Relative Values interview: documentary producer Nick Reed and his fashion designer son, Harris
The father and son on going from washing dishes to the big time — and dressing Harry Styles
The Sunday Times, December 1 2019
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Nick
I always wanted to be a father and Harris was an extraordinary baby. At the time he was born, I was just starting out as a Hollywood agent and his mother had just launched a candle company; she had clients such as Ellen DeGeneres and Jennifer Lopez. She is super-creative too. She would take him to work or he would travel on planes with me.
We knew that Harris was special when he was very young. When a six-year-old holds a conversation with adults or starts doing interior design on the house, it’s pretty obvious. Our job was to support him. Life pressures led to the dissolution of our marriage when Harris was about 10, but we dedicated ourselves to co-parenting.
My father was in the navy. I was born in Gibraltar, but we moved every three or four years when I was young. It gave me an adventurous spirit, which my son has definitely inherited. Harris moved from the US, his birthplace, to France for a year at 15 years old because he knew he wanted to get into fashion and needed to learn French. That takes balls.
...When I won an Oscar for The Lady in Number 6 [in 2014], I called Harris — in France, where it was the middle of the night — and got Bradley Cooper to tell him in French that I’d won. No one wanted that film at first: Hollywood had told me I couldn’t produce a film about a Holocaust-surviving pianist because I wasn’t a producer, nor Jewish, nor knew anything about music. I really believe — and this is something Harris realises — that great timing, on top of talent, is key. You need to be able to connect the dots.
As a Brit, I think something I have picked up in America is that Nike-style “Just Do It” attitude; I’ve tried to show Harris that he can do whatever he wants. At school, he had a lot of problems: attention deficit disorder, which they wanted to put him on drugs for when he was six, and dyslexia. But we moved him to a liberal arts school and I think that’s one of the reasons he’s turned out soamazingly. Given he loved fashion, I bought him a subscription to Women’s Wear Daily to encourage him to read.
I remember a school project for which Harris and his classmates were given cardboard boxes and asked to represent their pasts, presents and futures using them. Every other kid had just drawn on the side; Harris’s had twigs flying out of it in all directions.
He was always super-artistic and immaculate. He reminds me of James Bond: always cool. On the few occasions I look great, people assume it’s down to Harris. But I’d be so lucky: there’s a queue to be dressed by him now.
Harris
My dad’s still very English, despite having lived in LA for so long. He doesn’t throw compliments around, but I know he thought my work with Harry Styles was amazing. Harry wore about 13 different looks on his worldwide tour [in 2017-18] and about half of them were mine; Gucci did most of the rest, then there was Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen. To be among them was incredible. I wrote down most of the ideas in crayon on the back of a napkin in a meeting with Harry. He’s really amazing. Seeing him singing in my clothes in front of 40,000 people was ridiculous.
Having a dad whose career has gone up, down and all over the place, in a great way, has been brilliant in teaching me that taking risks and potentially failing is part of reality and success.
I’m studying fashion at Central Saint Martins in London and we have to do placements in our third year. The only place I wanted to work was Gucci, so I emailed them one evening and got a generic reply. I thought, fine. But then they called and said Alessandro Michele [the brand’s creative director] wanted to fly me to Milan, the Disneyland of fashion, to meet me.
We got on so well, talked for 15 minutes and he asked me to walk in their upcoming show. It wasn’t quite like my dad’s casting call — being told you’re cute while washing up — but it was extraordinary. He said he’d seen me on Instagram, then a magazine article about me, then my application and decided he needed to meet me. Gucci don’t do internships, so it was huge. I knew I couldn’t not do it.
Usually I sew all day, go to dinner, come home and work on my designs. I just don’t sleep;
Dad says you can sleep when you’re dead. He’s the one I call for advice, mostly of a creative or business nature. He understands I don’t want to say no to things, just know how to fit them all in.
Central Saint Martins was the only fashion school in the world I wanted to go to and I got in following a terrible interview. The guy interviewing me ripped me apart and I was holding back tears. But in my first year I felt like the sky was the limit. I don’t want to make beautiful things, I want to make things that have a story. My parents told me off when I was eight for telling a friend’s mother that the curtains in their house didn’t match the rugs. I can’t help tweaking things.
I believe you should always be who you are, do whatever you’re doing to the fullest, and not give a shit about what people think. Moving around a lot, like my dad, has made me really understand myself — I must have moved 30 times already and it’s made me strong. Home to me is everywhere, or where family is.
People who don’t understand fashion often think it’s silly, but it has such power to change the way people feel and to push ideas. My dad helped me grow up in a bubble of acceptance and freedom. I came out as gay at nine years old and think of myself now as more fluid. But I hate labels, and don’t need them with Dad: he’s always trusted that I know who I am.
Claire, the documentary by Nick Reed and Ryan Azevedo, is available on YouTube
