On the most surprising thing she found in her archives…
“The newspaper skirt! I thought I lost it. When I found it at the bottom of the trunk, I couldn’t believe it. There were things I thought I lost because I moved, and I had to go here and there, and my kid was born. So all of a sudden, what you [once] saw as so important wasn’t anymore because somebody else was there, which always happens when you have children.
On the book that inspired her style in 1985…
“I went to a bookstore, Rizzoli’s, and I found Image Makers: Sixty Years of Hollywood Glamour [written by Paul Trent and designed by Richard Lawton, 1972]. I looked through Image Makers because my face, to me, was a weird face with big fat cheeks, and I didn’t even know how to make that look good. So I went through history, I went looking for fat cheeks, right? I noticed that in the ’20s, there were people with these round faces, and I started to look at the makeup. Because what I was doing in ’85 and ’84—and even parts of ’83—was working with this wonderful artist, Patrick Lucas, who, if you said to him, ‘I have this check shirt on, but could you do checks on my eyelids?’ He’d just look at me, and he’d go, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Or, ‘Could you try this?’ And he’d go, “Oh yeah, I could definitely do that.” And he was so creative, and there was so much color.”
On her obsession with tulle …
“Even when my clothes didn’t have color, I would add some tulle. And a lot of it. I was inspired by the displays that Biff Chandler was putting up in Screaming Mimi’s, because I worked there. If I was going on stage, and it wasn’t colorful, my hair just wasn’t big enough, I would freaking tie the tulle on my head like Esther, the mannequin that was in the store who looked so fabulous and inspiring.”
