes in the art world. She has goals, but she isn’t sure when

• What was it like growing up in Paris? Incredible! Especially having my mother and grandmother as examples because they are the perfect example of French women not looking for perfection, but trying to become the best version of themselves. Beauty requires a ritual. Self care is about self confidence. If you feel good, you look good. Maintenance and prevention are important. It is never too late to start a good routine,
• Describe what the Vogue Paris offices are like. All the editors were running around. There was perfume, cosmetics, makeup, they let Clemence try out the different things. Women were elegant. There is a Vogue style, called "The Woman of Vogue." The Woman of Vogue was incredibly chic, elegant and always with a signature perfume. She would know when each person would be there by their scent. Her grandmother wore Guerlain, and now wears Chanel. Her mom wears Sisley, and loves to try new ones as well. 
• What is Beauty & Well-Being? After working for beauty companies, she wanted to have more her voice. She launched her online magazine. She gathered a team of freelance writers in the beauty & wellness field. Every month, they provide in-depth stories, interviews, high profile people and more. It is a platform for women of all ages from teenager to grandmother at accessible price points. It started in 2014. 
• When did you start Beauty and Well Being and how did the idea come about? After she had her twins, she felt was a great time to start a new company, almost like a third child. She wanted to talk about beauty & wellness because it goes together. She wanted to bring to women solutions, because people talk about the problems, but they don't give you the solutions. Wellness - how to choose the best skincare products - respect your skin and hair. They don't address fads. Only tried and true beauty tips.
  • How did you build your team at Beauty and Well-Being? From years working at Clarins, Puig and Dior, she had worked with a ton of journalists and beauty experts. Have to be confident that everything will work out, and need to test it to make sure it will work.
  • How do you come up with story ideas? Every month there is a theme. She can build the series of interviews, articles, stories. She reads the news, magazines; internationally 
• We grew up in similar ways with our elders telling us to make sure to have on mascara, lipstick, etc when we were around them! How did this shape the way you think about beauty? Her grandmother would say for Sunday night dinner, Rendez-Vous with mascara. She taught her granddaughters to be feminine. Femininity and self-care is about self-confidence and not vanity. As she gets older, taking care of herself is about giving a positive image about the passage of time to younger generations. She is 88 and looking great! The importance is not to look like someone else, but to look like the best version of yourself. When you get older, the idea is to look good for your age, not younger. Good skin doesn't have to be flawless. We should enhance our best features, work with what we've got. What we were born with. Try to age gracefully. It is better to look our age than to look no age at all. We have to treat our skin to our favorite silk blouse. We should hydrate the skin and keep it i

Monica Sordo grew up in Venezuela and was surrounded by the materials used in her designs in her father's design workshop. She went to school for fashion styling & merchandising in Milan. She worked at Marie Claire Spain as an accessories & fashion editor and in PR at Christian Louboutin before founding her own line. A lot of inspiration comes from her background and growing up in Caracas, Venezuela. Architecture is a huge inspiration for her. 

When she was a child, she loved playing office and being the boss wearing her mom's high heels and her father's briefcase. She wanted to work in fashion as an editor. All the people she worked with always told her they could see her starting her own brand. 

From her past work experiences, she was able to start her jewelry brand. She knows the needs of an editor and also how to work with press. Working as an editor involved a lot of boxes and garment bags. You get to meet talented people, get to discover creativity, get to travel, go to fashion shows & events. There is A LOT of work behind it. She loves when she gets to shoot her campaigns because she gets to style again when she was an editor. She is a designer and creative director. 

Traveling constantly & attending the shows was an important way to discover new talent when she was an editor. She loves to travel and be in constant movement. She finds inspiration in everything she sees. It is a melting pot of experiences. Sometimes she doesn't even realize where the inspiration comes from and something will later remind her she referenced that when designing. 

Christian Louboutin is an amazing human being. She worked with them when they were landing in the US and growing. She was a PR Assistant. She learned about wholesale and market week. So many boxes were coming. She never saw so many shoes in her life. As an editor she was used to fashion week and presentations, not market week. Buyers have a budget and they come to invest in the next season. She came from being a well-known editor in Madrid. She hasn't worked in English before, so she needed to now send work emails. It was challenging and interesting. It was a great time for the brand. 

After 2 years of working at Louboutin, she decided to start her own brand. Her father had an industrial workshop and loves creating new things. Her mom always wanted to work in fashion, but she worked in finance. She is a jewelry designer as well as Monica. Monica has the workshop, she has her mom and she wanted to do something on her own. It was organic. It took her time to research and find her own style. Monica has the faith in herself and the strength to do what she does today. She worked with her mom's jewelers to get started. Everything is possible. You need to find a way to make it functional. Design isn't an easy road. You have to do a lot of research. Her first store was FiveStory.

Monica has a strong point-of-view. This is important, because you don't want your brand to look like other brands. She is influenced by Art Deco and Pre-Columbian civilizations. Her pieces are all one-of-a-kind because they are hand cut for each of the pieces. The natural stones will have different colors which adds a big value to the pieces. She loves architecture, monumental, feminine and flirty. It is an interesting mix. 

They work mostly with brass with inlay work and all-natural stones. Most stones are sourced naturally in Peru, Ecuador or Brazil. When you cut the stones, anything can be happening inside, more of one color, may be glassy or full of lines. They innovate with their artisans and create new styles with them. 

It is important to know how the calendar works. It is really challenging, because the timing is set and not flexible. You need to be organized and make sure your team understands the importance. You have to divide your season into having time to design and develop while selling the col

We had the pleasure of interviewing Gigi Burris of Gigi Burris Millinery. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and her studio is on the Lower East Side. She was a 2009 graduate of Parsons School of Design where she was nominated to be the Designer of the Year. She studied RTW there. She was a CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund finalist from 2014. Her hats have been worn by Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Haley Baldwin, Taylor Swift and many more! 

Gigi grew up in Florida and didn't always dream of being a milliner. She loved art and working with her hands. Growing up, she worked with the local museum. She studied art in high school. She went abroad to Parsons Paris and got to focus on craft & heritage. Whenever she sketched RTW, it always had a hat. They offered a millinery class and she begged her friend to take it too so they wouldn't cancel the class. 

A milliner is someone who makes hats / a hat-maker. She has entrepreneurs in her family, but she never dreamed of starting her own company. Even though she was top 10 of her class, it was hard for her to find a job once she graduated from college since there aren't enough jobs for the influx of students each year. She worked part-time as a freelancer with stylists. She also worked with Dennis Basso where she worked with exotic skins and fur. If you're going to use fur, make sure the animals come from a farm that you know they are treated with the best care possible. The Parsons program is quite intense - similar to law school, MIT or a doctorate. You're expected to pull all-nighters, travel, come in on the weekends, etc, so it really prepares you for the working world. It prepares you for the work-life balance of work taking up most of your time. To work in fashion, you need to know that the time commitment and the financial return might not be in alignment. 

How do you make a hat? By hand, which is a technique that is centuries old. It starts with a carved wooden block. A hat has two pieces, a crown (the top part) and a brim. The shape of the hat begins in wood. They work with vintage blocks from the 1890s-1980s. They work with a skilled craftsman who can carve their own blocks. Once they carve the shape, you choose a brim. You place the material over the wood and you mold it with steam. The moisture allows for the material to form around the wood. Then it is baked in an oven. The process is all done with fire - a fire oven that stays on all day long. If it has a welt (a seam around the edge), you'd put a wire in it. You need to put a sweatband inside the hat that can serve as a buffer for your skin.

How many hats are in a collection? She designs with a merchandising background when she designs. When you see her collection in the store or a website, it should look cohesive and transportive. In terms of SKUs, it varies. Without color ways, they will be 28 at minimum and they have gone up to 40 in the past.  You can do wide brims, short brims, caps, beanies, etc. 

Materials - millinery is a category that has been shrinking, so some of the suppliers they've used have gone out of business. They used to put cotton grosgrain inside the hats, but that facility closed. It is a challenge to find a place to get materials. They get straw from Ecuador and Switzerland. She gets felt from the Czech Republic. Fur comes from Finland. 

CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund - she was such a small brand when she went through. She got advice from such an incredible panel of judges, such as, Anna Wintour, Andrew Rosen and Diane von Furstenburg. She was able to absorb everything and tried to apply it to the best of her ability. It helped her feel welcome in the New York City fashion community. She developed a family with the people she worked with - Paul Andrew, Eva Fehren and Ryan Roche. 

They show with the main season fashion calendar because of wholesalers. Their client is a buy now, wear now client. She is buying straw through August. She

Delia was thrilled to sit down with the famous manicurist Jin Soon Choi and hear all about her journey. She takes us through her illustrious career from the early days cycling from appointment to appointment where she was named Bicycle Jin up to present day where she collaborates with top designers to create the looks for runway shows. She has worked with the top models, designers and celebrities, such as Karlie Kloss, Marc Jacobs, Phillip Lim, Tibi and more. As Bobbi Brown said herself, Jin Soon is a big deal!
Jin Soon's hand and foot nail salons are our go-to spot for manicures and pedicures. Delia first met Jin four years ago when she was working on the Cosmetics buying team at Barneys New York. Delia got to go backstage with Jin during fashion week to the Tibi show where Bobbi Brown was doing the makeup. Bobbi leaned over and said, "Jin you're such a big deal" and Jin leaned over and said, "Bobbi, so are you!!"
Jin Soon Choi is Korean and moved to Manhattan in 1991. She only knew one person from Korea and they turned out to be her roommate. Jin didn't speak English when she first arrived, so she had no choice but to work in either a grocery or a nail salon. Korea was similar to NYC in that she could freely walk the streets, there are four seasons and lots of Korean people & Korean food. She decided to stop working at salons and start doing home-service. Jin started working with a PR agency which helped her to get editorial work and start doing fashion shows. Her eponymous nail polish was founded in 2012. There are 4 nail salons in New York City in Tribeca, Lower East Side, Upper East Side and West Village. The first salon opened in 1999. Her husband is an architect and he designed the salons.  

She discusses how she got into the fashion industry, how she learned to start and grow a business & the process of designing a nail collection. When creating a collection, she starts with a theme so there is a story included in the collection. She does a lot of research surrounding this theme. 

Her products are eco-friendly, safe & healthy nail polish AND long-lasting. Since she has salons, she can ask her customers what they are looking for. Their products started with 5-free, now they are 10-free. Once the media comes out with an ingredient that is harmful, they reformulate and remove that ingredient. The shape of the bottle was influenced by her husband who is an architect. She loves the sleek, simple, modern and elegant design. She found the bottles in Italy. They custom made the cap as the same shape as the bottle. It has both an outer and inner cap.

For her first collection, she named the products after classic novels. 

Jin works with select designers each season to do the nails for the runway. New York Fashion Week - have to go to tests before the shows. At the test, the designer has chosen the colors for the collection. The hair, makeup and nail teams meet with the stylist who is running the show. They narrow down to the theme of the collection and go from there. The test is 1-2 weeks before the show. Choosing the shape and color of the nails is all about collaboration. Jin's schedule during NYFW depends on the show. If there is a 10am show, she has to get up at 6am. Her days could end around 8pm at night. She brings 4-5 technicians for about 20 models, but shows with 50 models would need 10-12 people. Fashion week isn't easy, it is hard, but kind of like a big party with friends you've known for a long time. She has worked on shows for Michael Kors, Prabal Gurung, Tibi, Marc Jacobs and Phillip Lim. 

She has thoroughly enjoyed working with editors from Vogue Magazine - Phyllis Posnick & Tonne Goodman. Jin even got to work with Irving Penn before he died, with The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently had an exhibit on. Phyllis says Jin is the best manicurist (which is true)! Whoever has a basic skill, the older generation appreciates. 

We were so pleased to interview the iconic makeup artist, Sandy Linter at Rita Hazan salon. Sandy has worked as a makeup artist since the 70s and was 1 of 5 MUAs in the city, which today there are millions it seems! She has worked with the top magazines, editors, celebrities, models, influencers & photographers in the industry. She can count Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Barbara Walters, Brooke Shields, Christie Brinkley, Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant and many more incredible people as clients. 

She perfected her disco beauty look from her Studio 54 days. 

She grew up on Staten Island & moved to NYC as soon as she could. Sandy loves makeup because it brings out the best of beauty in women.

Her mom got subscriptions to all the high-fashion magazines. Her mom loved makeup, but didn't know what to do with it. When Sandy would look through the magazines, she could look at the makeup and figure out how to achieve the look in the magazine. Sandy did her mother's makeup before she went to work. 

After working as a secretary, Sandy went to work at Mr. Kenneth's salon. His clientele was the "who's who" of New York City. He did every society woman, major editors of magazines, models & actresses. He had a small booth in Bloomingdales. 

Sandy shares a story of working with Jackie'O. The next time she did her makeup, she did big smoky eyes. Jackie ended up buying all the products from the face chart.  

Sandy did one of the Vogue editor's makeup who then wrote a 2 page article feature on her in Vogue. After that, she was working with Vogue. 

The most iconic shoot Sandy worked on was a shoot for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine where Debbie Harry was on the cover. 

Studio 54: what was it like getting ready, what did you wear, what was the music like, what was the feeling there? Sandy was friends with hairdressers who would come over each night and do her hair, she would do her makeup and they would style her, so of course, she had to go out. In those days, you could get into a cab and say, "take me to Studio" and they knew where to go.

Typical day: be on a shoot all day and go out at night. Sandy could go to work the next morning with her Studio54 outfit on.

Makeup artists need to adapt to the current trends. If there is something you love that is "out of style," it'll come back at some point, so don't worry. Your clients know what is "in" and what is "out," so you have to know as well.  

Sandy has done makeup for a fashion show and she was the only makeup artist for the whole show. 

Advice for an aspiring makeup artist: work with a company or salon, don't just work as a freelancer.  

Sandy is the author of 2 books. "Makeup Wakeup" & "Disco Beauty". For the first 30 years of Sandy's career, she made up women in their 20s. Then, Sandy started working with women older than that and she found they related to her. It is a great book if you'd like to update your makeup look. Even if you've gotten injectables, it is still important to wear makeup. Less is less. 

Disco Beauty was a labor of love book. She would be booked during the day with the best photographers & models and at the end of the day they would do a shoot for the book. Makeup artists tell her now this book is their bible.

Working with....
Goldie Hawn - Sandy did a natural look on her as most girls who come from L.A. do.
Elizabeth Hurley - She is naturally funny
Helmut Newton - they worked on a shoot with Patti Hansen together. Sandy serendipitously came upon the person who represented Helmut. 
Arthur Elgort - Sandy worked with him when working for Vogue. You can't tell the models are working in his photographs. They are almost unaware he is taking the picture. 
Richard Avedon -  One shoot was with Jerry Hall. He was good looking, but had a short temper. 
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