Margaret Merten interview with Dr Gene Sherman

MM: How would you describe your sense of style?
GS: Structural with an emphasis on form, shape and line as opposed to an emphasis on colour. Monochromatic: black, sometimes grey, very occasionally olive green, but largely black with the focus on structure and shape and sculptural forms. I’ve got a very specific take on that aesthetic because I’ve collected the work of only three Japanese designers. For twenty years I’ve stuck to three specific designers. So I guess it is eccentric to an extent. I don’t know how to describe it in one sentence.

MM: I think you’ve described it beautifully. Who are the three designers? Is it Issey Miyake?

GS: Yes, and Yohji Yamamoto and Comme de Garçons - that’s the name, the trade name of the company created by Rei Kawakubo. When I started the collection it was over twenty years ago and I donated the collection to the Powerhouse Museum at the beginning of this year. The collection would have then been twenty-two years old. When I started, only Miyake was well known.  I think the others were known too but Miyake was really, to some extent, famous - not as famous as he is today but he was already famous, whereas the other two were relatively unknown, especially Rei Kawakubo, in Australia she was not really known at all.

MM:  I’ve got two questions to follow up on some things you’ve said. The first one is Where did your sense of style develop?  You obviously have, or have developed, a very singular vision.  I wonder where that came from?

GS:  Well, I’ve always had an interest in aesthetics.  With Sherman Galleries (the development of which ran parallel with the development of this collection), the aesthetic response meshed with an intellectual response and meshed again with an emotional response. So there were three levels of responses I felt needed to be in place when I agreed to show the work of a particular artist or when we acquired work for our personal collection. When it came to fashion, I applied at least two, and sometimes all three, of those criteria. The response was aesthetic primarily and also intellectual.  The look had to be right. However, I’m interested in the ideas behind fashion, in the social periods, in the reasons why certain fashions are taken up - in the difference say between early 20th century fashion, the flapper era and late 19th century, and the socio-economic reasons that led to those developments. And then finally the emotional response, does one feel good in it? So, it is not very different from my response to art, to showing art in the gallery and to collecting art. I applied the same set of criteria to my dressing and I photographed the fashion as I archived it. I had a wearing wardrobe - I still do - of twenty things, roughly, and an archived wardrobe of work that I photographed, documented and stored.

MM: Are these the pieces that you gave to the Powerhouse Museum?

GS:  Yes.

MM: Was it hard to part with them? 

GS: I don’t think so, because there was an end-of-an-era feel about my life (the end of one era and the beginning of another) so the gift to the Powerhouse Museum echoed the transformations. The gallery as a commercial entity closed, as you know, at the end of last year. We moved house from Paddington to Woollahra, not a huge move but nevertheless we had been in Paddington for fifteen years. I felt that that particular era had come to an end. I had, in a way, anticipated Asia becoming a major force aesthetically in terms of the art world. I’ve been on 40 trips to Japan in the last 21 years, taking shows there and bringing exhibitions to Australia. I’ve been to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea many times. All of that seemed part of that era, and once that era came to an end from the commercial side and the gallery had reached a kind of circular motion that came back - not so much to the point of departure but at least had rounded off that period of time - the collection fitted into that circularity so it felt like a very good moment to donate the pieces. And we were moving house. Instead of moving the archived garments to the new house I moved more than 60 boxed pieces to the Powerhouse.  It just seemed a logical trajectory in a way.

MM: Have there been any major influences on or inspirations on your sense of style over the years? A particular era perhaps?

GS:  What attracted me to these designers was the de-glamorised, de-sexualised attitude to fashion, instead of that kind of pretty-pretty look or the defiant Vivienne Westwood  ‘to hell with the world’ look, or the glamorised, film star ‘look at me’ look. I didn’t know who these designers were when I stumbled across them initially – my response was based not on their fame but on how the work communicated itself to me, how the fashion communicated. It felt very much cutting edge. It felt pioneering. I’ve always been deeply interested in textiles and they were revolutionary textile creators. Miyake particularly created a world of textiles that didn’t exist before. He was an absolute innovator and there have been many disciples from the ‘Pleats Please’ experimentations to the weaving in of metallic fibres, to the non-crushable practical side to his fabrics where you can tie things into knots, pop them into a suitcase, untie them at the other end and they spring back into exactly the same shape as they were originally. Most of his pieces, you can just fold, roll, tie, scrunch or press into a corner of a suitcase and they re-emerge as they started. No need for hotel irons or pressing services. They are not high maintenance clothes at all. This fashion meshed with the working woman of the modern world, as opposed to the high maintenance woman who was an expensive adornment to a high profile man.  So consciously and subconsciously that whole notion appealed to me. You could pack a suitcase in 5 minutes, which I always do, because everything goes with everything, given the monochromatic palette. You don’t need an army of helpers and acres of time in order to get ready.

MM: It sounds to me that the thing that appealed to you was the intellectual approach of those designers.

GS:  Yes. It always does. But it’s the look as well, the aesthetic as well. I started the gallery as a sculpture gallery, so the 3 dimensional emphasis on form that accompanies an interest in sculpture, was the same thing that drew me to these clothes. Three dimensional, on the body in this case, and emphasis on form rather than colour.

MM: And also in a way, beautiful and practical.

GS:  Yes.

MM: Do you have a favourite piece of clothing?  Was there one piece that you owned or still own that you absolutely love?

GS:  Yes, I have had a number over the years, but there’s one that I’ve still got that I rarely wear because it isn’t hugely practical. It’s a Yohji Yamamoto hoop skirt. I own a number of hoop skirts and I’ve actually shown a series of them in an exhibition at Object Galleries when the gallery was still in Customs House. About eight of us were allocated a small room to curate. I selected fashion, although I did include one or two works on the wall. The other participants were architects or furniture designers and each group or individual created their own space. It was a wonderful exhibition I had these huge bright red standing cones made for the show, over which the hoops hung. I have one of the cones that I keep in our bedroom at home, with about four or five hoop skirts hanging over it. The skirt that is my favourite is the Yohji hoop skirt that sits round the bottom of the cone. It wraps round the body and fastens at the waist and the hoop is so wide and fluctuates in a way that you can’t sit down in a normal seat. I can’t go, say, to the theatre or the opera in it. I can only wear it if I have a standing event. It’s quite dramatic. It’s a wonderful skirt. I actually saw a version of it in dress form at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, quite a while after I bought it. Mine’s a skirt and I wear it with an unadorned top.

 

MM: I love the fact that your most favourite piece is the most impractical. Isn’t that a lovely balance to have?

GS:  Yes, but I still wear it and everything that I’ve bought, I bought to wear.  Some people collect fashion to have rather than wear. Sometimes they don’t focus on the wearing side.

MM: You’re not interested in having something just as a museum dust collector then?

GS:  No, everything I buy is to wear, therefore the collection is skewed in a way,– it is an idiosyncratic collection – the Powerhouse is not getting the full range of pieces by these three designers - well it would never get the full range because obviously I didn’t buy everything - but the range is in many ways not complete. I would often buy a skirt without the related top because I prefer to wear a skirt with very plain  tops - long sleeved or short sleeved in the summer, as opposed to elaborate tops or dresses. I found the tops too much. It was the sculptural form below the waist or from the waist down that interested me. There must be about eight hoop skirts of which maybe 4 or 5 found their way into the Powerhouse collection. The others are still in my wearing wardrobe.

MM: Do you have a favourite piece of jewellery?

GS:  The jewellery doesn’t fit into the kind of framework described here because my selected designer-artists didn’t make jewellery. But I have a wonderful collection of contemporary jewellery, mostly Australian, but not all, that I bought over the same period of time. Probably my favourite one at the moment is a piece by a young Australian called Sean O’Connell and I have two versions of the same piece, which happened accidentally. He made the first version out of stainless steel and silver with ball bearings, just ordinary ball bearings that were supposed to travel in circular channels. The channels were fractionally too big and the ball bearings kept falling out. Wherever I went I heard clunk, I was like Hansel and Gretel in the forest with a little stream of ball bearings behind me. I called him and he said he would make me another with narrower channels and a spiral greater in scale. I paid for both and I kept the other one. So those are my favourite pieces. I wear the smaller one daily and the other one for more special occasions. I wear all my things all the time, bar a few really exaggerated pieces, like the Yohji skirt. But I don’t really distinguish between day and night wear. There’s no need to, not with these clothes.

MM: What’s the most outrageous or expensive item that you’ve ever bought in terms of fashion, that you have to breathe into a paper bag because it’s so expensive…?

GS:  You know, these clothes at the beginning were not expensive at all because they were clothes made in Japan by up-and-coming designers. I suppose they were expensive in relation to absolutely run-of-the-mill clothes, but in relation to European designers they weren’t expensive at all. They have become more expensive now because these designers have long been famous and they have stores in London, Paris and New York, with serious overheads. Years and years ago, maybe in the late 80s, I bought a contemporary kimono made out of silk, reversible, three-quarter length, which I have worn for 18 years. I’ve worn it every winter and I still wear it. I can wear it during the day and at night. It looks good at the opera.

MM: Is it coloured?

GS: No, it’s black. But you can wear it either side and it’s beautiful. It’s the shape of a kimono but it’s a contemporary version. This cost about US$4000 at the time. That was very expensive in the late 80’s and clearly still today.

MM: But once you do the cost per wear ratio...

GS:  Yes. Well honestly, I haven’t taken it off. When I came to consider if there was anything in the wearing wardrobe that I could add to the donated archival wardrobe, I didn’t consider this, because I wear it all the time. So it’s not about to disappear soon. My policy was if I acquired something, I retired something.

MM: You are very disciplined.

GS:  Oh, yes.  Well, it just made sense, because otherwise I couldn’t have kept the wearing wardrobe to twenty.

MM: What advice would you give to women who are seeking their own sense of style in a world that has become perhaps very homogenised.

GS:  I think you need to have a good sense of yourself, to come to terms with who you are both in terms of your body shape, your personality and your interests and that will automatically lead you into the clothes that suit you. You should never ever buy anything that doesn’t feel 100% right in the store.  Don’t be advised or guided by a shop assistant, generally, unless you find someone you really trust, because they clearly have vested interests in selling you something. You need to be firm in your convictions.  Red, for example doesn’t suit me. I occasionally wear colours, but red shouts at me. Even if I find the most divine garment in the right shape by the right designer that fits me like a glove - a real bargain and it’s red - I won’t do it, because I know that its not me and that ultimately I won’t wear it. I think a lot of people have things in their wardrobe which they have been talked into or they’ve talked themselves into thinking that ‘it’s almost right’. They then have these cluttered wardrobes of unworn things.

MM: So it’s about making a realistic appraisal of body and shape and the colours that suit.

GS:  Yes, if you can, just be realistic about yourself. I put the Japanese clothes on and they never have to be altered. Be true to yourself and don’t deviate, unless you want a wardrobe that’s very cluttered. You go to it and you think ‘what will I wear’ and you have a choice of 100 things, many of which aren’t right, and you end up totally confused. It takes you too long to get dressed and you dither. Less is more, really. Never walk out of a shop if you don’t feel right, just because you feel bound to buy something because you feel a sense of obligation, because you have been there for ages and the salesperson has a sense of entitlement, ‘I’ve spent a long time with you and I hope you are not going to leave here without making it worth my while’ attitude. You have to be careful. There’s an interaction there, with expectations on either side and you have to remember that you are the customer. It’s your money. They don’t have to live with the choices you make. Sometimes people might say ‘Well, if you just lose a little weight, it’s only a little too tight for you.’ Don’t buy in anticipation of future pleasure, It’s got to be right there and then.  Avoid going home hoping it will fit you at some later date.

MM: Thank you so much. I could talk to you a lot longer about this, it’s really very thoughtful and interesting

GS:  I don’t see fashion as a kind of ‘shop til you drop’ exercise.  It can be a serious focus on aesthetics linked with the times in which we live and if you consider it like that, it’s stimulating - like architecture, which defines your own exterior space. Fashion defines your body, it defines to an extent the way you are perceived by others and the way you interact with others. It has a whole set of resonances that go beyond spending your money for something sexy or pretty.

MM: Thank you so much.

At the time of the interview Margaret Merten was Associate Editor at Harper’s BAZAAR.

Interview courtesy of Harper’s BAZAAR, Australia.

Photos: Dr Gene Sherman by James Mills. Commissioned by Harper’s BAZAAR Australia.

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