If you axed off Murray’s head, you would probably drown, screaming like a little girl, in a spewing fountain of knowledge-a-la-fashion. But he’s not some truffle-brained, shallow style-whore, he’s the brains and gears behind a truckload of modern day magazine masterpieces, delivered in iconic titles like Love,Industrie and Arena Homme+ . We had two separate chats, one in a lovely wholesome food kind of place, savagely aborted by the upper time limit on the iPhone’s voice recorder; the second in a dainty tea room, but with a soundtrack punctuated by a group of enthusiastic women behind us who sounded like they were having repeat orgasms. 

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So your newest project is Industrie. How did that happen?

Well basically I was working with Jens and Erik [from design agency Saturday] on a magalogue for COS stores.

Yeah we’ve seen that about, they print it at the same place printHERO.

Oh really?

Yeah and we were in there overseeing the printing and they have these magazines they’ve done on the side. So we were flicking through saying ‘this looks nice’, and then were like ‘oh, there’s Murray’.

Yeah, in the last issue I worked on I think I wrote every piece in it. Normally I’d be given the people to interview, and the dates would get pushed back and back and then I’d finally interview them and have to write the thing over night, which is never ideal. On this one I had more time to actually really think about the writing, so I felt happier with it. I interviewed Grace Coddington for it as well which was really amazing.

Did you do that in London?

I did it over the phone, she had just had lunch in New York in her house and was in quite a good mood. I was told she didn’t like interviews and that she wasn’t always the easiest person, but she was absolutely amazing – she was chatting for a couple of hours and completely answered everything.

Have you seen The September Issue, you must have?

Yeah it was the run up to that, I did the interview about a month before it was released, I’d been given a top secret copy which was great.

I thought she was amazing in it, I really liked her.

Yeah she was completely the hero in that film and she was kind of embarrassed about the way they edited to make her seem that way, but I think from an stylistic point of view it probably was the only story to tell really. So yes we did the COS thing and then Erik met me last year and said they were thinking of doing a magazine that was similar to the COS project in that it was about people, not just in the fashion industry but surrounding it as too, or had some kind of interaction with it. Just to make something interview-led where people talk about what it is they actually do. The funny thing about fashion is that even if you work in the industry it’s not always obvious what a stylist does, or how they start to get to a position where they have so much control over the industry. So he was interested in that in the wake of The September Issue, which basically confirmed that people like Grace and Anna [Wintour] are kind of celebrities, it’s not just models or even designers, but stylists, editors that people want to know about.

You seem to be churning out like new magazines every week.

Haha, yeah.

You’re involved in Homme+ and Love as well – did you start off with magazines?

No I started in academia, I was doing my masters in Sussex, I was going to do a PhD, well in fact I started a PhD but never finished it which is really bad because I can’t ever go back.

Can you not pick it up again?

No, basically I can never go back, I’m excommunicated from academia.

Burnt some bridges?

Yeah, sadly because I would have liked to actually go back at some point. I started doing club reviews for The Face and then they got me writing the front section and then they started sending me out on stories…

Is this all while you were in academia?

Yeah, and then basically they offered me a job which I took as a staff writer writing features.

So that was like a full time, proper nine to five?

Yes, which I actually hated because I can’t do a full time job – I’m just incapable, I just find it very claustrophobic, just knowing what I’m going to be doing in two years time – it’s terrifying. After a few years I resigned.

Was it drama?

Yeah it was drama. Not long after after I joined The Face Emap bought it and I really think they didn’t have a clue. Suddenly there were all these fat middle-aged business men in suits, walking through making publishing decisions about a culture they knew nothing about and never really understood. They’d never been Face readers so god knows why they were there. There were very good reasons to sell it, but then I remember being taken on a team building day by Emap.

Ohhh…

Which never happened before and you knew this was wrong to start with, and then we were asked to describe the target Face reader and I just felt hugely insulted and said I’d only ever written for myself and that’s all I was interested in doing. And there was all this stuff about it having to be less London, well less Hoxton-centric, but when I read The Face as a teenager it was because I was living in the middle of nowhere and I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted an authentic engagement with people who were really living a particular way of life, and we were living that life and we were being told not to write about it and go and find out what people were doing in Macclesfield, it just seemed like – well why? So I was increasingly disillusioned and there was all this pressure from the new bosses to change the magazine and then as a result of that pressure they put Hear’Say on the cover.

Yeah I remember that.

And I resigned at that point, I just thought ‘this is insane’. But obviouslyThe Face is part of history. When I was a teenager I was more of an i-Dperson really, I always thought The Face was too slick and I was slightly suspicious of it, whereas i-D always looked a bit shambolic and I found that more honest. If you get those 80s issues of i-D, it’s probably not appropriate now, but it felt like a scrapbook and it was just full of ideas. The back pages – there would be about eight bits on a page, which nowadays would be an entire six page feature, just crammed together. It was almost like they were wasting their ideas but they were just so full of them – there was an intensity there, and you’d just find a paragraph which would just, well I was young and it was all new to me it would literally blow my mind and I would cut it out and try and find these places they would write about.

[pullquote]”I quite like elitism, elitism which isn’t founded purely on how much money you’ve got”[/pullquote]

Did they fulfill your expectations?

Well I studied in Manchester and I remember coming down to London when I was 18 trying to find the House of Beauty and Culture which was Christopher Nemeth and Judy Blame, they all got together and were selling stuff out of this place in Dalston. But when I got there it was shut. But I kind of quite liked that, that I finally got there, I came down from Manchester and it was shut. I liked how elusive that was and how user-unfriendly. Now everyone is bending over backwards to be accessible to consumers which is understandable but I quite like elitism, elitism which isn’t founded purely on how much money you’ve got.

So what happened after The Face?

Ashley Heath who was editorial director at The Face and Arena, which was still going then, and Arena Homme+ was just helping to set up Pop. And he took me out and said ‘Look, come and be managing editor ofPop and Homme+‘, and I’d never been managing editor.

What exactly is it? Does it differ from publication to publication?

Yeah it does, it’s basically production manager, and writer and copy editor.

So everything then?

Yeah [laughs] – I’d never wanted to do production because I’m not that technically minded and organised. And you have to be so strict with schedules and deadlines. And I’m not really. And I said yes, I mean, I was offered more money than I’d ever earned which was sweet, and I loved those magazines. And I was really honoured that he had that much faith in me. But Pop in those days was in a cupboard in the back of The Face office. It was Katie [Grand], Lee [Swillingham] and Stuart [Spalding]. That was kind of it. It might as well have been someone’s shed.

It’s amazing though when you get a team that works like that.

Every magazine I’ve worked on has been about five people. Actually,Love now is much bigger and is quite efficient. It’s the most efficient magazine I’ve ever worked for, and I never thought I’d see the day but Condé Nast are hugely supportive in whatever we need. They’d seenPop, and they knew what we could do. I think they really understood Katie and they really understood the magazine. Because it is Katie’s magazine, basically an extension of her persona almost, everything springs from her in that magazine. And I think when you get a publisher that understands a magazine then that’s 90% of the battle.

Did it take much to establish that team? I remember talking to you when you were working on the first Love and you were like [squealing noise]…

The first one was difficult and also I was very ill, when you’re freelance you can’t ever afford to be ill because you’re sick for two days and a magazine doesn’t come out, it’s that simple.

How much time does Love take up?

I start work about twelve weeks before an issue finishes, and then I’m in the office round the clock pretty much for the last two months.

So that gives you time for other projects – what do you enjoy writing the most, really in depth pieces? Or do they become tedious?

I find little pieces for the front section very difficult because they’re short and brief, I want to make sure every word counts and it ends up being like writing poetry.

Do you ever just scrap it and think ‘ok, that’s a bit over-egged now’?

No that’s the point, each time I go over it I try to simplify it. Refining it, refining it. So I never want a sentence to look like it’s been hard work to construct. So you have to deny the hard work that’s gone into it by editing it.

Do you get writer’s block?

Yeah [laughs].

I thought you wouldn’t! Because in the magazine industry you have to write on demand.

This is why I can’t write for a monthly. There are times in the year where I can’t write an email. And there’s other times where I can’t stop writing. And luckily most of those times when I’m obsessed with writing are the times I need to write.

That’s handy. Do you just write about fashion?

I write notes for myself that would never be published, just trying to work out what I think about things. My MA was in cultural studies and I’m much more interested in how fashion fits in to the bigger picture, the stories that culture tells about itself.

The music in here is really bizarre [was Boyzone, now panpipes].

I know.

So with your academic background, have you got any overarching conclusions that you’ve come to about menswear and its place in fashion and culture?

I think I had a clearer idea in the 90s, partly because I was still involved with the academic approach and not so involved with the fashion industry. And I don’t know whether it’s become more complicated since then. We had that whole Loaded magazine period, and that whole lad thing, it felt like there was a lot of writing at that time about masculinity as performance. At the start, Loaded felt like a performative approach to being male, almost a self-consciously regressing to pre-feminist mode, a very knowing and ironic thing.

Do you think the readers got that?

No. I think the editors did, and I think there was a time that Loaded was very interesting. And being quite clever, but then it collapsed into what it was claiming to send up. My PhD supervisor always said the trouble with post-modernism is that it always throws everything up into the air, and then it tends to land back in the same shape as before it was thrown up. And that’s exactly what’s happened with post-feminism and masculinity since the Loaded generation.

I’ve seen lots of ads recently, especially for cars, that remind me 80s macho car and cigarette ads. Before it all became so diplomatic.

My most muttered phrase is, ‘it’s like feminism never happened’ – I seem to be saying that every few hours. I sit there watching Loose Women and sigh. You can’t talk about masculinity without talking about femininity and girls now are obsessed with pink. And I’ve got a friend with a daughter who’s about four who won’t wear dresses and hates pink – she thinks it’s a sign of stupidity – and she gets bullied for not wearing pink. When I was a kid in supposedly more sexist times, that would never have happened.

It’s almost like trying to reclaim femininity.

Yeah, as if it was anything other than constructed in the first place anyway.

// two weeks later…//

So how do you think the internet is changing fashion and magazines?

Because the internet is so well disposed to putting out news and fast changing events reporting them as they happen, there’s no point in a fashion magazine competing with that. Fashion has to be an event in itself, it has to be something the magazine creates. It can’t be reporting on something else. Magazines like The Face disappeared for a reason, because the idea of it was that it was reporting on the trends as they happen, and you can’t get a better format for that than blogs.

Do you think that fashion itself has been affected?

People in different areas of the industry keep talking to me about the end of the fashion season. People who go to Net-A-Porter, they don’t just go twice a year to buy their stuff. They want new stuff every two weeks, and big fashion houses are starting to respond to that. They’re starting to stagger their distribution into nibbles, in the last few years you’ve seen the rise of pre-collection, cruise collection, so there’s four seasons, then suddenly there’ll be a mid season.

And then one-of-a-kind little bits and pieces.

Yeah and then there’s capsule collections for particular sites or particular magazines or collaborations, so the idea now is that designers can come up with an idea and think ‘rather than develop it to come out in six months’ time, this is just a little idea I have, I’ll put out a collection in the next month’. They can do it in small numbers and it goes out there through a particular outlet or in their own store. So that idea is out there already, and the bigger more epic stuff, which takes longer to develop, can still be the twice yearly main collection. But advertising is really behind on all that stuff, magazine deadlines are kind of set by the advertisers because they want their advertising in the shelf by a certain day. If that was removed you could take as long as you like bringing things out.

Maybe it’s nice there is some kind of metronome.

Yeah, otherwise things would go on forever. I think it’s quite hard for designers as well because they end up creating ten collections a year, so there is this constant need for output.

I guess a lot of the time designers end up making their collections in the last three weeks anyway before the shows.

Exactly.

So they might as well use up the other 46 weeks in the year to actually make some more stuff!

Yeah, I mean obviously there’s a limit to how fast the fashion industry can move, rather than one person in charge creating everything, particularly with the really big fashion houses, you’ve got a designer, a team, a whole network of manufacturers and distributors. But designers have to be clever about what they show, about what’s going to grab headlines and what’s going to go into the stores. Comme des Garçons are very clever like that because they’re considered to be very conceptual but they’ve got about 12 different sub-brands now, so there’s the twice yearly collections that are high-end and expensive, but you don’t see all of that on sale. They make some pices that are so fantastic you can’t imagine anyone who would ever wear it, and they’ve got ‘Play’ and all sorts of other lines.

Like ‘Shirt’…

Like ‘Shirt’ which is absolutely wearable, like really beautifully done, really simple and people are always going to keep buying it. I think in terms of understanding the future, they’ve always been two steps ahead.

Generally menswear has changed quite a lot in the past 10 years or so, what do you think is next?

Well it seems to me the boom time in menswear always comes on the back of a kind of financial boom generally, like when, I don’t know, when the middle market is more affluent suddenly there is an appetite for more progressive menswear. Certainly what we saw in past recessions is that big fashion houses suddenly shot their menswear budgets and focused on womenswear, we’re sensing that now in menswear with advertising, they’re cutting their budgets back massively and I’m sure they’re cutting back the production budgets as well. I worry that it can be quite a dull time for the established fashion brands, and certainly in the last couple of years its been less exciting than the five years before. But you also get new names emerging because they have nothing to lose.

What was the perception of menswear when you were writing?

It was a different era in menswear definitely. I think then you had a much bigger divide between fashion label menswear and streetwear. Menswear then was driven a lot more by street trends than designer trends. Now the designers themselves grew up on the streetwear, like Junya Watanabe. He’s someone who shows a perfect understanding of streetwear and turning that into a designer brand.

With menswear now, unlike womenswear, it seems like you have to either be fashionable, or not. You can’t just wear one designer thing and then plop back to the norm.

And I think men are still drawn by practicality.

But it’s interesting that some of the really new designers like Jaiden rVa James, their whole show was just gimp outfits, full face leather things with bondage. Obviously none of that is practical or is going to go anywhere near the shops, it’s almost just a platform to make a statement.

Exactly yeah, but there will be one or two people who would wear that to certain clubs and get a lot of attention and look fantastic, but it’s not going to be a mass market thing ever, or even a niche market thing – it’s only a handful of people. Hair is also a generational thing. The amount of effort that goes into young men’s hairstyles is astounding. You’re on the Tube and you see people 15, 16 with amazing hair, I don’t know how long its taken them but it’s just immaculate and you think ‘my god’. But back to budgets, I wonder how badly these brands are actually doing, I don’t think any, as far as I know, nobody’s really suffering at the moment. Like marketing budgets get cut back in anticipation of things getting tight.

There is a lot of talk but then you don’t know the figures really, I mean people are still making good money, I guess its a certain set of people, but the people who buy fashion are a certain set of people.

Certainly the common wisdom is that in previous recessions, certainly luxury brands aren’t hit by the recession because the people with that kind of money don’t lose their jobs. Where are these companies that are doing badly out of the recession!?

Woolworths. Woolworths – and who else shut down? Whittards, but then Whittards got bought out the next day or something.

Apart from Woolworths [laughs].

The pinnacle of high fashion. So you always seem to know what’s going on, do you socialise much with designers to get the inside scoop?

Certainly not that high end, but more in the boheminan way than the fashion way. There are some fashion parties I like and some I don’t.

A lot of designers don’t like the fashion scene, they just really don’t like the whole idea of the parties and networking.

I’m not necessarily into fashion in its totality anyway, I mean I suppose I’m into new ideas and there are some designers who provide that and there are some that don’t. So I’m not so interested in them and not that interested in going to their parties.

What does excite you about a designer? Is it new trends each season or is it more about seeing them doing interesting things over time?

You learn to appreciate fashion in different ways. But what still drives me I think is, you know that moment when you’re 15, and you see someone that looks completely different and it changes the way you look at the whole world, and the way people react to them, you start to see a sense of power, it undoes people’s perceptions. There are still moments for me like that – realising the power of dressing a certain way and what it can do to the way you fit into society. People like Pam Hogg in the 80s who really excited me and still do because they’re still living that thing – she could have been hugely successful financially but only ever did things that excited her, and I still respond to that. And then there are people, like when I first interviewed Gareth Pugh, I think it was about his second or third season, and I got the same gut-wrenching feeling.

Do you go to the shows?

I don’t go there any more, it’s exhausting, and if you go to one you have to go to all of them because otherwise you’re offending the people you don’t go and see. It’s all there on the internet anyway. The funny thing is I was actually at the Louis Vuitton show in Paris because I went along and did some text stuff for Marc, so I was there for the two days right up to when the collection went out, and everyone was there watching the online feed backstage.

Ha! That seems crazy.

That does seem crazy, but it’s the best seat you can get if you’re not actually in the front row. Why bother with the hassle? One of the first shows I ever went to I remember it was London Fashion Week and we all had to squeeze through this tiny door and it was an hour late starting. I remember there was such a bundle that basically Zandra Rhodes was picked up like a bowling ball and just thrown and I thought ‘that’s so rude’. I just thought it was really unpleasant and the shows still have that element to it where it’s just like a scrum.

Yeah it’s a bit like a gig when you’re all sweaty and everyone is just shoving.

But not nearly as sexy, I mean being stuck in a moshpit is kind of great but not when it like 50 year old fashion editors, it’s like ‘I really don’t want to be squashed up against these people’.

And there’s that whole kind of sneery vibe depending on where you’re sitting.

Oh the whole politics of who’s got what seat. Literally I have heard people saying ‘Why are they there, I should be there’ and calling the PRs over and you think, ‘I just don’t want to be here’. I must say there are bits of the fashion world that really excite me and bits of it that sicken me, there are times when I think ‘I’ve got to get out of this and I’ve got to find something that is manifestly less unethical’, but I think anything, any industry is the same. I mean god, what would I go and do? Work in a supermarket? That’s even more evil.

Do you feel like you have a lot of power with your writing for such a wide audience?

I don’t feel like I have power. Actually to be honest, I feel wracked with horror at my responsibility after I’ve interviewed someone and they say ‘bye’ to me and I start thinking ‘oh my god I’m in control of this perception of this person’, and I find that terrifying. I do have sleepless nights where I’ve written something, I don’t think I’ve ever written anything damning about anyone, but I do lay awake thinking ‘have I misjudged or misrepresented someone?’

So a random question – where is your favourite place?

Berwick Street is one of my favourite places in the world. When I was 15 I was living in Crawley, I started making clothes because you couldn’t buy the stuff you wanted. You couldn’t just go to Topman and buy it. I remember I’d go to the fabric store in Crawley market and buy fabric and the couple that ran it were really nice. They were like, ‘you want to go to Berwick Street, it’s amazing’. There’s still loads of fabric shops here but there were even more in the 80s so I would come up here every weekend with my pocket money.

So you’re quite good at making things?

For a period I actually made clothes for a living when I lived in Manchester. After I graduated I worked at the Haçienda and I was making clothes for one-off commissions, and at one point all the men in the Haçienda were all wearing my stuff.

So did you not ever get into or ever interested in being a designer?

Well, when I was in Manchester I was trying to set up as a designer; the funny thing was I actually got interviewed. I remember being in Dry Barand this journalist in this very designery dress said, ‘Oh I’ve heard about you, I want to do an interview with you’, and she was from W and I was like, ‘well I never heard of it’ and she was American and I thought, this is awful isn’t it, but I thought ‘why do I want to talk to you, I’m in Manchester, this is the coolest place in the world I don’t care about anywhere else’…

Mistake…

‘…I’m making tops for Clint Boon and Graeme Park, I don’t care.’ So I never rang her.

Oh my god.

How arrogant is that?

[laughs] So Soho has remained your favourite?

I love the way it’s always been that mixture of stupidly rich and desperately poor. There was that school off Brewer Street, a tiny school on the rooftop and you hear the kids playing at playtime and at about 4 o’clock you see the mums collecting their kids. They walk past the brothels and the peepshows and the madams on the door are sitting there saying ‘Hi’ to the kids and the mums and dads. It’s such a weird mixture, such a brilliant mixture of such different types of lifestyle and everyone’s getting on, I think that’s an achievement.

Do you think London is the most inspiring place for fashion as well?

London is one of my favourite places in the world. I think there’s a tradition of fashion being that bit wider and that bit crazier here which other countries respect and which we haven’t always been able to exploit financially, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Have you ever regretted not buying a piece of fashion?

God – going right back to Vivienne Westwood’s Time Machine collection which there was this kind of suit of armour jacket in felt… basically it was like a waistcoat with arms that strapped on, you could undo a buckle at the back so it was like a suit of armor. It had this big shoulder thing and this two part sleeve with a hole cut out and an angled bit on the elbow. I wanted that so much that I actually made a copy of it. I tried it on in the shop so I could measure it with my fingers, then I went outside and then sketched it and made a very good copy. But then unfortunately one of Bros wore it on Top of the Pops and then that was it, over.

So do you have much stuff you bought but never wore?

Not much. But there are some Dior high tops that are like ankle boots with about 20 velcro straps on. I’ve worn them once and I don’t think I’ll ever wear them again, but as objects they’re fantastic.

Have you got them on a plinth at home? I can imagine you having all this stuff around in like glass cases.

I’ve actually got a bench in my hallway with a shoe cage underneath. I got it from a company that stocks changing rooms, so its like real local council.

Do you have to dust the shoes?

Yep [laughs].

Do you ever get rid of clothes?

No I keep everything. From when I moved a year ago I’ve still got massive laundry bags full of clothes that I haven’t unwrapped. I’ve got loads of Bathing Ape stuff from like ten years ago now that I would never wear now but I still love and is still valuable. I think about selling it to collectors but I think ‘one day I’m gonna regret that’. So as long as I’ve got space to keep it, it’s all there packed up in laundry bags.

It’s funny that, the whole collecting thing. It’s always like ‘wow, this is so expensive now’ but you don’t want to sell it. It’s exciting to have it because you know it’s valuable, but then what’s the point?

Last time I moved I threw out about 40 pairs of sneakers and some of them were really obscure collectors’ items but I couldn’t be bothered to go through the whole thing of putting them on eBay. I was so sick of it in the end I just took it into a charity shop.

That would have been a find.

I know.

One of the first fashion things I bought was a simple Dior top, and I had it on sitting of the wardrobe and didn’t want to wear it in case I ruined it, when I got it down it was caked in dust, then I had to hoover it.

Talking of clothes I never wear. About five years ago there was this Dior polo shirt that’s basically fishnet. I tried it on and I liked it but I’d never have the guts to wear it out.

Is it because of the lighting in the changing rooms? I always find it makes you look good in anything. They always light it from behind the mirror or something and it gives you this even, tanned glow and you look so good. Then you put it on your bathroom under the harsh light and see what it really looks like.

When I got it home I still liked it. I was just worried about what it might say if I…

…wore a fishnet top?

Yeah. So I’ve never worn that, that’s always been hanging in my wardrobe.

Ok one more question. Because you meet so many designers to interview them, when you talk to them does it make you want to buy their stuff more because you have that connection – because you know them a bit more?

Meeting designers makes me understand what they’re doing a bit more, but I’m so sure about what I like to wear myself and what I don’t like, that it’s never changed my opinion about what I’m going to buy.

Have you ever interviewed a designer whose clothes you already like and then they’ve put you off somehow? That’s happened to me.

There has been a couple of brands where I’ve met the people responsible and I’ve thought ‘this is completely not what I thought it was’ and all the intelligence that I had attributed to the people concerned wasn’t really there, and it’s kind of an accident. It ended up being something that I responded to. But that was a long time ago. It hasn’t happened recently.

Ok one more last question. When you interview people is there a certain question that you always pull out of the bag that disarms people, but that always gets an interesting response?

I’ll always research before an interview obsessively to make sure I’m not asking them things they’ve been asked before. Sometimes you have to clarify something they’ve said before, they might say something and I think ‘that’s a bit out of character’ or ‘I’m not sure about that’, so you ask the same question slightly differently to try and get an answer.

So there’s no secret Murray Healy question?

[laughs] No there’s no magic, it’s not a parlour trick!