Designer Todd Oldham on fashion, MTV, and the scrappy ingenuity of House of Style
His DIY experiments for the beloved 1990s show ushered in the Etsy era and inspired a new "way of seeing."
Cindy Crawford could not pose for glossy magazines and strut down catwalks forever. Models, after all, have notoriously short shelf lives. And at 23, Crawford was hardly an ingénue.
So when MTV asked her to host a new fashion-focused show in 1989, she not only said yes — she offered to do it for free.
“My agents thought it was a waste of my time,” Crawford later said in “I Want My MTV,” an oral history of the music-video channel. “I was making so much money modeling, per day, why take away from that?”
Oh, how wrong they were.
“House of Style” turns 35 this May. The beloved MTV series, hosted for six years by Crawford, took viewers behind the scenes of the fashion and modeling worlds — a glamorous, irreverent and intimate blend of haute couture and pop culture.
Where else could you see the members of Duran Duran shopping at Sears? Or supermodel Naomi Campbell applying zit cream? Or fashion designer Todd Oldham taking a hacksaw to a pair of boots to create sandals?
“Organized guerilla,” Oldham said when asked about the vibe of “House of Style,” where his DIY segment, “Todd Time,” aired for four years.
“It was very influential,” he added.
One segment, “Lazy Guy Grooming Tips,” made him a cult celebrity. “For at least 10 years, somebody would come up to me and say, ‘You taught me how to cut my hair,’” he recalled. “I still hear it!”
This is the opening of my New York Post story about “House of Style” — and the mania for fashion TV shows that started in 1980, with CNN’s “Style With Elsa Klensch,” and reached its apex in the 1990s. I argue that, while these programs don’t really exist anymore (replaced by competitive reality shows), they largely shaped the image-saturated, style-obsessed world we live in today. (You can read the online version here, which for some reason breaks up my meatier paragraphs into one-sentence-long chunks — though I guess it does mimic the quick-cut, frenetic, short-attention-span style of old MTV!)
Anyway, I talked with a lot of people for the story — fans, critics, fashion experts, people who worked at MTV, people who worked on other TV programs — and nearly everyone mentioned Todd Oldham, a high-fashion designer who nonetheless exhibited such earnest enthusiasm for fashioning zipper pulls out of twigs or upholstering an old couch with fabric scraps.
“It was very improvisational, DIY, and kind of was a harbinger of the crafting movement,” said Simon Doonan, noted fashion wit and author of many books, including the forthcoming “The Camp 100: Glorious Flamboyance, From Louis XIV to Lil Nas X.”
“You know, would Etsy even exist if Todd hadn’t done his thing on ‘House of Style’?” he mused. “It felt like anyone can have a go [at fashion]; it was not exclusionary at all.”
Oldham closed his fashion line in 1997, but he still creates. Much of his clothing, furniture, and decor is made from upcycled garments and items, and he approaches his work with the same curiosity and ingenuity that he exhibited on “Todd Time.” He told me that his whole M.O. was to inspire a new “way of seeing,” which is what the most exciting art does: Hussein Chalayan’s “furniture clothing,” Kathy Acker’s cut-and-paste narrative-busting novels, Jean-Luc Godard’s many film experiments.
Oldham’s many wonderful insights pepper my New York Post piece, but of course, I couldn’t fit everything! Here’s some more of our conversation.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Todd Oldham: Doug Herzog [former president of MTV] wrote me and said you were doing a celebration of “House of Style.” I was quite shocked to think that it was 35 years ago.
Wearable Art: I know! Yes, I’m doing deep dive into the history of fashion on TV, pegged to the anniversary.
Oldham: It's funny, there was more celebration and exploration of fashion as an art form then than there is now.
Wearable Art: Why do you think that is?
Oldham: I'm not sure that [fashion] matters in the same way. It was a really a giant, universal kind of thing at the time. [Now] it's kind of all fractured and fragmented. But it's a strange that it hasn't led to some like, amazing, single kind of fashion show the way that “House of Style” was back in the day.
Wearable Art: Can you tell me about how “Todd Time” came to be?
Oldham: I had done a collection called "Interiors" that was based on my house. And Alisa Bellettini, who was really the serious life blood behind “House of Style,” had seen that show and said, “Can you show us how to make this stuff?” Because she knew I'd made like the sofas and things [in my house] that I'd been inspired to then turn into dresses.
So I did a little segment on, I think, the second or third episode of “House of Style.” They did a segment on my fashion show and then I did a segment right after it showing how you can make this stuff. We went to the 26th Street Flea Market and bought an old sofa and sawed it up and repainted it and kind of did a new thing. And it aired and became really popular — people really liked it. So Alisa asked me if I would come on full time and do something every episode. And I was so happy to do it, because it was just a blast.
Wearable Art: How did you come up with ideas for your segments?
Oldham: In a funny way, they were kind of like snake bite venom for what I did during the day, which was these extravagant $10,000 dresses that very few people could afford. So I wanted to make sure my ideas on “House of Style” had nothing to do with money and had just to do with ingenuity and style. So, I would interview John Galliano at one moment, and then we would show you how to take a hacksaw to boots to cut the toes up. It didn't matter what anything cost. We didn't even talk about the cost. It was just about what was interesting. And that's really rare.
This was way before somebody said you have to use advertisers' clothing. We were 100% autonomous. … Alissa would say “You’ve got three minutes and 20 seconds; what are you going to do?” And then I would literally hand them the tape and they would air it. …
It was really funny that we got to do those goofy things, which is really just the way I was raised with my family: We just made shit all the time. But fashion is very loud — you know, when you when you make noise in fashion, it's super big. Or it can be. So it was always fun for me to do these little things that like cost a quarter or trying to inspire recycling. There are a lot of a lot of things that are still super important to me that we got to include, even if it was just a subtext in many of the projects.
Wearable Art: When we were chatting earlier, you said that House of Style demystified complex ideas. What kinds of ideas were you talking about?
Oldham: We really were able to demystify the makings of fashion [and] the weird hierarchy, and explaining historic reference in fashion too — you know, most everything has some has a tiny finger in something from the past, or a really significant one. Really, our whole effort was to inspire a way of seeing, like to open eyes, and to create a curiosity.
I mean, I was always happy if you want to do what we did, but that wasn't really the deal. It was just about causing you to think in a new way.