The Art of Storytelling with Nian Fish

Nian Fish knows what you’re wearing.

As a stylist, filmmaker, producer, and creative force behind the fashion industry for the last 30 years, she’s directed runway shows for the biggest names in fashion in the United States and Europe including Clavin Klein, Anna Sui, Marc Jacobs, Chloe, and Gucci. In between producing films for the Council of Fashion Designers of America and model casting in Milan, Fish provided Theme with her insight on the fashion industry and the inspiration behind her tireless creative energy.

Theme: You’ve been in New York for a while. Were you born here?
Nian Fish: I was born in Kobe, Japan. My mother is half-Japanese and half-Chinese, and my father is an American solider. I was an army brat and lived all over the world—Japan, Germany, Hawaii, Norway, before settling in America. My mother and father split up when I was nine years old, and my mother and I moved to New York City.

My mother was sewing in a sweatshop in Chinatown, doing piecework, and she also made costume jewelry. I remember going to the shop in Chinatown [where] she was known as “Operator Number 19,” and I remember the smell of the white rice. As a nine year old I would watch her do the sewing and help her string necklaces. I think those two things sparked a very, very subconscious knowledge of fashion in me.

How did you get into producing fashion shows?
Actually, a really important part of how I became a producer came when I was 10 years old. I lived on Broome Street on the Lower East Side, and I used to produce these variety shows with all the talented kids in the neighborhood—I would take the Chinese violinist, the Puerto Rican dancer, the Japanese flutist, the Jewish storyteller—and I would put them together in these shows and charge twenty-five cents. I did them in the lobby of my tenement. And then they got to be so big that when I was about 11, I did them in Forsyth Park, near Allen Street, on this cement stage.

I think it’s really funny how these things come to pass; I never thought I’d be a producer in the fashion business, but it was a part of my background.

Tell us what you do now.
I have several different careers, but I’m the Creative Consultant for KCD. What I do in that role is work directly with designers to create their fashion shows, and sometimes events, like a perfume launch or a 40th anniversary of such-and-such.

What I do for the fashion shows is put the entire team together. The stylist, and the hair and the makeup and the fashion team, and the set designer—I’ve occasionally done that myself—and the music. Fashion shows are very much like doing a theater piece or a film, where you’re putting the most talented people together.

KCD has pretty much changed the world of fashion show production.
KCD has a system for doing shows that everybody now follows—it’s a methodology.

How were fashion shows done prior to KCD?
Fashion shows before were done in-house; what KCD did is give the client a service, taking all of that production off of their hands so they could focus purely on design. KCD took over responsibility for making the show great by putting the right team together. Stylists subsequently started becoming more and more important, I think starting around 1990. Before that, the designers and the design team would do all of that themselves, and the PR person would do the casting. 

KCD started developing stylists and casting directors to do shows. We started cultivating the top hair and makeup people, and as they did more and more shows, they got more and more experience. There was a real development of all of these really talented people who make a show happen.

Also, fashion was not global [back then] in the same way that it is now. We worked in New York; Milan had their thing; Paris had their thing. Now we work all over the world.

We’ve heard that before each girl goes out on the catwalk, you’d give them a little pep talk.
My daughter modeled, so I’m very compassionate about these young women. Some of them look absolutely terrified when they’re about to go out there in front of a thousand people and the cameras and everything. And they’re so young, they’re 16, 17, some of them 15.  We’re trying not to do the 15 year olds anymore, they’re just so young.

I made it a point to get to know them, and I’d really try to say the thing that would make them feel amazing when they walked out. You know, if a girl’s mother was in the audience I would say “Just look for your mom, just go out there and show it to your mom,” right before they’d walk out. Guido the hairdresser was known to make fun of me; he’d sit there and do a whole parody of my little backstage speech.

Can you tell us about your work with the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) Health Initiative?
I’d read that one out of three American women have some form of an eating disorder—a very sad part of our culture right now. There was a trend in the last five years of having very thin, young Eastern Bloc models, and they were starving them at fourteen years old. When these 14 year olds become 17 and 18, a lot them develop eating disorders to maintain that weight. And that was what we were putting forth on the runway. Everybody really liked that size zero look, and we all started drinking the Kool-Aid.

I started telling the agents about these girls one-on-one, saying “This girl has an issue.” The CFDA found out about it and started an awareness campaign, backed up by guidelines I pretty much wrote, for the American fashion industry to follow.

What are the guidelines?
Trying not to use girls under 16, with rare exceptions, such as if they have their mother and father around. To get girls help instead of gossiping about them when we know they have a problem. And to not use girls that are extremely skinny, because those are the girls that the rest of the population wants to look like.

Thin models are so ingrained in our society; that has to be a challenging trend to try to beat.
Models are always gonna be thin—we don’t live in the time of the Rubenesque figure. Right now the aesthetic is thin. But you can be thin and healthy. It’s absolutely doable, so we try to educate them on that.

Where do you think the fashion industry is headed, and what part do you want to play in it?
Human beings—we’re tribes, and I think that the way you dress defines what tribe you belong to. And there’s fun in that. I would love to see fashion become more self-expressive. For me in the ’60s, fashion really expressed who you were; there was so much freedom. Now we’ve become a really repressed culture, and I think it really shows in what we wear—I think we all want to look like each other instead of expressing who we are. [It used to be that] if you’re a hippie, you wear your bohemian sandals and your earrings and you’re not afraid that people are gonna make fun of you; but now we’ve created this whole thing about looking good. And if you commit your life to looking good, you’re never going to have freedom, because that’s the outside looking in. I would like us to be on the inside looking out.

I know fashion is a serious business; I just think people should lighten up about it. I would like to see more fun in it, and I’d like to be a part of making that happen.

A side of you that a lot of people don’t know about is your filmmaking.
I’m a film director and a film producer; I’ve done easily 60 short fashion films. In New York, in 1959, there was a show called “Million Dollar Movie” that ran movies twenty-four-seven, and I couldn’t wait to get home to see it. Doing my homework in half an hour so I could watch five, six movies back to back. I was just addicted. 

It got filed away into my subconscious and when I started to do fashion film, it all came together; I remembered how much I loved film as a medium to tell a story, and I realized that my fashion show production was perfect for film production. It was very much the same, the whole putting the team together.

Out of that came this brainstorm—I always wanted to write a book about my mother and my father. Right now [biracial couples] are a dime a dozen, but when I was growing up, it was very rare; I’m sure everyone’s parents have a story, but my parents really have a story. My mother was very wealthy, and my father was very poor, and they cut her off from the family wealth and she really gave up a lot to marry him. What a woman would give up for love...you don’t hear that much anymore.

So will you be moving away from fashion production and investing more time in film production?
I do really want to focus on film. If you look at people with dual careers—look at Karl Lagerfeld, he’s a photographer and a designer, two very different careers, and they feed each other. I see [film and fashion] feeding each other. Fashion is such an amazing industry for filmmakers. I think filmmakers have a little bit of a writer’s mind and the type of people in the fashion industry is stimulating.

As I get older, I actually find myself having more capacity. People think that when you get older you’re on the road to retirement, but look at Richard Avedon and Georgia O’Keefe—Richard Avedon died on assignment, shooting his last project, and Georgia O’Keefe died painting in the desert. They’re role models.

It’s my job to keep things inspiring for me, not the other way around.