Victor Glemaud’s A Charming Designer

AB: You say that a man should have a lot of color. I know that you put a lot of yourself into your designs, so I’m wondering, how does the outside world influence – the war, the election – how does that influence your vision?

VG: The clothes I make?

AB: Or the ones that you wear…

VG: A lot of people have asked me about my clothes and I always say, “Oh, it’s what I want to wear,” but that’s bullshit. I worked with a lot of different designers, I did all these shows that I eventually figured that I like clothes and I liked it. I wanted to be involved in creating the clothes. In terms of how I dress, I feel like I developed my personal dress and it became colorful, but I didn’t want to wear black – I’ve always had to wear black: at shows, at events – I’m black, I don’t think I look good in black, so I need to wear color. I always liked wearing colors and collected all these sweaters and have all this knitwear that I wear all the time – I wear cashmere in the summer and people think I’m a freak, but I hate a t-shirt and shorts. That doesn’t look right on me. What was the question, again?

AB: How the outside influences your aesthetic.

VG: Oh, I don’t know the answer to that – I think about a man and the way that I dress. Men don’t really change that much – you wear jeans, you wear pants, you wear a suit – men go and buy something because they need it and they want to wear it, not like women.

AB: Are you close with your family?

VG: My mother – more so than my father these days.

AB: Really?

VG: He retired and uncomfortable with the whole gay thing and I’m always the same and I don’t change…

AB: He’s uncomfortable with you being gay?

VG: We don’t really talk about it. He never acknowledged it.

AB: Never? Not once? Not through the family?

VG: He found out from my mother, she told him and there was a moment of silence for a couple of years.

AB: That’s more than a moment.

VG: Well, you know, it is what it is.

AB: What period was this?

VG: This was ’96, when I first went to college.

AB: And when did you next talk to your dad?

VG: I would say around 2002.

AB: And what was the first event – what spurred your talking?

VG: He was in New York and I would avoid seeing him, but then I saw him and we said “hey”.

AB: Do you think he’s proud of you?

VG: Yes. Now that I’m making clothes. He can understand – being a design assistant, he didn’t understand that, and being a publicist, he didn’t understand that, either. Now it’s tangible to him.