* uN NOUvEAU iDEAL by fILEP mOTWARY

I knew how RobB Young LOOked like thanks to Diane Pernet AND through magazines that he has worked for ,either as a columnist or stylist: ID, SLEAZENATION, V MAN, Nylon.....The list is quite long . We finally met  while attending the last Hellenic Fashion week and watched some shows together. I thought it would be nice to do an interview for you my iDEALS. While reading the following, you will know many things about himself, personal and career wise. 

FilepMOTWARY: So Robb, it's almost two weeks after you attended the Athenian Fashion Week and returned to London. What is the "taste left in your mouth"? RobbYoung: Well, I'd be lying if I said I'd been given a full gourmet meal but there were a few highlights to pique my taste buds.  As I always say, the most important aspect of these fledgling fashion weeks isn't really the fashion itself but the fact that the organised fashion industry has spread its tentacles out to another attractive part of the world.  So young (and old) talented Greeks with a statement to make or with great fashion product to show have a platform to do it.  With the right links and nurturing, over time, Athens Collections could become a good stepping stone for a future generation of Hellenic fashion maniacs.  The only thing that may be lacking is the education component - excellent fashion, art and technical schools.  I'm only guessing but that and a local fashion industry go hand in hand so I hope there are some great fashion programmes out there around the country to supplement the event itself... fM:What is your personal history with Fashion? Share with us the highlights of your career so far..rY:Well, my epiphany, so to speak, was when I went for an interview at the United Nations in New York.  It was to be my first internship out of school.  Until then I had been the very eager and naive black sheep in all my lectures at university.  All my classmates were already buttoning up suffocating suits and grooming themselves like young corporate wannabees but there  I was going through a rave phase - wearing some twisted version of that awful look - sky-high stripey platforms and enough jewellery to sink the Titanic.  I thought to myself, it's my GPA (grade point average), brains, ingenuity and determination that would get me where I wanted in some NGO or as some economic analysist for the World Bank.  Without an ugly suit.  After all, if the UN's Ghanaian contingency could dress in all those bright prints with headdresses and jingle-jangle gold jewellery, well, so could I.  Right?  Wrong of course.

 So I strode through the Midtown UN building's security checks (a preview to my future career at airports pissing off just about every security personnel around the globe from Heathrow to Narita to Charles de Gaulle) and gathered up my accessory mess at the other end.  But by the time I got to the main elevators, my confidence had started to deflate like a punctured mylar balloon.  I just stood there awaiting my moment of truth in the world's centre of governance surrounded by its cherished diplomatic community... looking like a total prat and feeling, for the first time ever, completely overdressed.  Or underdressed... or more to the point, wrongly dressed. The interview went very well despite my gruesome look and I'd been given a placement in the coming summer but I couldn't face the inevitability of the dress code.  After a crisis of about a week feeling totally bewildered about where my top-of-the-class honours in political economy would take me dressed like I do... I thought.  OK, if the trouble is not being able to make a compromise about my bloody clothes than maybe I ought to switch to a job IN clothes.  And here I am a decade on working in fashion...

 fM:What are the projects you are involved in about, for the next six months? rY:Well, besides my writing assignments for a bunch of newspapers and magazines, I'll mostly be occupied by prep work for the Swiss Textiles Award.  It's much later in the year but I have to decide on the group of expert panelists, jury members and come up with a strong guest list long before then.  What else... After I get back from Mumbai and Moscow, I've promised myself to sort out a few things on the home front so if I can get out of going to Milan & Paris men's shows to have such much needed time in London, I definitely will.  I may go to South Africa though.  Of course I'm forever monitoring the designers that I oversee for Diptrics, the distributor in Japan where I'm brand manager.  The big focus this summer is, for the first time in AGES, something unrelated to work. The only friend I retained (and my best friend during my teenage years) from high school, Eboni, is coming to Oxford to do a certificate there so she and I will be in the same country for an entire month!  I'm really excited to be able to spend August with her after so many years missing each other...  And I have to visit my best friend in New York, Anisha.  I've been neglecting my friends the past couple of years and it really has to cease.

fM: How important is the article you write on Fashion in THE FINANCIAL TIMES? Do you think it clears up the picture in the head of somebody who has not a real opinion about fashion? rY: Personally, I'm chuffed that I can finally explore some big reality issues in fashion.  And all these years watching mega-talented young designer friends  struggle because they're rubbish apart from the designing itself... The more I understand the business perspective, the better I can hopefully advise them at some point.  There's nothing worse than seeing amazing talents die simply because they're out of touch with the way the industry works.  And I feel like I've finally come full circle in myself too - bringing my academic background to my passion.  For so long I was wondering if my studies had been in vain.  Now I can make some use of that era (well, whatever hasn't oozed out of my brain in the past decade!) in my fashion career. fM: What makes a designer "iDEAL" for you? Who is that designer for you nowadays? rY: I'm still a purist at heart.  But I'm also super pragmatic on another level.  Sustainable fashion design relies on commerce.  That's a fact.  We're in another era now.  Fashion as art in the days of couture is such a rarity now.  If you out price 99.99% of the world's potential clients with even the most immaculate of frocks, you'd better be damn sure you have access to and the loyalty of that remaining 0.01%.  Likewise, if you're designing some of the most extravagant avant-garde creations that will put off practically the whole word apart from the chosen few...then you'd better be a close business associate to those chosen few - and be sure they have the means to buy it too.  There will always be a few cult designers who strike a chord with just enough private clients to keep themselves afloat, and maybe in some very rare cases even prosper.  And I salute them in the biggest way possible.  But just about everyone else has to find a way to apply their ideas to a product that will sell some volumes.  Look at it however you want, but I think my IDEAL designer is someone who can push me over the edge with their pure ideas and simultaneously offer 2 or 3 really attractive versions with the spirit of the pure idea.  Let us choose how daring we feel on any shopping occasion - either aesthetic wise or with our wallets. I hate to see spectacular talent die for lack of a little business acumen or the ability to re-interpret their ideas so writing about fashion for a financial publication is helping to inform me to help inform them, or at least I hope...

fM :Do you dream of the future? rY:Of course.  My whole life since as early as I can remember has been based on the future.  I'm guilty of being a bit of a hedonist and live pretty spectacularly in the moment too but when it comes to the big questions, I'm all about achieving something in the future.  A lot of friends have been gently reminding me to 'stop and smell the roses' recently... well, I will eventually but right now I'm all about ploughing ahead. fM: Where you always a vegetarian or is it a way of life you chose at a point in your life /and why? rY: I became vegetarian as soon as I left my parents' house, age 17.  So that's nearly 14 years ago now.  As soon as I got to uni, I met Anisha and she'd been a vegetarian since junior high school.  She became my other half instantly and it just happened extremely naturally and suddenly that I became a strict veggie, surrounded by her.  My darkest veggie years are probably whilst I lived in Tokyo.  There's nothing you can buy on the street or prepared  that doesn't have at least fish stock in it there without going to a full-course posh restaurant.... Even the soy sauce served is often disguised as "dashi" with fishy bonito extract which I can smell a mile away.  So I was carrying around my own mini container of soy sauce, with a miserable palette for a few years a eating plastic tubes of tofu on the street.  Or kilos of chocolate.  Life's too fast there to try to find the rare veggie meals.  I'm not some animal rights freak and don't care about animal welfare more than the average Joe but I certainly can't stomach the idea of consuming flesh.  Utterly gross.  Though I do have fond memories of the worst kinds of meat as a five year old, plundering mum's fried bacon and sausage for breakfast as a kid.  Bizarre!

fM:List the 20 most influential things in your life from : people, films, songs, books, destinations, website links ...rY:Oh, this is impossible to do in one go.  It's the kind of thing I'd like to mull over for a couple years but here goes a  five minute attempt...- My Welsh-Canadian-American mam-gu (grandmother), Alice - folk farm lady living a puritanical 19th century existence in the 20th century for six decades...  Until she completeley re-invented herself at age 65 when her husband died  to become a jetset pilgrim of the Virgin Mary's apparitions and has seen the world inside-out. She hasn't changed a bit actually.  God bless her.  She was my lifeline as a young boy. - Anisha Kansal - my best friend who I hardly see these years.  Shame on me.  I'm not keen on admitting things like this, but the woman has moulded me musically.- Depeche Mode was maybe the only pre-Anisha band in my life in any big way apart from the hideous 80s and 90s pop artists I still adore.  When I hear Strangelove or Behind the Wheel, I feel complete. - Unfortunately, I still list Mr.-tattoos-on-my-wrist here somewhere probably... thank god I now know what kind of relationship I never want again.  And thank god humans are so fucking resilient.  - On that note, my ex Wandson has taught me that angels really live.- I'm not big on literature (shame shame, I know...) but I think the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood really touches some part of my own imagination...- That five second clip of the CBC's evening news when they showed a big fat naff wedding dress come out of a Paris couture show. 

 I was probably five years old and utterly gob smacked - probably my first fashion epiphany. - As far as how my personal aesthetic has developed, I'd say that when I discovered the Cubist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, I found somebody who shared at least a bit of my same soul. - And I'm not a religious reader of magazines by any means, but I do think that my early years in London pouring over iD magazine and 7-days-a-week nightclubbing must have taken its course. - Birds of paradise like Diane Pernet, Isabella Blow & Anna Piaggi, and a few of the lesser flock.  - Countless glorious nights out on the dancefloor with me, myself, the beats and I.  That first adventure at Screamers with Anisha hooked me for life.- Life in London, Tokyo & New York.  To finally putting down roots in London.  And many happy returns to Sao Paulo.- You'll have to come back to me another time for more...fM: Yeah, I will. Now Please Share with us a romantic childhood memory, or better, the person you first fell in love with. I am sure you remember this one rY: I won't go into the real first love as his name's tattooed as a battle scar for the world to see.  But my first childhood love, in hindsight, is probably a boy who I'll refrain from naming.  His mum was German and his dad was black American and he was very clever.  We had a couple classes together in junior high schol.  I thought he was my "best friend" (my real "best friends" were all girls of course) before I had the clarity of realising I fancied the poor soul.  But luckily before it came to anything, like most of my friends throughout school, he vanished once day since he was stationed at the military installation near my town.  The army always moved them on to another base somewhere in the world without much warning... fM:Do you like Un nouveau Ideal? Is there something you would like to wish for my blog? rY:Goodness me.  I don't know yet.  I'll tell you when I have a spare minute--- maybe in a few months.  Ugh!!

PS" Reproduction of this interview is not permitted without my written "ok"