· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Okay. [00:00:00] S0: Warren Buffett has this idea where it's like, well, if you want to invest in a company and in an industry, go around asking all the leaders in the industry and say, "Hey, you got one bullet. You can take out one guy. Who is it going to be?" [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: And usually, they'll all say the same guy. He's like, "That's the guy you should invest in." So he has this. So Balenciaga was that, where like Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, they called him the master of us all, I think was one of the quotes. And so I got to... Obviously, what I think of Balenciaga now and how they thought about him back then is crazy. But Balenciaga, if you haven't read about him, I'll send you some good biography recommendations. He essentially redid his stores almost like a church. He had a reverence, a religious reverence to what he was doing. But one of the most fascinating things is he had notebooks of... Because he would not only design, but he would also physically sew everything together. He was one of the few coutures or- [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: ... master couture, whatever they call it. But I thought that idea of like, okay, your career, in his case, I think he started relatively late. Let's say he spent 20 years. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: He can go back and be like, "What was I doing 18 years ago?"
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: He can go back and be like, "What was I doing 18 years ago?" [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. But as an atelier that he was, to me, and this is very important, especially in footwear, I got to learn how to make a shoe from scratch also. So, going back and looking at the progress that we made, also the knowledge working with certain brands, and some brands do things better than others. So the amount that you pick up along the way working with this many brands, I feel like in footwear, I've become the most well-rounded, knowledgeable person in footwear because I got to see between athletic shoes and brown shoes and boots. I got to really learn how these brands make product, go to the factories, go to their offices, and really understand the dynamic of what makes them so special. So this book, it stands for so much more than just the product at face value. To me, it's a timeline of feelings that I had and knowledge that I gained along the way. So, when I think back to a moment, there are things that you'll remember based on certain events or based on certain news and milestones in your life based on certain things that happen in your family or whatever it is. I remember my life through product. So, I think back to when I got married, and I think about also the product during that time. The product when my first baby was born, when my first store opened, or all the stores along the way. I have product that- [00:00:00] S0: Your life milestones are anchored to the products you were creating. [00:00:00] S1: Oh.
· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Oh. [00:00:00] S0: It goes back to, again, why the soulful... We talked before we started recording. It's like, when I said, it's like what I'm trying to understand is I can't understand the way you push your work until I understand the personality of the person that developed the ideas. [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: I seek to understand who the fuck is sitting across from me. [00:00:00] S1: Yes. [00:00:00] S0: Like, how the hell... I ask you, like, "You're 13. How the hell do you get interested in shoes?" And so then it's like, oh, think about the culture he's in, think about where he's living, think about what he's listening to, think about what is around him. It's like you can't understand Ronnie unless you understand everything that happened then.
· Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Going back to that, taking two buses to high school, the Q17 to the Q30, or taking the train to work when I took the F train from the last stop on 179th and Hillside to Broadway Lafayette, or West 4th when I used to work at 8th Street. What you see on the train, because you pass by certain neighborhoods, right? Each stop or every other stop would be like a different culture hopping on the train. Because cultures are spread out and they create communities, and then they get on the train in packs. And along the way from basically the first stop on the F train, or the last stop, I should say, going into the city, what I got to see became my world. That was my influence. I got to see so many different styles, people dressed in so many different ways. And that's when the sense of individuality was at an all-time high, before you were influenced by your algorithm, which now a lot of people want the same things because it's based off of what they see or what brands have to basically pay for in terms of mass distributing content. We lived in such a different era. I got to see people walk in to a store, have no idea what they're looking for, have no idea about the brands, and I got to see what they gravitated to first based off of a visual of what they thought looked different or looked on par for what they wanted to wear. So, I got to understand why so many different people liked so many different products for so many different reasons, and that became a big part of who I am, because it became a part of why I like product. That was my influence, basically, is seeing so many different styles and then forming my own edit. It's like that's a lost art.
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: Wait, say more about that. "I got to see so many different styles." So you're taking in all this information, you're essentially synthesizing it, putting it in your head, and you say, "Okay, what's my spin or take on this?" [00:00:00] S1: Like, what's my opinion on it? Back then, when you went shopping back then, you were forced to have an opinion because you wouldn't have seen everything. If you would see a music video, you'd see one or two different shoes, right? Or boots. If you were to open up a magazine, you'd see 10 different boots. But then you walk into a store and you see 500 different boots. So it's like you're walking in and you were forced to have an opinion. Today, people will walk into a store and know about all the product before they walk in. So they've already seen someone wearing it, a photo of it, a lookbook of it, a campaign of it. [00:00:00] S0: They're outsourcing their taste to somebody else. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. And not to say that people weren't influenced by media back then. They were, but it was a much smaller aperture of what people were seeing. And then you'd come in, and back then, you were just forced to have your own opinion. [00:00:00] S0: I feel like I get the vibe you want to live in more of an analog world.
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: I feel like I get the vibe you want to live in more of an analog world. [00:00:00] S1: Man, fucking hell I do. For real. And I tell my wife this every day. I wish that I could throw my phone away. And you know what's funny is that I really feel, just like fashion is very cyclical, I feel like people's thought processes are also cyclical. And the way people think about how their lives are influenced, I feel like that's also cyclical, meaning if you had had a taste of what we had pre-internet, I just find myself fucking begging for analog, for just the physical. I want to be influenced outside of digital. I want to travel and shut my shit off and just not have a connection to the internet, you know? [00:00:00] S0: Something we had when we were kids is like, you were just forced to be bored and alone with your own thoughts. [00:00:00] S1: And my daughter's like, "I'm bored." I'm like, "That's great! That's amazing! That's when you use your imagination, when you're bored." [00:00:00] S0: But that's also where difference comes in. I just flew to Milan because I meet a lot of founders, entrepreneurs. I meet a ton of them. And I met this guy named Luca Ferrari who does this company called Bending Spoons. [00:00:00] S1: Yes. [00:00:00] S0: And I remember having lunch with him back in February. And literally, the lunch was so jarring because he was describing how he built his company and ideas I'd never even heard of anywhere else, especially for he's our age too. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah.