A Chat With Abe Gurko - My Favorite Fashion Pundit

TEXT, VIVIAN KELLY

I recently got the opportunity to drop into my favorite fashion pundit's downtown NYC headquarters. Abe Gurko is a fashion veteran who in the course of his career has worked with Carrie Fisher and assisted her in some insanely funny press situations [he talks about that in our video next week].

Recently, he's one of Anna Wintour's biggest supporters for her Fashion's Night Out Initiative to his latest project - reinventing and repositioning the Monarchy Collection, by way of a cool video. I'd seen the "old" Monarchy collection at past IMG-LA Fashion Weeks and was reminded of old eighties bands. I couldn't really envision current rockers wearing the ripped and acid washed pieces. The current collection however = a whole different story. The video [watch it here, below], features

Reeve Carney and his band, Carney. Abe styled them in this fashion / music video which functions as an interesting look book for Monarchy Collection featuring the song Testify from the film Machete.

Carney is the star in the highly anticipated Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, directed by Julie Taymor.

My only disappointment about our 1/2 hour together was that we didn't get to do the interview on the bed - the classic Abe interview spot. Bad luck, the housekeeper needed to straighten-out the bedroom that morning so Abe, and I and his two micro-pups conducted our business on the front office couch. Oh well.

Anyone and everyone is potential fodder for Abe's blog, www.imeanwhat.com. No one is too high or mighty or inconsequential if they happen to irritate him. Abe's an avid newshound - he reads the papers in the a.m. like the hedge fund boys scour The Financial Times, Barrons, Wall Street Journal and Investor's Daily.

One of the funniest of his posts which also ran on The Huffington Post - to which he is a regular style contributor - was so on point that it inspired me to whip up my own post here, on TheFE about M. Cardin's unfortunate decision to throw all 200 pieces of the proverbial "kitchen sink" on the Paris runway last season.

One person we both feel positively about is Anna Wintour, for her Fashion Night's Out initiative. Okay, I'll admit that I wasn't singing its praises a year ago, on the first one. Back then though, I was looking at it from a hard-nosed financial perspective. "Where, I wondered [and asked everyone I ran into] are the numbers? DID THEY make $$?"

After the couch time with Abe and actually experiencing a few uptown events with friend, Mark Behnke, of www.fashiontribes.com, I was of a different mind. The evening with Mark and the talk months later with Abe got me thinking that maybe what this was REALLY about was to lift morale and to get people out on the streets and in the stores. It's a one step at a time thing. Rome was not built in one day right? Neither will the economy boomerang back into total health and shoppers swarm to the stores and happily pay full price anytime soon. For now, let's be happy that Anna and FNO is getting us excited about shopping again.