From fashion to literature
Today, Douglas Stuart is a successful novelist: his semi-autobiographical debut,
Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize in 2020. But in another life, he was a New York-based fashion designer for high-street giant Banana Republic. “That was a $4bn business, and it was an incredibly demanding job,” he told David Crow in the FT. “I would travel every four or five weeks overseas.” And he started to find it a struggle. “I was unhappy. I was becoming tired of everything I was doing in fashion. So in 2008, I sat down to begin writing Shuggie.” The novel took him a decade to complete, and was rejected by dozens of publishers. When he finally did get a book deal, he quit fashion immediately, and held a farewell bash in a Manhattan bar – an evening which confirmed his suspicions about the limits of the industry. “Not a single one of [the guests] asked me what the book was about,” he recalls. “Every single one of them asked me if I was going to design the cover.”
By the age of 28, Sonny Rollins was already a giant of modern jazz, says John Fordham in The Guardian: having grown up mixing with Thelonious Monk in Harlem, he’d reached stardom himself in the 1950s. But in 1959, he dropped off the radar. He didn’t stop playing, though. For two years, he just swapped New York’s smoky jazz clubs for the fresh air of Williamsburg Bridge. “I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn’t satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically,” says Rollins, 91. Then, one day, “I just happened to be out walking and I saw some steps and I thought: let’s see what’s up there. And when I got to the top, I just saw all this fantastic open space. No one was up there. There were a lot of pillars and abutments back then, where I could find spaces where people couldn’t see me, though they could hear me. The only people who could see me were the few who were walking across the bridge. And not many of them would stop to talk. I guess mostly they thought: who’s that crazy guy?” He loved it so much, he played there night and day, rain or shine, for up to 15 hours at a stretch. “I’d come down to go to the bathroom, or I’d go to a bar I liked where I might have a cognac, but then I’d go right back up. If it was cold, I’d play with gloves on. It was so wonderful to be so close to the sky up there, any time of year.”