For the first issue of The Impression/CFDA, The Impression founder Kenneth Richard sat down with John Varvatos to discuss his career, his vision, Carre Otis, and the future. The was joined by Stephen Niedzwiecki, a founder of agency Yard and frequent Varvatos collaborator.

Here, some of the highlights of the conversation. For the full interview, please click here.

KENNETH RICHARD: John, thanks for carving out the time…I’d love to hear how you got into the field.

JOHN VARVATOS: When I was in my first year of high school, I started working in a men’s store for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, I wanted to make my own money. My parents had five kids to take care of and I didn’t want to burden them by asking for money to buy clothes for school. I figured if I get a job at a men’s store, I would get a discount and I’d have the cash to buy the clothes I wanted. That really was it. I fell in love with the whole style thing. I didn’t even call it fashion, so much as style. I grew up in Detroit with Motown artists, but they were all wearing uniforms, and to me, it felt like they were costumes. I was much more captivated by all the British invasion bands, like the Rolling Stones…

When I was 24, I partnered with some people in Grand Rapids, Michigan and opened up a men’s store…It was a very unique store, even in today’s world. When I first started the store, a brand like Ralph Lauren wasn’t a department store brand at all. There was only one shop in America. We were one of the first stores that kind of created a world with Ralph Lauren, but we mixed it up with other things, too. The people from Ralph Lauren…came in, and were enamored, and I became friendly with them.

Very quickly, I made a decision to make a change into wholesale and took over the Midwest for Ralph Lauren, where I oversaw 10 states…It was 1984 and at that time Polo was really starting to happen….The timing was great. Ralph was doing well and so was I. I was the youngest person in the organization and they moved me to New York to head up sales… It was a very different company then, than it is now. When I joined the business, it was 150 million. When I left, four years later, it was a billion plus….While heading the merchandising piece, I began sitting with Ralph and the design team. That’s when I woke up and had the realization, ‘this is what I want to do.’ So I started taking classes, pattern making and illustration.

K.R.: Where did you take classes?

J.V.: At FIT. It was just a couple of classes. I was leaving at six o’clock to make the seven o’clock class. When Ralph found out, he said, ‘You don’t have to go to school to be a designer. What you have to have is the taste level, the eye, and the vision. Work here in design.’ That’s how I got my start in design. A couple of years later, I was contacted by Calvin Klein, who wanted me to come to talk to him about being a designer there. After our meeting, Calvin asked me to head up design for the whole men’s company. At that time they had Calvin Klein women’s collection, underwear and Calvin Klein Sport, but everything else was a license and he wanted to shut them down and revamp things. He wanted to start a men’s collection business. So I started designing Calvin Klein collection and I said to him, “We should start another brand. Why don’t we try to do a diffusion kind of thing with its own point of view?” So, CK was started at the same time and it grew quickly. I definitely was in the right place at the right time, but I had a very strong point of view and was confident about what I could do for these brands, both in sales and design.
I enjoyed Calvin, but eventually I went back to Ralph in 1994 to take over design for all of menswear. It was a big opportunity. I wanted to be at Ralph Lauren. I wanted to design lifestyle. I wanted to be able to design from head to toe. I wanted to be able to understand how to finish the shoes and construct them. I wanted to know how to build bags. I was voracious. I still am, but I was voracious at the time for knowledge. I made sure I knew everything there was to know about shoes, about underwear, or about socks. I didn’t want to be one of those people that touched a lot of things, but was an expert at none. I didn’t want to be a jack-of-all-trades. I wanted to be an expert in everything.

K.R.: That time at Calvin was Sam Shahid, Fabien Baron and some other greats. You were really building brands. What did you pick up about marketing?

J.V.: Well, before Calvin, I was at Ralph. I learned more in the first month there than I’ve learned in my entire career. That was a company that broke the rules. There weren’t any shop-n-shops before Ralph Lauren. There wasn’t true lifestyle design before Ralph Lauren. There was couture, and then, there were brands. He was the first at doing a lifestyle and I learned about advertising and creating a dream and creating the excitement that people wanted to be part of.

When I went to Calvin, it was the complete opposite. It was about sex, drugs, maybe not rock-n-roll, but it was definitely about sex and drugs. I don’t want to make the drugs thing sound like a big thing, but it was about irreverence and sex, and creating things that were rebellious and shocking at times.

It was very different at Ralph’s. Ralph was very pure about everything. The girls looked very pure, everybody was buttoned up. At Calvin, we did a whole film with Bruce Weber. Mickey Rourke was dating a really beautiful actress for a time, and we shot her nude in the shower. It was crazy. I can’t remember her name.

K,R.: Shower, motorcycles… Carré Otis?

J.V.: Carré Otis! Yes. So, we did that kind of thing. I was so fortunate. I couldn’t have been at two better brands. I really saw how to push the envelope. I also learned that marketing sells. Beyond the dream that Ralph was creating, I learned that sex sells, and that shocking sells, too. But it is not always easy to know what is right and when it is right!

K.R.: So how did the change come about to open John Varvatos?

J.V.: When I went back to Ralph, we changed from being in a brownstone with everybody running up and down the stairs, to an office building on Madison Avenue. When I left it was a billion dollar company, when I came back it was four and a half billion. My first meeting back, there were 20 people in the meeting, to talk about the new shirt body. I was there for another four and a half years. It was great, I had a super relationship with Ralph and I still do. But the company had gotten very big and I was a product guy.

There was this spark that hit me one day. I was at Barneys, it was a fall day in 1988 and I was looking at Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Gucci, Prada and such. They were all doing black nylon, with their own point of view, but very similar in a lot of ways.

I guess I was in my early 40’s. And I thought, “It is time to do something different.” And on that day, I decided, “I’m definitely going to do it.”

K.R.: What is next?

J.V.:  We’re evolving that “Rock-N-Roll Gentleman.” He’s going to come in and out of what we do, but in different ways. Our past campaigns really zeroed in on rock, not rock-n-roll, but “rock” as a spirit, the spirit of rebelliousness.

Back when I was in college, people had a voice. They were talking strongly about what the government was doing, they were talking strongly about the war, whatever it was that was happening, they were talking strongly about it. People today just complain that nobody does anything. Very few people have voices today and it’s a time for people to use their voice, raise it, and take that spirit of rebelliousness to get things done.

So now we are talking about who the rebels of today are. The interesting thing about the rebels today is that they’re not just men. There are more women out there that are the rebels today. They’re Miley Cyrus, they’re Taylor Swift, they’re in the music industry and they’re women who are having a big voice today. We’re really zeroing in on everything we do now, including my Fall ’16 show, thinking about it from the perspective of what the “spirit” of what rock represents. It’s a soul kind of thing. It’s something that runs in your blood. That isn’t necessarily about a music genre, it’s more about a way of life.”