Jordan Roth wears Katarzyna Konieczka collar. Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Michael Philouze.
Theatrical producer is truly an appropriate way to describe Jordan Roth. He’s been a major producer since he was 21. He’s the President of Jujamcyn Theaters which controls 5 Broadway theaters and he’s won 4 Tony Awards. He’s also a fixture on the best-dressed list and in the front row at the couture, known for ensembles that are small theatrical spectacles in and of themselves. In the late 90’s, Roth and I met when we both were trained by star trainer Harry Hanson. At that point, I would describe Roth’s look as stylish muscle gay, with bodybuilder arms and clothes that were hip but definitely from the men’s department. I was excited to talk to Roth about his fashion journey and just like his signature Met Ball looks, his story doesn’t disappoint.
One thing that I find interesting about us talking to each other is I’ve known you in this trajectory, your fashion trajectory, for decades. When I first met you, I would’ve called you a muscle gay. You dressed very differently than you do now. Can we flash back to that, to where you were identity and fashion wise and take us forward to where you are today?
Well, I love that we met in the Hanson Fitness days, and yes, we have traveled a road together, my friend.So I think there’s two pieces, I think, to your question, and they are connected but not exactly the same, which is body and fashion.
Yes.
I have always had a complicated relationship with my body and always felt like it was not what it was supposed to be, and if only I could make it into something else, then everything would be okay. Then I would feel like what I wanted to feel like. Then whatever was not, I thought, would be. And I think it’s a very interesting thing where, in the coming out process/formulation of a gay identity at that time, for me, which was, you spend your whole childhood being not boy enough, and then you finally come out, I was 19, and you might think that, that, then, allows for the release of not boy enough, but in fact, it doubles down, and then the pursuit of man enough begins. And that is where we met.
That was a daily, hourly effort to be man enough, muscle enough to be what I thought I wanted to be. And I’m thrilled and honored that you said muscle gay because I would’ve said, trying to be, desperate to be, attempting to be. And I will tell you that I’m in a much different place. I’m in a much different relationship with my body, now, which began when I said, “Show me what you want to be. Show me what you are. Show me what body you are. And what happens if I take my hands off the wheel just a little, not entirely, but what if I release my grip just a little, what would you be?”
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- Jordan Roth wears Syban bodysuit, Alexander McQueen corset, Balenciaga catsuit and vintage necklaces.
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- Jordan Roth wears Olivier Theyskens dress, Archive Alexander McQueen by Lee McQueen coat, and Vintage necklace
That’s so interesting.
And I then started allowing that body to be beautiful, to be what I wanted to be. And the funny thing is, I’ve always felt like I’m growing into myself. I never made sense as a child, as young person. I’m a much better grown up. And so I think it is the confluence of what my body wants to be and what I want to be finally matching up. This is where your question, I think, goes from body to fashion, is the fact that my body is now a body that can wear clothes that I now want to wear, which is very different than what I wanted to wear then, in the body that I was trying to be.
So we’ve, I’ll say, a combination of truths and finally being ready for each other. It’s like those stories that people say about how those Harry met Sally stories, I’m in a Harry met Sally with my body.
I love it.
And we’re finally sitting together on the couch at the end.
When you were a kid, how did you dress? Did your interest in fashion come when you Harry met Sally’ed yourself, or was there always a face against the window about fashion from the time you were a child?
I love face against the window as an image. Fashion was always, I think, a vocabulary for me. When I was younger, it was costumes and plays and dance recitals where I would have my moments of joy. It was also, though, even if it wasn’t outrageous, it was always a way of expressing myself. I remember in fifth grade, I had a self-styled uniform of Oxford shirts and sweater vests. Now sounds pretty conservative, but in fifth grade, it was pretty elevated. I would say late high school and college, I really started going for it.
I will say there was a hiatus my freshman year of college where I was very deliberately trying to blend. I had just arrived at Princeton and into a glorious sea of khakis, and I think I really took a couple of steps back, and not as in back in order to survey, but as in back as in two steps forward, one step back, and retreated. And then I had a seminal summer back in the city, of going to my first gay bar, Splash, and I got a brown biker jacket, which I took to be as code as code could be.
And I went back to school and I started growing my hair and I started experimenting with my clothes. And that got all the way to drag on Princeton campus that was definitely noticed. Bright blue Cookie Monster fur jackets, and platform silver star platform boots, and I was finding my way.
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- Jordan Roth wears Olivier Theyskens dress, Grace Elizabeth feathers, Gianvito Rossi shoes, Loulou de la Falaise bracelets, and New York Vintage rings
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- Jordan Roth wears Olivier Theyskens dress, Grace Elizabeth feathers, Gianvito Rossi shoes, Loulou de la Falaise bracelets, and New York Vintage rings
Gorgeous.
Then I came back to the city and I started producing very, very, very young. I did The Donkey Show when I was 21, and that started a whole other fashion journey, which was one of authority, which was, I was younger than everybody who I was working with and managing, and I created, whether consciously or subconsciously, this uniform of authority, and it worked. It was very comforting and helpful for me until it started to restrict. And I think I only knew that in retrospect years after it was much too tight. And then I began, again; first, a process of allowing myself to shed that, and then, a new process of reemerging, which is where we find ourselves, now.
What are your pronouns? I never asked you that, and I’m trying to think of what part does gender identity play in this? Or is it a purely fashion expression?
Oh, it’s absolutely very much a part of it. And as I said earlier, fashion has always been a vocabulary for me. And there, absolutely my clothes have been a way in which I have given voice to and… Well, first I would say, I’ve given myself the opportunity to explore what I mean by my gender, which is, I think, very different than telling you or telling, I don’t mean you. You, the other.
I absolutely can trace, in a very short period of time, just really, a matter of five years, how clothes have helped me articulate what I mean by me. Well, first of all, I can remember wearing certain things and feeling like, oh, I’m really on a limb here with this. And then a couple years later I look back and it’s like, I might as well have been in t-shirt and jeans relative to where I am now. And thinking about that, that felt at-risk.
I also can remember, again, not that long ago, relatively, just a number of years, being very clear about, oh, okay, that’s “women’s clothes” that I’m put putting on now. And that distinction really doesn’t exist for me anymore. I never look at a piece of clothing and say, “Oh, now I am wearing women’s clothes.” Though I will say I do, sometimes, look at a piece of clothing on me and say, that’s too boy. Which is to say, I don’t feel like me in this. And so absolutely, my clothes have been really the paint on which I have figured out how to paint myself.
Jordan Roth wear Dreamione/Liam Hsin
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- Jordan Roth wears a full look from Maison Margiela
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- Jordan Roth wears a full look from Maison Margiela
How would you describe your style or the clothes that you’re attracted to for yourself?
I’m attracted to color and texture and touch. I’m attracted to clothes that tell my body how to move in them. I am attracted to clothes that have artistic rigor and intent. I am attracted to clothes that tell stories and allow me to tell stories. I am attracted to clothes that ignite something in me. How’s that?
That’s good. It seems like, in a way, your clothes on a level have taken you, whether intentionally or not, from behind the scenes to the spotlight. Has that been an unforeseen outcome from your growth fashion wise, or are you naturally attracted to the spotlight and this is just helping bring you there?
Yes, to all. Let me distinguish between everyday dressing, which I still am very deliberate about, and event dressing. And I always feel on an event level, a piece that I have really put heart and mind into. I take myself to be performing that piece. Which, and for many people the word performance implies artifice, and for me, it does not. Performance is about expression, and rigor, and revealing, not covering, not pretending.. So in that way, I think it connects to your question.
Also, though, as I said, fashion has always been a vocabulary for me and vocabulary is a way of communicating. What has been so gratifying and moving is when people are able to hear that communication and respond to it in kind. I think that’s happening much more than…..Yeah. Period. That’s just happening.
Did you, as a child or now, have you had any fashion role models or people who inspire you the way they express themselves in a way that you feel like you relate to?
There’s so many sense memory references of people, whether public figures or just people in my own personal sphere that I saw as a child who made an impact on me or a particular dress my mother wore, or a photograph of my grandmother, and these things that bury themselves in us and then seeds, really, and they grow. And if we’re lucky, we get to harvest them and make them into something that feeds us. How’s that for taking the metaphor all the way to the end?
Jordan Roth wears Archive Alexander McQueen by Lee McQueen vest, Elizabeth Emmanuel shirt, corset, and tie, Katarzyna Konieczka sleeves, New York Vintage rings, earring, and gloves and Vintage necklace, Rick Owens leggings.
Applause, applause, applause. I wanted to just mention a couple of your recent looks that I particularly loved and just maybe hear a little bit about how they came about-
Oh, I love that.I’l play this game.
Your look at the Tony’s, I thought, was particularly a new level. How did that all come? I think they cut to you when the director of Parade was doing his I’m a faggot with a Tony moment. It seemed like it was not just Look 27 from the show, it was more of a put together look. Do you know what I mean?
There are moments where I really want to create something in the space between me and designers and something, a piece that will allow me to express something very specific, and also mark a moment in my life. And so those are the pieces that we create from scratch. There are absolutely moments where Look 27 will be completely amazing and figuring out exactly what that right look is for exactly that right experience, whether it be an event or a shoot or something else. And then creating the hair and makeup around it, and the narrative around it, and the styling around it, that’s all also deeply fulfilling.
But, so the Tony’s, I’m always thinking about what’s the experience, what are we doing there, and what do I want to say about it? What do I want to express about it or what do I want to bring forward in my own experience of it? And so this Tony’s, I was there primarily for Into the Woods, which is a show that has been seminal for me since I saw it as a teenager, as I know it has been for so many people. And one of the things that I think is so extraordinary about this show is how it’s always there for us at every step in our lives, it has something new to say to us, which is, frankly, exactly what the show is about, so the fact that it does the thing it’s about is one of its many layers of genius.
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- Jordan Roth wears Olivier Theyskens dress, Grace Elizabeth feathers, Gianvito Rossi shoes, Loulou de la Falaise bracelets, and New York Vintage rings
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- Jordan Roth wears Olivier Theyskens dress, Grace Elizabeth feathers, Gianvito Rossi shoes, Loulou de la Falaise bracelets, and New York Vintage rings
And so this time around, I have been really thinking a lot about the hood, the Red Riding Hood, and of course it is the symbol of all of our visuals for the show, the curtain, the red curtain and the red hood. But also, when you listen to the show, and I think probably at this moment in my life, for all of the reasons we’ve just been discussing, the ways in which we endow articles of clothing with power and protection and the ability to protect us or the belief that they can protect us, and then knowing when we don’t need that protection anymore, that, that protection has fused in us or, perhaps, always was us.
The narrative of the hood and our relationship to whatever our hood is, was something that I wanted to explore. And at the same time, I have always been captivated by the witch, and particularly, her dressing and her transformation. I will tell you, I was obsessed with the idea. So when Into the Woods first came out, I was 12 and I was obsessed with it, and I was heading into my bar mitzvah year and I was obsessed with the idea that my mother should wear a dress like the white dress that Bernadette wore in her transformation as the witch. And so the witch has always been my girl.
So those two things, the Red Riding Hood and the magic sorcery of the witch were the jumping off points for this look. And Ludovic De Saint Sernin is a friend who I met a couple of years ago in Paris and have been loving knowing him and his now fiancé, Ignacio, who works with him, and watching his style evolution. And we
came together on this piece. This felt like the perfect brief for him to breathe life into. He had been developing and working with this crystal fabric.
The one thing I thought when I saw the hood was I wanted to float. I want the hood to be a piece of magic, and so we made it solid so that it could hide some magic, and then asked Stephen Jones to create the mechanisms of magic. And I had just worked with Stephen for the first time. I have been obsessed with his work for so long and we worked together for the first time just a couple of weeks before, or months before, for New York, New York. And he made that extraordinary feather top hat to go with Zac Posen’s look. So I called him and he knew immediately exactly what to do and created the under structure that allowed the whole thing to float.
And then Brent Lawler, who does my hair for these kinds of events, created the crystal head. Between my scalp and the hood are three different artists’ work; the crystal layers, Brent’s crystal, crystal skull, Stephen’s Frame, and Ludovic’s hood, and together, magic.
Jordan Roth wears New York Vintage top, Elizabeth Emmanuel dress and choker, Early Halloween necklace, Stephen Jones hat and Wing and Weft gloves
Exactly. Perfect, perfect. I love it. Another look I thought was amazing, and also interestingly, I felt like it was a little bit simple, in a way, was your Met Gala look for this season, which was one of my favorite looks of on the red carpet or the pink carpet or whatever color it was.
Oh, thank you.
In the past, your look has been extremely elaborate and very butterfly, but this was amazing and appropriate for the occasion, but a little bit more simple. Am I crazy?
You are not crazy. As soon as I knew that Lagerfeld was the exhibition, I knew that I wanted to do a portrait of him through his personal iconography, different than his designs. I’ve always loved his designs, of course, but I was particularly compelled by his personal iconography, the elements of style that he used to define himself as his own design. And I think there are a handful of really symbolic elements in that, of course, one of which is, well, his fan, the glasses, the collar, the ponytail, his profile. I was starting to imagine how that becomes a piece of art, not cosplay, all of that added up to Daniel at Schiaparelli.
And I had just interviewed Daniel at Vogue for Forces of Fashion, and we had this extraordinary dive together into his story and ideas. And I knew as I was sitting there, that he was exactly who needed to create this piece. And so I started talking to him about what was in my head and this idea of portrait of Karl through his personal iconography. I also knew that I really very much wanted it to be through the lens of Schiaparelli and that unique take on iconography, and both literal and figurative. Daniel went away and came back with a whole bunch of really thrilling ideas. And this one was both of our favorites immediately.
It was Daniel who said from the beginning, he said, “I want you to look like this has been poured on you. Poured on and snatched,” was his word, “poured on and snatched”. And he was so thoughtful in wanting to place this piece in the, what is the word I’m looking for, in the context of my Met, my previous Met looks, exactly to your point. And so he was very excited about being able to do the same kind of wow impact in a much more restrained silhouette. And I would say he nailed it.
I agree completely. It made it on a lot of best-dressed lists, not that that’s always the litmus test, necessarily. But segueing off the looks, there are going to be looks that people don’t like or that get evil comments.How do you handle those or deal with the adoration/public reaction to your looks and expression?
Yeah, some days are harder than others. I will say that comments that push on a doubt I have about myself can cut. Comments that don’t connect to a doubt I have about myself, I’m pretty good at letting fall away. But I know, in my head, that people’s reactions are about their own experiences, not mine, but sometimes that’s hard to keep in your heart.
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- Jordan Roth wears Comme des Garçons coat, Luchen dress, Jean Paul Gaultier necklace, Wing and Weft gloves Oscar de la Renta feather neck piece, and Gianvito Rossi shoes.
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- Jordan Roth wears Comme des Garçons coat, Luchen dress, Jean Paul Gaultier necklace, Wing and Weft gloves Oscar de la Renta feather neck piece, and Gianvito Rossi shoes.
Let’s talk about the shoot that you did for Zoo Magazine. I feel like it’s my favorite shoot that you’ve done.
You liked that one, I remembered your comment about that.
I like all your shoots. I think they’re all great, but that one, particularly, I just felt like there was something about it. Tell me a little bit about that shoot and your thoughts about it.
Well, I’ll tell you a fun fact about that shoot. That was the shoot on which my eyebrows became bleached.
Wow.
Forever, forevermore. I arrived on set and we planned all the looks, so I knew what we were creating. And I got there and Maude, who is a wonderful makeup designer that I’ve worked with on and off for many years said, “How do you feel about bleaching your eyebrows?” And I said, “Absolutely not.” Because my thing is, I will do anything you want to do as long as we can put it back at the end. And she was like, “Okay, well, we can try it with makeup. It’s not quite the same, and you’ll see the makeup, but we can just, let’s try it.”
And so she put makeup in my eyebrows and was actually doing it quite deliberately to thinking that may be how we go. And I saw it and I thought, huh, okay. And then I was like, well, actually, I like what this looks like. I like what this is doing to my face because it completely changes your face. I had no idea. And I looked in the mirror and I thought, oh, okay, let’s do this. So she did it. We took the makeup off, bleached the eyebrows, and haven’t looked back. Literally.
How hard is that to undo? Does it ever grow out or you would have to dye your eyebrows?
As it turns out, our eyebrows seem to grow to a certain length and then fall out, and then are replaced by other eyebrow hairs that are growing.
Okay.
And we don’t ever see that process of growth, release, new growth, because they’re all the same color. And now I can see that I bleach my brows, and literally, the next day you’ll start to see all throughout, little brown hairs starting to grow. And I just find it fascinating. First of all, it’s such a metaphor for how we live, even though we may not be aware of what we are doing is growing, releasing and shedding, and growing anew. It’s just, we’re usually not able to see it because we’re not focused on it. We’re not focused on it. But that’s what living is. That’s what growing is. It requires releasing in order to allow something else to come through. So life as bleached eyebrow metaphor.
Jordan Roth wears Moschino coat, Katarzyna Konieczka collar, Balenciaga catsuit, Alexander McQueen shoes and Hyland Carter rings.
There you go, I love it. I always wondered about eyebrows because Lana Turner had shaved her eyebrows off for a movie and then they never grew back. So she had to pencil in her eyebrows for the rest of her life.
Right, so then that was my fear. Those are the things you worry about.
You’re a parent.
Yeah. I’m just wondering, I love to think of people who are the Daphne Guinness types, the show pony types who have very pronounced fabulous style. I like to think of them in different situations than the red carpet. So, do you have a PTA Jordan look, or do you have a conference at school look? I’ve been with you when you’re in, what others might consider, a casual day look, which is still not casual. It’s still couture blouse with a bishop’s sleeve moment,-
Thank you very much.
My pleasure. So what is your going to school for a PTA meeting look like, and does the approach still the same as it is to your storytelling approach to other stuff?
It’s a really great question, and I’ll tell you, school and fashion or school and what I look like, I will say, are definite places of anxiety for me. It was then, and it continues to be now. And I will say one of the reasons I know we’re at the right school for our family is that I don’t feel that way, and that I don’t have to be nervous about what I look like, or feel that what I look like will create any issue for my children in their school environment. So my drop-off /pickup look is, I would say, for me, it’s mellow, but I do still get comments, so I guess it’s not everyone’s mellow.
On the Met Ball red carpet scale, it’s mellow.
I’m so happy to be doing this with you.
Me, too.
I really do feel like you are, you’re one of the few people that I have known through many iterations of life.
Yeah, I agree. That’s why I felt like I couldn’t say no. I was just like, really, I’m a good person for this.
And you are.
Jordan Roth wears a full look from Maison Margiela
