"We’re people, we want to look at each other."
Brushwork figures splashed across loose paper. Pots of coloured water. Anglepoise lamps. The sound of Brooklyn unfurling outside a window. This space is where a venerated illustrator plies his trade. Richard Haines has been in fashion for over fifty years now. He moved to the ragged Technicolor of 1970s New York after escaping the cloying monochrome of suburban Virginia, and never went back. After a career designing for the likes of J.Crew and Calvin Klein in the '80s and '90s came to an end, he began What I Saw Today, a blog capturing the people and moments of every day life in a gentle, expressive style. Surfing the wave of internet 1.0, the blog blew up, bringing Richard back to the attention of the fashion world. He now captures runway shows, chronicles and feeds couture culture, and has worked with the likes of Criterion, The New York Times, Apple, Vogue, The Observer, Balenciaga and GQ.
You’ve had an amazing trajectory. Moving from Virginia to New York to become an illustrator before becoming a fashion designer. It would be great to get a sense of the world you came from. What was life like back then?
Oh my gosh. I grew up on military bases. My father was in the Navy, so everyone around us was in the Navy too. That was the world. Even at four and five, I knew it was incredibly stifling. It was the fifties, so it was this idealised, very gendered, rigidly masculine and feminine world, and that was not me. It still isn’t, and it never will be. So there was always this sense of being on the outside.
I will say there would be moments of relief. When I was a teenager we moved to Iceland. There was a NATO base there where my father was stationed. It was a reprieve from that deadly suburban Americana. It was so completely different to everything I had known. That really fed me.
How old were you when you went to Iceland?
I think I was twelve, thirteen. Then we moved back to the US into the most bland suburb of Northern Virginia, which is part of Washington, DC. I just remember going to school — and the name was Robert E. Lee, which, you know … It’s so American; it’s so Jim Crow. They’ve since changed the name but it says a lot about what it was like. There was something like 1,100 white kids and I think maybe two of them were repressed homosexuals, and there was no place for them to go. I made a decision as a freshman in high school that the only way to get through this was to focus on my art. I couldn’t conform. Everyone wore the same thing. Actually, the style wasn’t that bad now I think about it! Chinos and navy sweaters, windbreakers, loafers. When they’re fourteen or fifteen, people wear the same thing.
Then you made the move to New York. How did life open up for you there?
Well, when I moved to New York in the mid-seventies, it was perfect because you could be fearless. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, that’s going to be dangerous.” The city was basically bankrupt. The first summer I was there, there was a headline in the New York Post about President Ford telling New York to drop dead, because New York was trying to get money from the federal government. And that was basically the end of it. It was bombed out. There were fires everywhere. There was no trash pick-up. To a twenty-four-year-old, it was heaven. I was running around, going to clubs, being incredibly crazy. I immediately found my tribe. The liberation of being around people who won’t judge you is a really powerful, heady thing.
Tell us about your early illustration experiences. How did it go on to shape the design career that would follow, working for major brands and houses?
I remember getting a box of crayons when I was young. It was almost like a drug. The power of it. Every kid has a box of Crayola, but it was like an out-of-body experience for me, a way of getting out of this very drab, grey environment I was in, literally a contrast to the deadness around me. Opening up a box of crayons, it was like beams of colour and light would come out. That was my relief from the time I could hold a pencil. So I was always drawing. Later I drew fashion; I drew people, much to my parents’ chagrin, but that’s what I wanted to do. It led to me going to school for graphic arts. Then I moved to New York thinking I would be an illustrator, but I had never formally studied it. I didn’t know how to put a portfolio together, and in the seventies, things were really switching to photography. Illustration was kind of on the way down. I gave that up fast, and started getting jobs designing.
What was it like being in those 20th Century design studios? It must have been so different working in fashion in a pre-digital world.
In early fashion design, we weren’t in front of a terminal all day. We were going to Paris to shop for fabric. That’s basically what it was like. The budgets back then were enormous. There was no online. We started sending faxes of designs in the early eighties, but before that everything was done by hand. In my first job, I was sent to the fabric shows in Paris twice a year. It was literally hands-on. You shop for fabrics, you sketch, you work with a pattern maker, and you produce the show. It was hands-on because it was so small. I can’t imagine what it’s like now. It’s as much of a contrast as the suburbs of Virginia are to New York City.
My first really big job was with a company called Perry Ellis. Back then, the early-to-mid eighties, they were a powerhouse, on a par with Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. We had a design floor in this big building in Midtown, and in the studios there must have been eight designers: men’s, women’s, accessories, shoes. The other side of the floor was a sample room with maybe three pattern makers and fifteen sewers. The overhead of that is unthinkable. You’d sketch something out, go back and work with a pattern maker. They would do a muslin. From there came a sample.
To take this into your illustration style as it is now. It’s very easy to take photographs at fashion shows, and a lot of people do, but you illustrate them in this beautifully expressive way. You capture real life there. What do your drawings capture that perhaps photography can’t?
People ask me this all the time, and I always say I’m not competing. An illustration is not competing with photography. They’re two completely different things. There is some beautiful photography and I don’t want to say it’s less than what I do. I’m capturing my emotion of that moment. And maybe the photographer is too. I’m basically bringing seventy-four years of my observations and my loves and my inspiration, and all of that gets packed in.
Pre-photography, illustration was the only fashion expression, wasn't it. You kind of revived it when you took illustration into a blog that blew up. How did that come about?
Later I was at a point in my mid-fifties. I had gotten a divorce, I was really broke; I had a young kid. No one would hire me for anything. No one would hire me to work on the sales floor, no one. Other than being a creative director, which after 2008 was kind of irrelevant because the budgets had changed so much. I started drawing again because I really didn’t know what else to do. It just felt so good. It was this relief and this joy. It helped me rethink the city, because all of a sudden, I was looking at people again as potential drawings. I was looking at the way they move, what they wear, their line. Everything was reborn. It was like a rebirth.
Then a friend said, “You know, you should start a blog.” I had no idea. I knew blogs were happening, but it was a new world for me and so I started one called What I Saw Today, just drawing people on the street. I think because it was such a ‘blog moment’, few illustrators were doing it. And I work really quickly, so I could post constantly.
I guess your blog came out in was those early internet days when sites weren’t so algorithmically or subscription controlled. No one had got hold of the internet yet. The major gatekeeping had been hacked; people could get an audience quick. That must have been liberating, finding you could get your voice out there again.
It really was. When I started What I Saw Today, blogs were for people who wanted to be there. It was conversational, people would chat. I remember looking at the data for the first six months. I had viewers from New York, and then there were people in like Seoul, and I thought, what the fuck? How is this happening? This is wild. It was really thrilling to know that what I was doing could reach so many people. To me, not growing up with that kind connectivity, everything was a revelation, and I loved it.
How has your style developed? Had you been drawing in the background the whole time? Because obviously you said you started out drawing, then went into design, and then…
It’s interesting. Recently I was staying in a friend’s apartment in Paris, and I have a piece of lavender paper and that’s where I’m mixing my colours to paint. So I just thought, well, I’ll draw faces and bodies on these blobs of color, because the blobs are so beautiful. I posted some of them this morning. My style has become something where I keep breaking things down, in terms of not having detail and bringing the viewer in by engaging with them. And so these blobs of colour are another breakdown of obvious systems and shapes, but I think it’s kind of engaging with people in a new way, which is really exciting. So it’s always changing.
Yeah, people don’t need truth spelling out for them, do they?
People don’t need it spelling out. When I was younger, I was very literal. I had no real editing process. I call it my people-pleasing era. I was doing things because I wanted people to like them, and that is not the right reason to do anything. So they were really shitty drawings. They were stiff and uninteresting and flat. I had to go through this complete, cathartic process to get to the blob with a leg coming out of it.
What makes a good subject? What makes a person stand out enough to want to draw them?
I think so much of what attracts me is attitude, the way people stand, the way people interact. It’s one reason why I’ve been going to Paris in the spring and summer. The expression “eye candy” is really overused, but people are basically living on the street. Everything happens on the street. Parties pour out onto the street. The cafés are open. It’s just thousands of people connecting, and that to me is the most extraordinary thing.
When I got there this summer it was the peak of a heat wave. All these kids were jumping in the canal and swimming. I had never seen Paris that energised, and obviously erotic. It’s always erotic in a very Parisian way, but there was a sensuality and a kind of joy. I was trying to capture it in drawings and it was happening so fast. They’re diving. It’s seconds in the air before they hit the water. I’m so glad I caught that. The heat got intense but it was a really great time to be there. It was super-charged. It’s Paris, people like getting sweaty and hot. Every day is a wild visual feast.
You’ve been in the fashion industry, creating and documenting it, for so long. What stays consistent about it. What stays timeless?
In menswear, sometimes I look at a picture of myself from when I was sixteen, and I’m wearing Levi’s, a navy blue sweater, a ringer tee and loafers, and it’s like, nothing’s changed. I mean, it all changes, because the cuts are different and the fabrics are different. It’s nuanced. But it’s kind of interesting to see what remains.
In Paris and New York right now, it’s almost like someone gave everyone adidas shorts and a pair of white socks and loafers. I say to myself, wait, this is a real trend. I didn’t think there were such things anymore, but this is trending. Guys are really into this look, and they look great. They’re very simple pieces, but they’re put together in a way that looks preppy, I hate the word. But it's also sexy, because the shorts are shorter. For men, if shorts go up an inch, it starts to feel pretty radical.
When you put two new things together and rework the proportions, you’ve got something totally different. Which is really an endless resource.
Okay, so these next two are about menswear. How do you see the space changing in the next few years or so? We’re not asking for a full-on Nostradamus effort here by the way, but … what do you think comes next?
That’s good, that’s good! I mean, today I’ve gotten onto an algorithm of guys doing fit checks, which is wild. They’re really turning it out, putting their phone, maybe on a ledge and backing up, and showing the shoe, their look. Compare that to when I was a kid in early college, and I wanted a hair dryer. My father was like, “You’re not having a hair dryer.” That was the beginning. The handheld hair dryer was the beginning of the gender breakdown that has caused chaos in Western culture. So when I think of that attitude, to random guys doing fit checks, it’s a huge arc. Now in public forums, guys are saying, “I care.”
Yeah, and that’s okay. There is a sense of narcissism and it being much more widely accepted now thanks to social media. Show your face on a post and you get likes, right? But there’s a happy meeting point in there somewhere that’s actually about expression.
I mean, face it. We’re people, we want to look at each other. In New York there’s really eye contact on the street. People look, and they don’t try to hide it. In Paris it’s a little more subtle. London I’m not as familiar with, but my English friends tell me that no one looks at anyone. But yeah, in New York, people move to be looked at. They didn’t come here to blend into the woodwork. There’s a lot of preening, which I love. Bring it! I’m inspired.
This last part is where we ask you to send some cultural inspiration out into the world, recommending 5 Good Things and the reasons why you chose them.
A restaurant or cafe you like in your city
Odeon. It’s beyond a classic. I was there in the '80s and love it just as much now as I did back then
A film everyone should watch
Blowup. It perfectly captures the hedonism of that moment. And everyone is so beautiful.
A book everyone should read.
Anything by James Baldwin.
A musical album or artist that means something to you.
Early David Bowie.
Where you’d send someone if they were visiting your city or hometown for the first time.
Central Park on a June weekend afternoon.
You can keep up to date with Richard here. He wore our 3001 Overshirt in ultra blue, the 7011 Champ sweatshirt and 5021 Painter pants in coriander.
5 Good Things - Richard Haines - New York City, USA
"We’re people, we want to look at each other."
Brushwork figures splashed across loose paper. Pots of coloured water. Anglepoise lamps. The sound of Brooklyn unfurling outside a window. This space is where a venerated illustrator plies his trade. Richard Haines has been in fashion for over fifty years now. He moved to the ragged Technicolor of 1970s New York after escaping the cloying monochrome of suburban Virginia, and never went back. After a career designing for the likes of J.Crew and Calvin Klein in the '80s and '90s came to an end, he began What I Saw Today, a blog capturing the people and moments of every day life in a gentle, expressive style. Surfing the wave of internet 1.0, the blog blew up, bringing Richard back to the attention of the fashion world. He now captures runway shows, chronicles and feeds couture culture, and has worked with the likes of Criterion, The New York Times, Apple, Vogue, The Observer, Balenciaga and GQ.
You’ve had an amazing trajectory. Moving from Virginia to New York to become an illustrator before becoming a fashion designer. It would be great to get a sense of the world you came from. What was life like back then?
Oh my gosh. I grew up on military bases. My father was in the Navy, so everyone around us was in the Navy too. That was the world. Even at four and five, I knew it was incredibly stifling. It was the fifties, so it was this idealised, very gendered, rigidly masculine and feminine world, and that was not me. It still isn’t, and it never will be. So there was always this sense of being on the outside.
I will say there would be moments of relief. When I was a teenager we moved to Iceland. There was a NATO base there where my father was stationed. It was a reprieve from that deadly suburban Americana. It was so completely different to everything I had known. That really fed me.
How old were you when you went to Iceland?
I think I was twelve, thirteen. Then we moved back to the US into the most bland suburb of Northern Virginia, which is part of Washington, DC. I just remember going to school — and the name was Robert E. Lee, which, you know … It’s so American; it’s so Jim Crow. They’ve since changed the name but it says a lot about what it was like. There was something like 1,100 white kids and I think maybe two of them were repressed homosexuals, and there was no place for them to go. I made a decision as a freshman in high school that the only way to get through this was to focus on my art. I couldn’t conform. Everyone wore the same thing. Actually, the style wasn’t that bad now I think about it! Chinos and navy sweaters, windbreakers, loafers. When they’re fourteen or fifteen, people wear the same thing.
Then you made the move to New York. How did life open up for you there?
Well, when I moved to New York in the mid-seventies, it was perfect because you could be fearless. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, that’s going to be dangerous.” The city was basically bankrupt. The first summer I was there, there was a headline in the New York Post about President Ford telling New York to drop dead, because New York was trying to get money from the federal government. And that was basically the end of it. It was bombed out. There were fires everywhere. There was no trash pick-up. To a twenty-four-year-old, it was heaven. I was running around, going to clubs, being incredibly crazy. I immediately found my tribe. The liberation of being around people who won’t judge you is a really powerful, heady thing.
Tell us about your early illustration experiences. How did it go on to shape the design career that would follow, working for major brands and houses?
I remember getting a box of crayons when I was young. It was almost like a drug. The power of it. Every kid has a box of Crayola, but it was like an out-of-body experience for me, a way of getting out of this very drab, grey environment I was in, literally a contrast to the deadness around me. Opening up a box of crayons, it was like beams of colour and light would come out. That was my relief from the time I could hold a pencil. So I was always drawing. Later I drew fashion; I drew people, much to my parents’ chagrin, but that’s what I wanted to do. It led to me going to school for graphic arts. Then I moved to New York thinking I would be an illustrator, but I had never formally studied it. I didn’t know how to put a portfolio together, and in the seventies, things were really switching to photography. Illustration was kind of on the way down. I gave that up fast, and started getting jobs designing.
What was it like being in those 20th Century design studios? It must have been so different working in fashion in a pre-digital world.
In early fashion design, we weren’t in front of a terminal all day. We were going to Paris to shop for fabric. That’s basically what it was like. The budgets back then were enormous. There was no online. We started sending faxes of designs in the early eighties, but before that everything was done by hand. In my first job, I was sent to the fabric shows in Paris twice a year. It was literally hands-on. You shop for fabrics, you sketch, you work with a pattern maker, and you produce the show. It was hands-on because it was so small. I can’t imagine what it’s like now. It’s as much of a contrast as the suburbs of Virginia are to New York City.
My first really big job was with a company called Perry Ellis. Back then, the early-to-mid eighties, they were a powerhouse, on a par with Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. We had a design floor in this big building in Midtown, and in the studios there must have been eight designers: men’s, women’s, accessories, shoes. The other side of the floor was a sample room with maybe three pattern makers and fifteen sewers. The overhead of that is unthinkable. You’d sketch something out, go back and work with a pattern maker. They would do a muslin. From there came a sample.
To take this into your illustration style as it is now. It’s very easy to take photographs at fashion shows, and a lot of people do, but you illustrate them in this beautifully expressive way. You capture real life there. What do your drawings capture that perhaps photography can’t?
People ask me this all the time, and I always say I’m not competing. An illustration is not competing with photography. They’re two completely different things. There is some beautiful photography and I don’t want to say it’s less than what I do. I’m capturing my emotion of that moment. And maybe the photographer is too. I’m basically bringing seventy-four years of my observations and my loves and my inspiration, and all of that gets packed in.
Pre-photography, illustration was the only fashion expression, wasn't it. You kind of revived it when you took illustration into a blog that blew up. How did that come about?
Later I was at a point in my mid-fifties. I had gotten a divorce, I was really broke; I had a young kid. No one would hire me for anything. No one would hire me to work on the sales floor, no one. Other than being a creative director, which after 2008 was kind of irrelevant because the budgets had changed so much. I started drawing again because I really didn’t know what else to do. It just felt so good. It was this relief and this joy. It helped me rethink the city, because all of a sudden, I was looking at people again as potential drawings. I was looking at the way they move, what they wear, their line. Everything was reborn. It was like a rebirth.
Then a friend said, “You know, you should start a blog.” I had no idea. I knew blogs were happening, but it was a new world for me and so I started one called What I Saw Today, just drawing people on the street. I think because it was such a ‘blog moment’, few illustrators were doing it. And I work really quickly, so I could post constantly.
I guess your blog came out in was those early internet days when sites weren’t so algorithmically or subscription controlled. No one had got hold of the internet yet. The major gatekeeping had been hacked; people could get an audience quick. That must have been liberating, finding you could get your voice out there again.
It really was. When I started What I Saw Today, blogs were for people who wanted to be there. It was conversational, people would chat. I remember looking at the data for the first six months. I had viewers from New York, and then there were people in like Seoul, and I thought, what the fuck? How is this happening? This is wild. It was really thrilling to know that what I was doing could reach so many people. To me, not growing up with that kind connectivity, everything was a revelation, and I loved it.
How has your style developed? Had you been drawing in the background the whole time? Because obviously you said you started out drawing, then went into design, and then…
It’s interesting. Recently I was staying in a friend’s apartment in Paris, and I have a piece of lavender paper and that’s where I’m mixing my colours to paint. So I just thought, well, I’ll draw faces and bodies on these blobs of color, because the blobs are so beautiful. I posted some of them this morning. My style has become something where I keep breaking things down, in terms of not having detail and bringing the viewer in by engaging with them. And so these blobs of colour are another breakdown of obvious systems and shapes, but I think it’s kind of engaging with people in a new way, which is really exciting. So it’s always changing.
Yeah, people don’t need truth spelling out for them, do they?
People don’t need it spelling out. When I was younger, I was very literal. I had no real editing process. I call it my people-pleasing era. I was doing things because I wanted people to like them, and that is not the right reason to do anything. So they were really shitty drawings. They were stiff and uninteresting and flat. I had to go through this complete, cathartic process to get to the blob with a leg coming out of it.
What makes a good subject? What makes a person stand out enough to want to draw them?
I think so much of what attracts me is attitude, the way people stand, the way people interact. It’s one reason why I’ve been going to Paris in the spring and summer. The expression “eye candy” is really overused, but people are basically living on the street. Everything happens on the street. Parties pour out onto the street. The cafés are open. It’s just thousands of people connecting, and that to me is the most extraordinary thing.
When I got there this summer it was the peak of a heat wave. All these kids were jumping in the canal and swimming. I had never seen Paris that energised, and obviously erotic. It’s always erotic in a very Parisian way, but there was a sensuality and a kind of joy. I was trying to capture it in drawings and it was happening so fast. They’re diving. It’s seconds in the air before they hit the water. I’m so glad I caught that. The heat got intense but it was a really great time to be there. It was super-charged. It’s Paris, people like getting sweaty and hot. Every day is a wild visual feast.
You’ve been in the fashion industry, creating and documenting it, for so long. What stays consistent about it. What stays timeless?
In menswear, sometimes I look at a picture of myself from when I was sixteen, and I’m wearing Levi’s, a navy blue sweater, a ringer tee and loafers, and it’s like, nothing’s changed. I mean, it all changes, because the cuts are different and the fabrics are different. It’s nuanced. But it’s kind of interesting to see what remains.
In Paris and New York right now, it’s almost like someone gave everyone adidas shorts and a pair of white socks and loafers. I say to myself, wait, this is a real trend. I didn’t think there were such things anymore, but this is trending. Guys are really into this look, and they look great. They’re very simple pieces, but they’re put together in a way that looks preppy, I hate the word. But it's also sexy, because the shorts are shorter. For men, if shorts go up an inch, it starts to feel pretty radical.
When you put two new things together and rework the proportions, you’ve got something totally different. Which is really an endless resource.
Okay, so these next two are about menswear. How do you see the space changing in the next few years or so? We’re not asking for a full-on Nostradamus effort here by the way, but … what do you think comes next?
That’s good, that’s good! I mean, today I’ve gotten onto an algorithm of guys doing fit checks, which is wild. They’re really turning it out, putting their phone, maybe on a ledge and backing up, and showing the shoe, their look. Compare that to when I was a kid in early college, and I wanted a hair dryer. My father was like, “You’re not having a hair dryer.” That was the beginning. The handheld hair dryer was the beginning of the gender breakdown that has caused chaos in Western culture. So when I think of that attitude, to random guys doing fit checks, it’s a huge arc. Now in public forums, guys are saying, “I care.”
Yeah, and that’s okay. There is a sense of narcissism and it being much more widely accepted now thanks to social media. Show your face on a post and you get likes, right? But there’s a happy meeting point in there somewhere that’s actually about expression.
I mean, face it. We’re people, we want to look at each other. In New York there’s really eye contact on the street. People look, and they don’t try to hide it. In Paris it’s a little more subtle. London I’m not as familiar with, but my English friends tell me that no one looks at anyone. But yeah, in New York, people move to be looked at. They didn’t come here to blend into the woodwork. There’s a lot of preening, which I love. Bring it! I’m inspired.
This last part is where we ask you to send some cultural inspiration out into the world, recommending 5 Good Things and the reasons why you chose them.
A restaurant or cafe you like in your city
Odeon. It’s beyond a classic. I was there in the '80s and love it just as much now as I did back then
A film everyone should watch
Blowup. It perfectly captures the hedonism of that moment. And everyone is so beautiful.
A book everyone should read.
Anything by James Baldwin.
A musical album or artist that means something to you.
Early David Bowie.
Where you’d send someone if they were visiting your city or hometown for the first time.
Central Park on a June weekend afternoon.
You can keep up to date with Richard here. He wore our 3001 Overshirt in ultra blue, the 7011 Champ sweatshirt and 5021 Painter pants in coriander.