After sending an email requesting an interview to the address listed on Christian Audigier’s website, GQ senior staffer Devin Friedman was invited to tag along with the shmata-making millionaire for a few days. The result is the fascinating, merciless profile titled “Emperor Du Fromage” now on the magazine’s website.
Of particular interest to me was his description of the inside of Audigier’s office, which I walk by every day on my way to get three dollars worth of chicken salad from Pavilions:
Audigier Brand Management is housed in what you’d more likely call a palazzo than an office building. A freestanding brick mansion with grand filigreed stone casement windows, a mansard roof, a driveway where your Bentley is parked in a designated space. The door is heavy and wood, with iron detailing; the front desk is paneled in leather; there’s a perfectly weathered Ralph Lauren–like heavy bag in the waiting room, a large moody black-and-white R&B-record-cover-style portrait of Christian in the entryway. And once I entered and could take in the whole balustraded open floor plan straight up to the skylight, I saw laid out on the white marble floor a stuffed albino peacock, a long leather bench with a fur thrown over it, and what appeared to be a precise replica of the chopper from Easy Rider, with the Stars and Stripes carapace and everything. It was not immediately clear what any of these items meant, but it did give you a feeling.
Here’s where the money for that office came from:
The thing about the trucker hat that no one had taken advantage of, Christian said, is that you can see the logo really clearly when it’s on the head of a famous person in a photograph.
Of course! You could have thought of it first. But you didn’t. Like a Jackson Pollock painting.
As a bonus, here’s comedian Nick Kroll’s archetypal Ed Hardy patron character, Bobby Bottleservice.
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