Lauren Lawrence

How did you get into interpreting dreams? I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams at a young age. I’d read a dream and tried to decode it, like a sleuth looking for clues. I’d interpret friends’ dreams and they always said I nailed it. Years later during sessions with my psychiatrist, I learned how amazing dreams were, how convoluted and multi-faceted—I saw them as jewels. I wanted to know if what one did in life was reflected in the psyche. Freud never focused on this. What did the Duchess of Windsor dream about just after the abdication? What was Einstein’s dream? Coco Chanel’s? Picasso’s?

What was one of your first experiences with celebrities and their dreams? I was John Kennedy Jr.’s “Political Dreams” columnist at George. I interpreted the dreams of speakers, senators and other members of Congress. That was a crazy time… During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, John wanted Bill Clinton’s dream so I called Joe Lockhart (who I knew was an avid reader of my column) and he really chewed me out saying he would never let Bill tell me a dream. But John thought it would be fun to write “In bed with… Bill Clinton” under my “Political Dreams” column.

How did you learn to become an expert dream interpreter? I studied in school and read everything, but really had to develop a feel for the language of dreams and become fluent in the grammar, metaphor and imagery. I always say I am fluent in Dream. It was my own dreams that drew me in. And I feel strongly about them and their purpose: “Dreams are to the mind, what exercise is to the body.”

What was the last dream you had and what do you think it meant? The last dream I remember was of this incredibly expensive Louis XVI commode I wanted desperately to acquire (in reality, from Florian Papp Antiques on Madison Avenue). I saw it in my dining room, but when I walked over to it I saw that beyond it was the edge of a cliff and a cavernous drop... in my bank account, no doubt.

What are the most recurring symbols you hear from clients? Mirrors, nakedness, falling, houses, teeth falling out, crashing, not being able to move. Mirrors reveal the wish for self-reflection. Nakedness shows vulnerability, the wish to be noticed, and the wish for exposure. Falling can signify control issues and the desire to let go. Houses symbolize one’s personality: a grand house reveals a grand sense of self, a shabby home reveals a poor self image. Losing teeth is a gender related symbol: for women, it means a wish for pregnancy, or the wish to fill a void; for men, it represents a sexual fantasy. Crashing reveals the need for confrontation. Feeling paralyzed usually reflects indecision and/or conflict.

Do you interpret nightmares differently? Nightmares are sexier… they expose more symbolism and in doing so reveal more about the dreamer.

What is the oddest dream you’ve heard? Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s former press secretary, had a frightening dream. It was the strangest dream I ever interpreted because it had no visual—only audio. This heightens the importance of what is being heard. These dreams are often prophetic. He heard a voice tell him that the worst terrorist attack would occur in Paris, in August, in the last week. He called me at 2:00 p.m. on August 30, 1997. I wrote up my interpretation and faxed it over to my friend Soheir Khashoggi at 4:00 p.m., 10 p.m. Paris time. She’d wanted to read one of my interpretations. Two and a half hours later, Soheir’s nephew, Dodi Fayed, was dead along with Princess Diana, in Paris.

Who are some of your celebrity clients? Regarding celebrity clients, my lips are sealed. But celebrities tend to dream what they call “actors nightmares” which are really performance anxiety dreams. So they’ll dream of showing up at the wrong theater, or they’ll have the wrong script, or they’ll be wearing the wrong costume or the costume won’t fit because they’ve gained weight and buttons are popping off.

I’ve interpreted the dreams of all the following celebrities and public figures, such as: Kate Moss, Michael Douglas, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Oliver Stone, Sophia Loren, Valentino, Chris Kattan, Francesco Clemente, and so forth, many dreaming variations of the same dream, trying to perfect what is great about them.

How can our readers get in touch with you for help interpreting their dreams? My work email: yourdreams@nydailynews.com

Go to the next page to read Lawrence's interpretation of Zac Posen and others’ dreams.

Zac Posen [PatrickMcmullan.com]

What it means: Any change into something else—the rodent-turned-termite—reveals the wish for transformation. Dreams of transfor -mation reflect creativity and a sense of resourcefulness particularly relevant for a fashion designer. The dream highlights Posen’s ingenuity and his desire to design something new.
Zac’s dream presents a daunting challenge! How to turn a drab, shabby pack rat into something that will bring the house down—say, at a fashion show, perhaps? The problem is solved when the rat transforms into a termite. Termites have been known to bring down a house or two. At the heart of the dream is the wish to master something and make it work for you.

Alanis Morissette’s dream: In a recurring dream, I am driving alone at night, trying to find my way “home” although I have no sense where that is. I know I am in charge of finding where it is that I am going, but I have no sense of where to go, and I'm panicked. I park in a parking lot to regain my composure and wind up driving up around and around this beautiful hilly village, trying to get where I’m supposed to be.

What it means: The mode of transport defines the dreamer—quite literally, it reveals her drive. In these Jack Kerouac-styled “road” dreams, the direction home is often unknown, the destination, convoluted and hard to reach because there is more ground to be covered. Dreams of disorientation often express anxiety over meeting daily obligations; they worry over the direction one takes in life. Necessarily, the progression home is hilly—it has its ups and downs. There is an awareness of the circuitousness of life: Although “getting where I’m supposed to get” is important to the dreamer, the ride is more essential. At the core of the dream Morissette’s real joy is found not in finishing an activity but in the act of doing it.

Natalia Vodianova’s dream: I dreamt that I was strangling someone.

Natalia Vodianova [Patrickmcmullan.com]

Nicky Hilton’s dream: I dreamt that my grandmother was sitting in the living room but she had plastic, cellophane paper like saran wrap covering her face. She was all wrapped up.

What it means: It is not by chance that the deceased grandmother is viewed in a specific.   location: the living room, a room which has the symbolic meaning of living. The wish is that the grandmother is still alive. The unconscious, having dealt with the grim reality of the grandmother's death, wraps her like a mummy so this mournful certainty is transformed by saran wrap. The cellophane covering the grandmother's face is a preservative—the corporeal being, kept fresh, will not decay.

Nicky wishes for permanence. The see-through paper allows the grandmother to see, and be seen. Nothing has really changed. A clever coping dream indeed!

Kick Kennedy [Patrickmcmullan.com]

What it means: The dream reveals a sense of estrangement, of feeling out of place in one’s surroundings—like a Democrat at a Republican fundraiser—yet Kick loves this challenge! Alienation is joyous when exclusion becomes exclusivity. Befriending the elephant in the room reveals a fondness for what is different or outside the norm, for that which departs from humdrum expectations. In other words, Kick  runs from the routine, seeks out the extraordinary and leaves those who want something from her behind in the dust.

Ryan McGinness [photo by Alex Wagner]

Ryan McGinness' studio

Similarly, the 50 Parties project rose from McGinness’ frustration with sponsored events. “There are practically no genuine parties for the sake of partying anymore. They all have a corporate agenda, want to sponsor a vodka or promote a brand,” says McGinness. So in an effort to bring back genuine partying, he threw a party every Friday night, in his studio, for 50 weeks in a row in 2009-2010. Each party had its theme, one that the artist did not take lightly. “The parties were the medium I worked through that year, and I wanted to create genuine, immersive experiences,” says McGinness who goes on to tell me about his Autopsy party. He’d wanted a real dead body, for a real autopsy performed by a real pathologist. But, as McGinness noted, “besides being illegal, it’s also almost impossible to find a dead body.” So instead, McGinness stepped in as the cadavre, and had a make-up artist add on prosthetic organs to his torso. The work payed off, with some guests even bolting for the door thinking the artist’s body was actually a corpse. Others, like McGinness’ friend artist Will Cotton, turned the experience into an artistic endeavour—drawing and photographing the body. When he was told that, for his Pool Party theme, the weight of water on his rooftop would likely collapse the building, he filled the inflatable pools up with styrofoam. Flipping through the invitations designed specifically for each party, we fall on the he sent out for the “Prom” theme, which features a photo of McGinness from his own high school prom, standing with his date and current wife. High school sweathearts—how cute. “Yeah,” McGinness says with a grin “unfortunately, it’s very cute.”

Eric Fischl, Self Portrait: An Unfinished Work, 2011

Why now? Was this memoir something you’d always wanted to do? I had no intention of writing this. I play tennis with Michael Stone [who co-wrote the book] and he wanted to write something about CalArts, exploring the preponderance of young precocious people who show up at one place at one time. He interviewed a lot of artists, but didn’t know a lot about art so he came to me with questions. I kind of laid it out and we got deeper into it, going into the creative process. When his publisher said we should focus on just one artist, we made it more personal and it turned into a memoir. But if [Stone] had approached me at first to tell me he wanted me to do a memoir with him, I would have said no.

Who is bad boy’s intended audience? The focus of the book is to give people a window into the creative process, to demystify things that are falsely obscure and over-romanticized. People say they don’t know anything about art because they can’t draw a line—I wanted to reach out to that population as well as art students who will go on to become professionals. I wanted to shed light on the external pressure of making art and the professional aspect to it.

You take a couple stabs at some of your contemporaries, calling Damien Hirst “shallow” and Jeff Koons’ work as “all smoke in mirrors.” Yes, I guess I probably am burning bridges here. But they are the most public examples of something I’m criticizing, which is their approach to art and marketing. They are the greatest examples and greatest targets.

What about their approach do you take issue with? I don’t know where to start! There’s a lot I find fault with. Aesthetically, Jeff Koons’ objects aren’t compelling—they stand in for an experience that isn’t coming from the object. There is a literalness to it that is devoid to what I value more, which is empathetic and transcendent experience. They are not objects to empathize with. You don’t trade spaces with the work; the objects are not to reflect on, but to reflect by. It’s a very decadent kind of thing. The scale of production is also an example to which it is consumable and can be manufactured. Damian Hirst’s dot paintings are as dumb as they get. He produces them by the truckload and people buy them. And why? They are about the emptiness of art. It’s not that it’s not right, it’s just incredibly depressing. We are way too polite. Artists make art out of profound belief of something, so lets make it seem like it matters. In fact, the most difficult part of writing the book is becoming public in that way. I have already been dealing publicly with my biographical past life and so it was easy to go into that again.

You talk about how professionalism and the high stakes of sales changed the art world in the 80s, turning artists into rock stars. Do you think the art world has changed much since then? These days the institutions and galleries are less important, art fairs are more important. Short term, short hit, sensational aspect. That’s how people buy art nowadays—buy it fast and it doesn’t even leave their storage warehouse before they sell it off again

Go to the next page for an excerpt from Fischl’s memoir, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas.

Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, By Eric Fischl and Michael Stone

Chapter 9, from BAD BOY: MY LIFE ON AND OFF THE CANVAS

I finished Bad Boy in 1981 and showed it the following spring at Ed Thorp’s, where it made a splash with critics and the public alike. But I didn’t stick around for the fallout. Exhausted from the effort of putting up a show, I took off to Europe with April, landing first in Venice. Later on we discovered St. Tropez.
We’d been driving around northern Italy, making our way along the coast to Aix-en-Provence, which April was eager to show to me.
We stopped over in Ramatuelle, a pretty village outside St. Tropez, where an art dealer I knew had invited us to visit with his family. They introduced us to the beach life there, and we fell in love with it.
We also fell in love with their home, a beautifully restored villa, parts of which dated to the eleventh century, with a walled-in courtyard and a gorgeous magnolia tree. Over the course of the next several summers, we rented it in exchange for drawings.

After leaving St. Tropez, we drove to Aix. But since April’s last visit, the town had been overrun by condos and suburban sprawl, so we quickly headed back to St. Tropez. There our lives settled into a cozy routine, one that we would repeat over the next nine years. Mornings tended to be lazy. After late coffee, there was tennis and going to market, and around noon we’d hit the beach. It was six weeks during which April and I could be alone with each other, rediscover each other and what we were thinking. We hardly saw anyone else—1983 was still precomputer and precell—and didn’t give out our phone number.
That time of year—May to June—the beach was never crowded, but there were always enough people around to make things interesting. Surrounded by unclad sunbathers, armed with my little camera, I would shoot picture after picture as the people lolled and gabbed, read and slathered sunscreen. My camera was so innocuous, they paid little attention to me. Even if they caught me photographing them, they almost never expressed concern or disapproval, perhaps because the French are inherently exhibitionistic/voyeuristic.
The beach was a revelation. Had I not experienced it, I would never have thought to paint it. We’d go every day. April would read, we’d talk, and I would photograph. I never questioned why someone doing something unusual held me spellbound. I trusted my instincts and just took the photo. Back in my studio, months and even years later, as I went through the photographs, I would become once again entranced by that gesture. What photography did for me was capture the body in motion. I wasn’t interested in big motions like running or jumping, but small gestures like someone shifting their weight or leaning forward. These small movements were the trigger for narratives. This woman twisting and bending was longing for something. This man turning away was afraid. And because these beachgoers were unself-conscious and unaware of being watched, their body language often betrayed how uncomfortable they were with their physicality. I often felt that I was witnessing minidramas between the body and the soul, the inside and the outside, being played out at that interface where skin touches the air and light.
What St. Tropez gave me was a way of painting people, of viewing their bodies as a currency of exchange—the dynamic relations that take place between people at the most basic, physical level. Naked, stripped of social indicators, they revealed attitudes and intentions hidden from everyday cosmopolitan life. I felt as if I’d stumbled into a primitive fantasy world, my Tahiti.
At other times, though, their naturalness seemed incredibly false. Their nudity struck me as so brazen and inappropriate, it felt forced, even farcical. And later, as our vacation wore on, tourists, mainly Americans—loud, obnoxious “garmentos” in their cowboy hats and bling—added another layer of artificiality and hedonism to the scene. I felt as if I was at the circus. Degas, Beckmann, and Goya had haunted places like this—carnivals, dance halls, cabarets, fantastic settings where the normal mores of society were suspended—and made paintings full of parody and pathos. It was incredibly stimulating for me.
April and I tried different beaches, but we always returned to La Voile Rouge. I loved the red-and-white color scheme of the umbrellas and matelas. I also liked the music, much of it a kind of pop-flamenco provided by the Gipsy Kings, whom we met and befriended. The group, which would become an international success in the late eighties, was then playing weddings and parties, and sometimes serenading tourists on the local beaches. April and I brought them to New York and tried to introduce them to the music scene. But the trip was a flop. Either our timing was off or our music connections weren’t very good. But we did spend one memorable day with them at a church in Brooklyn—the Kings wanted to hear gospel music—where we witnessed a spiritual rite of passage that would influence much of my later work. More about that later.
Meanwhile, the experience of being on a beach in St. Tropez and seeing nude men and women interacting socially was both an inspiration and an assault on my puritanical American background. I had mixed feelings about what I was witnessing: the confrontation with what was taboo, the absurdity of the taboo, and the absurdity of the scene itself. Seeing naked people behaving as though they were clothed had an undeniable element of comedy to it. There was also a racial element to it. You had these African men combing the beach, hawking baubles and approaching wealthy, fancy white women lying naked in the sun. As the men crouched down close to them to show their wares, their proximity created an uncomfortable tension with the husbands or boyfriends and even me. It’s one thing to be naked on the beach with your wife. But the dynamic becomes different, more complicated, because of how Americans have mythologized the potency of black men. Later, when I painted these kinds of scenes, I thought I was capturing something that was particularly French or European, the way the foreign eye of David Hockney had captured Los Angeles.
But what it made me realize was that I’m an American wherever I go. I’m not particularly worldly or sophisticated. Though I’d painted many of my subjects naked and grown up in a house with parents who often went around without their clothes, I was shocked by my first visit to a topless beach. My mother’s nakedness had made me uneasy. And I’d used nakedness in my paintings to highlight psycho- logical stress. It was very different from the open feeling the French were expressing. They undressed to unwind, to free themselves from the constraints and conventions of everyday life. The only person who was self-conscious was me. I was the one responding to their naked- ness with a mixture of irony, titillation, and disapproval.
I tried to capture this in St. Tropez, a large square canvas I painted when I returned to New York in the fall. The picture looks like a typical beach scene. Set against a rectangle of sky, a sliver of sea, and a broad expanse of white sand dotted with orange parasols, a chic blond woman in her thirties lounges in the foreground, her naked body propped up on one elbow and torqued at an unnatural angle. Standing behind the woman, a naked pubescent girl—likely the woman’s daughter—and a tall, whippet-thin black man form a shadowy triangle with her.
The picture is trying to locate the blurry line between the private and public spheres, the natural and the artificial, the prurient and the appropriate. Though nothing much seems to be happening, the scene radiates a kind of inner tension for me. Both the child and the black man are looking at the back of the woman and she is oblivious to them both. Holding a bottle of suntan oil, her face hidden behind sunglasses, she gazes at something outside the picture frame. The girl smiles boldly but it’s a forced, precocious gaiety. Her posture betrays the anxiety of her age—she’s on the brink of becoming a woman— and she fusses with her ears, adjusting, it seems, a pair of earrings. The man—possibly an attendant or the woman’s lover or merely a stranger—is the most disconnected of the three. Clad in a sarong— he’s the only one in the picture wearing clothes—he’s turned his body away from the others and placed his hands on his hips.
Despite the festive setting, this is not a jolly or even a relaxed group. (Several characters in the background—a solitary jogger, a reader, a woman unpacking her bag—mirror the principals’ isolation.) No one is rollicking through paradise here. No one is luxuriating in—or even noticing—the natural beauty of the seaside. The people in St. Tropez may be naked, but they’re not free. They’re acting according to social codes as well-ordered as the rows of evenly spaced beach umbrellas.

Eric Fischl, St. Tropez, 1982

After the success of the Bad Boy show at Ed Thorp’s gallery in 1982, I could no longer ignore the upswing to my career. Increasingly I saw my name included in articles about where the art scene was headed. What’s more, my paintings were in demand by name dealers and collectors alike. From 1982 to 1983, I had one-man shows slated for Sable-Castelli in Toronto, Saidye Bronfman in Montreal, Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, Mario Diacono in Rome, Marian Goodman in New York, and Nigel Greenwood in London; and I was invited to exhibit in group shows at P.S. 1, the Whitney, and Sidney Janis’s tony gallery on Manhattan’s Fifty-Seventh Street.
Around the time of the Bad Boy show, I ran into Jean-Christophe Ammann walking through SoHo. I hadn’t seen him since that fateful studio visit two years before. We stopped to talk and after the usual exchange of pleasantries, the conversation turned to my work. He told me he’d seen my new paintings and that he’d had time to think about what I’d been trying to do. “I misjudged [your old paintings],” he said. “I just hadn’t been able to see it at the time.”
It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. The Sleepwalker show in 1980 had been a hit, and Bad Boy was a home run in terms of the reception it got. There was certainly a lot of positive energy coming out of those first two shows. But success felt uncomfortable to me. Perhaps that discomfort was a form of self-preservation, a way of countering my manic sense of hubris and guilt, the dark side of my competitiveness. All I know is that rather than creating a sense of elation, my success stirred up old fears and insecurities in me. I didn’t really believe I deserved the rewards I was suddenly getting.
But those feelings did nothing to curb my ambition. After the Bad Boy show, I went in search of a new gallery, one that had the prestige and resources to carry me to the next level. I wanted to be seen as one of the artists creating the conversation of the eighties. I felt there were two galleries associated with the best of my generation. One was Metro Pictures, started by Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring, and the other was Mary Boone’s. Metro was mostly showing conceptualist artists, many of them women. Mary had the male painters.
I asked David Salle to intercede on my behalf. In early 1983, David brought Mary to my small Reade Street studio to meet with me and to view my current work. But she didn’t love the paintings I had up, and the tensions that are a part of almost any studio visit— the mutual expectations of artist and dealer, the desire of the artist to please, the dealer to respond, especially when the artist is friends with other artists already at the gallery—made Mary wary. She left on an inconclusive note.

That spring the eminent Spanish curator Carmen Jimenez put up Tendencias en Nueva York, an exhibition in Madrid featuring what she believed to be a new wave of American art. David, Julian, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Susan Rothenberg, Bryan Hunt, and I were among the nine painters and sculptors invited to show. April did not join me on this trip. She felt hurt that she hadn’t been asked to be a part of the show, and has never been comfortable as a tag- along. As soon as I touched down at Madrid-Barajas Airport, though, I regretted that April hadn’t come. This was no ordinary event. The show’s organizers had not only flown us first-class and installed us at the Palace, the city’s poshest hotel, but they’d also arranged a series of receptions, dinners, and entertainments worthy of a state visit. Our little downtown art scene had suddenly become an international phenomenon.
One of the highlights of the trip was meeting Bryan Hunt. Roughly my age, Bryan exploded on the New York art scene in the late seventies. Linked to a group of artists who were exploring sculpture and illusion, he manipulated materials to create images like bronze waterfalls and lakes. I’d seen and admired his work in gallery shows and at a recent Whitney Biennial.
Bryan had a reputation as a wild man—hard-drinking, outspoken, combative, larger than life. I remember hearing about him at the Odeon, where he’d had dustups with Richard Serra and Larry Gagosian. What I didn’t know was how much fun he could be.
At the opening dinner in Madrid, our hosts treated us to an exhibition of flamenco—an incredible show, in the middle of which Bryan, stoned and inspired, got up onstage and started dancing, delighting the Americans present but horrifying our Spanish hosts. Not knowing Bryan, they felt he was parodying the other performers. In fact, he was only trying to show his appreciation. But it ended the evening’s entertainment abruptly.
A group of us left together and decided to hit the clubs. Bryan was really feeling it now and wanted to continue dancing. It took some time to hail a cab, and by the time we did, Bryan had already become a legend among Madrid’s demimonde. Our cabbie asked if Bryan wasn’t the famous American flamenco dancer.
Spain was in the midst of a renaissance. Franco was dead. People were waking from a nightmare of repression and backwardness, reaching out from their forced isolation. Their economy was growing and the energy of their youth was driving the country into the future. They were eager to connect to the outside world through the arts, as well as to showcase their artists’ fresh voices of liberation.
All the artists were feted for four days straight. The Spanish live their lives according to a schedule unlike anywhere else I’ve been. Stores open at eight a.m. and close at noon for lunch and siesta, then reopen at four p.m. and close at eight p.m. Dinner doesn’t begin before ten, and more often midnight. The day ends around four in the morning. When you add to this the generous amounts of cocaine that were handed out to us during our stay, we slept very little and ran around Madrid with a manic high.
On our last night in Madrid, a grand party was held in our honor at a private home on the outskirts of the city. Our host was a prominent commodities trader rumored to be a partner of the American tax evader Mark Rich. A fleet of limos picked us up at our hotel and ferried us to a gated enclave. The property was completely enclosed within high brick walls punctuated by lookout towers. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter, carrying machine guns.
When we arrived, our names were checked against a list and our car scanned for bombs. Finally the gates parted and we drove up a long road to a contemporary house filled with steel and glass. A glass igloo sculpture by the Italian artist Mario Merz stood in the middle of the driveway.
Our host had a penchant for exhibiting his art collection in un- usual places. He’d stuck a huge steel Richard Serra sculpture in the middle of a tennis court and placed a large photo collage by the British duo Gilbert and George on a wall obscured by a steel beam. With seeming disregard for its structural integrity, he’d cut holes in the beam so that viewers could see more of the piece. Encouraged to explore the house, I stumbled into the spa; just outside a steam-room door hung an El Greco. Later I found a sublime Giorgio Morandi still life mounted to the inside of a closet.
The party itself was surreal. A glamorous crowd milled around— some dancing, others naked. The waiters carried trays of champagne and offered guests a choice of cocaine or heroin. I was never formally introduced to our host, but from time to time a short, thin man in a silk smoking jacket would sidle up to me and ask if I needed any- thing more. The way he said “more” made me curious what he could possibly have in mind.
I am sure there was some lesson to be taken from the scene. Commerce corrupts art, or corrupt commerce corrupts art absolutely. But whenever I ran into Bryan and the other American artists we would start laughing, enjoying the thrill of our new success. We were on a joy ride, and the world was putting on a show for us.
And there was another sensation, one I didn’t identify at the time: the queasy exhilaration and shared intimacy of a group losing its innocence. Maybe it was the guns or the audacity of the money and trinkets and drugs showered on us, but you can’t rub shoulders with that kind of lifestyle, I realized later, without some of it rubbing off on you.

Adapted from BAD BOY: MY LIFE ON AND OFF THE CANVAS
Copyright © 2013 by Eric Fischl. Written with Michael Stone. Published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

Brandusa Niro with her friend, photographer Gilles Bensimon

What was the inspiration to start The Daily just over a decade ago? I’ve always had a passion for the behind-the-scenes world of fashion, where this milieu is at its most authentic. The designers and their teams, the retail and media kingmakers, the self-fueling model and agent dynamic, the fashion editrixes—anointed taste makers whose job is to steer the mass toward class, or the other way around, as is the case with those who rely on focus groups rather than creative process! It’s all fascinating to me. It started when I was a tween, growing up in communist Romania, a place without a stich of Chanel in sight, and where all magazines from the western world were strictly contraband. My uncle, the great Romanian actor Toma Caragiu, used to smuggle Elle and Vogue for me from his soirées at the French embassy. Who knew then that Elle’s lead photographer Gilles Bensimon, whose work I adored on those pages would today be one of my closest friends and collaborators? But I digress. When you love something as much as I love fashion and magazines, you owe it to yourself to create your own piece of it, something that is completely new and original, a voice and a look unheard and unseen before. For me, that labor of love is The Daily.

How has The Daily changed over the past 10 years? Fashion is serious business, but it is also serious fun! That’s The Daily credo, and foundation. Within this framework, we are evolving constantly, at a very fast pace. Our readers are: the smartest, most sophisticated and influential people in the fashion and media world. Our job is to keep them engaged and excited. So far we’ve done OK with that. Our readers always ask for more. Consequently, we have added magazines outside of our New York fashion week bible, The Daily Front Row. Our most important initiative is The Daily Summer, our weekly magazine published in the Hamptons from May to September. It’s the shop-able, social and ultra-chic sister to our fashion week Daily, with plenty of the humorous kick and fashion edge that’s our signature. It’s our third year in the Hamptons and we have gathered such a huge following over there that we’ve had to increase our circulation by 40 percent this summer. Plus, we now are making the magazine available on the digital newsstand where we average already 3.2 million impressions per issue. My favorite thing is when I get reports from our moles on the scene in Southampton, East Hampton and Amagansett about how fast our mag gets picked up. Everbody says “It’s like candy!”

Did you know when you started The Daily that fashion would become such a national obsession and that the web would become such an important platform? I did, actually, in 1998. That year, I launched the first independent fashion newswire, a site that was posting 24/7, like an AP wire but with a sense of fun. We were syndicated in over 300 media outlets. AP was our client as well, right from the start. I believed as early as 1998 that there was an appetite for the fashion insiders, the characters, the process, the news, the front row, the backstage as well as the runway, among readers and viewers everywhere and that the web was the best way to take it to them. Five years later I launched The Daily in print, in 2003. It was the year The Devil Wears Prada was published. And the rest is history. In terms of style, my web roots inform the print Daily, which has the kicky urgency of the web and of TV. Totally short-form, all-access, anecdotal, show-versus-tell, seen, heard, overheard, very visual, sound bite-y and fly-on-the-wall, the ultimate vicarious experience for the reader. You can be at home in your pajamas and feel like you’ve been brushing shoulders with Michael Kors. You are a true participant. Plus you know every bit of dish that matters.

How has Fashion Week changed since you first started? It has grown and evolved tremendously. IMG and the CFDA have done an incredible job building up the scope of the American runway talent and making it possible for it to flourish. There’s nothing more vibrant, buzzier or more exhilarating than New York Fashion Week. We certainly played our part too, by chronicling every second of the week, infusing it with so much colorful, glorious and celebratory energy.

The Daily Front Row

What have been your favorite Daily covers? I always adore a model or two each season. I love the covers we shoot with these models at couture. Not only are the girls magnificent, but also you capture the exact vision of the designer, at its very best. The clothes, hair, makeup, styling, etc., nothing and no one can replicate that vision, and as such it is the definition of a true fashion moment. The “Chic-i-leaks” cover is a favorite, then there is the one with Miss Piggy sandwiched front row between Anna Wintour and Franca Sozzani, Miss Piggy saying, in a talk bubble, ‘Move over, chérie.’ That is so Daily. And our Tenth Anniversary cover, with the dangling 10 earring on Lindsey Wixson— that cover captures exactly what The Daily is about today: very chic, very luxury, and very, very cheeky.

Speaking of, The Daily is known for being funny. How do you balance poking fun at fashion people while still being loved by everyone? Has there ever been a story that has ruffled a lot of feathers? Not that anyone has told me! You know the thing that makes me happy every day? It is how smart and funny and talented most of the people we cover really are. I couldn’t dream of a better readership. The Daily is for them and about them. It’s working perfectly. Yes, there may be a few who can’t take a good joke, like a certain venerable designer who was celebrating an anniversary and we printed a cheeky quote from a movie star guest about what gift he’d give him for his birthday. His publicist called to say he doesn’t like anything funny. Well, in that case, I must paraphrase Miss Piggy and say: “It’s fashion, chérie! You need some joie de Daily!”

As the Editor in Chief, you are a bit like the female Wizard of Oz as you don't go to every show and party, though you could sit front row everywhere from Calvin Klein to Céline. Why do you prefer being behind the scenes? I actually sit front row at Calvin Klein every single season. Luckily their show is after we finish shipping our last issue and I adore Francisco Costa. I sometimes make it at Marc Jacobs and to Carolina Herrera and Michael Kors. I wish I could be at more shows, but when I send to press a new issue of a glossy 50-page magazine overnight, covering what happened the day before, I have to approve pages every 15 minutes and then work on the cover, select photos and write the cover lines. I am the only editor who works on the cover with our Creative Director, Guillaume Bruneau. To me, the work we do on covers is what I love the most. So, as always in this life, something’s got to give. Working on The Daily covers trumps going to shows. The rest of the year, I go to fashion and media events very selectively. And I spend nearly every day all year meeting with the subjects of our stories—the designers, creatives, media mavens, top retailers, etc. I do it at lunch, one on one, or at private dinners. This way we can really catch up and have fun. And it is how I get a lot of scoops, I might add. My favorite tables are at Le Bernardin, Il Gattopardo, Armani Ristorante, and Indochine. Last week I discovered a new spot thanks to my friend Alex Gonzalez from Marie Claire—A Voce, in the Time Warner building.

What is your first fashion memory? My first Chanel show when I was covering the collections for L’Express, in my early 20s. I have never encountered anything that could top Chanel. Just like there was just one Coco, there is also just one Karl Lagerfeld. Another moment from that same era was my first interview with Valentino during the couture shows in Rome, on the Spanish steps, and in Paris again, with Hubert de Givenchy.

Lorenzo Martone and the Men's Grand

What inspired you to get into the bike business and launch Martone Cycling Company? I had the idea in April 2011 when I moved to the West Village and had to store my bike in the living room for everyone to see. I noticed there was something wrong, something about the aesthetic. I felt there was no fashion filter to the bike I was riding. Basically, I had a design epiphany! I’ve worked in public relations for over 10 years and love it, but everyone in New York is multitasking, getting involved in new things. And I had the design itch so I went for it!

Who is your customer? Anyone who appreciates design. We make bikes for men and women and in different sizes, so basically anyone can become a Martone Cycling Company rider. There is one thing: my customer is someone who likes compliments. I’ve noticed that the people who ride our bikes get a lot of attention from others on the street. Also good for flirting!

When did your love affair with bikes start? I got my first bike for Christmas when I was a kid, and if you see the pictures of that night you would think I had won the lottery. I’ve loved biking ever since. It’s such an awesome way to connect with your environment. You can explore the city on it and see it at its best. Now, since I started making them, I fell in love with so many other layers of the project. I love the sustainability aspect: it’s a noise, gas, electricity-free object that takes you from A to B very efficiently. I also love how nostalgic and romantic they are. There is a reason why bikes have been around since the 1800s—they are perfect.

Do you have a favorite bike in the collection? It would be like asking who my favorite child is. So no, I do not have a favorite. Personally, I have been riding the gold bike and it’s quite fun. When the sun reflects on it, it’s as if the bike has its own aura. So many people in the street ask me about it. The white is also a favorite, especially among chic editors.

Where do you go for a leisurely bike ride in the city? I never get tired of the trail along the West Side Highway. I ride it both for leisure and to get around. I can go from my place in the West Village to uptown in 20 minutes, all while enjoying the beautiful views of the river.

What direction do you see your business going? I definitely hope to open our own Martone Cycling Company shop in N.Y. and other key bike cities. We are gearing towards “active wear” as well. I’ve already designed locks, helmets and am working on bike-inspired apparel. I will try a pop up this summer and we’ll hopefully have our own permanent store next year.

martonecycling.com 

Tina Craig [PatrickMcMullan.com]

Who has influenced your sense of style and taste the most?
My grandmother. She grew up in Shanghai during its height of chic in the 1920s and 1930s and wore red lipstick every single day of her life, even in an ambulance after having a stroke—she clutched a CHANEL red lipstick in her hand and whispered to me “don’t let me die without lipstick on.” She had a distaste for any fabric that was not silk or cashmere. If I wore jeans, she’d wrinkle her nose, grab an Hermès scarf and toss it around my neck before letting me out of the house. She didn’t follow trends or worship name brands. She wore the same style of dresses her entire life, and would just get different variations of them every season. She taught me that money was not indicative of good taste, and true style comes from knowing what works for you and wearing it with confidence.

What are you craving most this season?
I grew up in the 80s and lived for checkered Vans and striped mini dresses—which is why I want everything striped and checked from Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton this season.

Who are your style icons?
I don’t really have style icons but if I had to choose, I’d say Kate Moss because she loves diamonds as much as I do and Tilda Swinton because the sight of her in Haider Ackermann suits makes me want to marry her.

Waris Ahluwalia [Patrick McMullan.com]

Who has influenced your sense of style and taste the most?

I’ve always been influenced by my mother’s grace— not just in her sense of style but in her way of being.

What are you craving most this season?

What I’m always craving—sunshine, sand between my toes, a palm tree swaying overhead, a warm breeze, turquoise water, mischief, more suits from Doyle Mueser and Esquivel shoes.

Who are your style icons?

David Niven’s character in Around the World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg. He was sharp, in dress and wit, no matter what corner of the world or situation he ended up in. And Kris Kristoferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—who doesn’t love a bit of denim. Or a lot of denim for that matter.

Here's who made the cut.Click to view slideshow.

J. Logan Horne [Patrick McMullan]

Who has influenced your sense of style and taste the most?

My style has mostly been influenced by my travels rather than any individual. I do a majority of my shopping when I travel because I get inspired from other cultures and the locals of wherever I happen to be.

What are you craving most this season?

Brown suede Saint Laurent Chelsea boots. I love the idea of wearing an all black outfit with brown suede shoes. For some people, mixing black and brown may be a faux pas but I find it to be very sharp and unexpected.

Who are your style icons?

Gwyneth Paltrow is hands-down my biggest style icon to date. Before making most decisions I like to consult GOOP or ask myself W.W.G.D.? (What would Gwyneth do?) Her approach to style and love of life are exactly on point.

Fiona Byrne [PatrickMcMullan.com]

Who has influenced your sense of style and taste the most?

I have always liked the same things: utilitarian style, leather, stripes and denim. That’s how I dress now and I think it stems from my grunge phase as a teenager; only instead of wanting to dress like Courtney, I wanted to dress like Kurt. I also really liked Meg Ryan’s look as Pamela in The Doors movie. That beachy California thing was so alien to me growing up in Ireland. The idea of a tan was also alien.

What are you craving most this season?

For spring, Korean brand Fleamadonna did these amazing sailor tunics and shirts. I need one. There are also these white oxfords with mesh and hearts by Rachel Antonoff for Bass that I am excited to get when they come out in May.

Who are your style icons?

Brigitte Bardot in the 60s—unbelievably chic. I loved her in her most mannish looks. Current day, I really like how Jenna Lyons puts pieces together.