Off the Cuff - Carson Kressley [2]
So I know what it’s like not to feel good about yourself, and I also know how great it can feel to finally embrace who you really are. That’s what I want to help people do—be confident and enjoy who you are. (Are you a jean or a khaki? Maybe you’re a Jackie. But that’s another book.)
Anyway, I was definitely not born wrapped in a Prada blanket. My dad’s in the car business and my mom is the child of dairy farmers in rural Pennsylvania. But the other big influences on my life were my paternal grandparents, who were in the horse business. As we got older, my sister and I got more and more involved in equestrian sports. The horse world is a very, very glamorous one, and one filled with fabulous clothes and rich heritage. By the time I was fifteen, I was traveling all over the United States showing horses at national competitions. I met sophisticated people who lived in big cities. I met movie stars and the heads of major corporations. I met gay people. I was seeing all these amazing clothes that they didn’t have at the Chess King at the Lehigh Valley mall. I was like, “Wow, there’s something else out there.”
After I graduated from Gettysburg College in 1991, I took a job with the Equestrian Federation of the United States so I could move to New York. But after a few years there I learned that man cannot live on nonprofit wages alone. One day when I was working out at the gym in some super preppy outfit, carrying a Ralph Lauren plaid basketball from the holiday ’94 gift catalog—I bought something like ninety gallons of fragrance to get it for free—I was approached by a headhunter who told me I was “so Ralph Lauren.”
Two days later I had an interview, and in a few weeks I was a gopher for the top executives at Ralph Lauren. (Forever in the back of my brain I’ll know that Ralph’s brother Jerry Lauren likes his coffee black with two Sweet’n Lows at 6:45 in the morning.)
For the next seven years, I worked for Ralph Lauren and got to see every side of the company, from design and manufacturing to merchandising and advertising. I learned about the nuts and bolts of men’s clothing: the gauge of a sweater and the thread count of a dress shirt. I visited fashion shows and fabric vendors and design houses. I got really great hands-on teaching from the masters, people like Ralph and Jerry Lauren and John Varvatos. It was such an education, better than I could have gotten in any design school.
The Art of the Tszuj
When I worked at Ralph Lauren, whenever we were styling looks for runway shows or on models, Ralph and Jerry Lauren would turn to me and say, “Carson give that a little tszuj.” “Tszuj it” just means tweak it, finesse it, make it better, make it personal. It might mean paying attention to the details: a little roll of the cuff, a tweak of the collar, or pushing up sleeves. It might be as simple as halfway tucking in a sweater, opening a button or two on your shirt, or tweaking the angle of your ballcap.
The whole reason for tszujing is to take your look over the top. It brings an outfit to life and makes it look like it’s not on a mannequin. Tszujing is being alive. I tszuj, therefore I am.
(Tszuj not, lest ye be tszujed!) So just tszuj it, people!
Ultimately, I became a stylist in the advertising division. That meant that when Ralph Lauren clothing was advertised in a catalog, I was the fashion police officer styling the clothes, selecting the models, helping with the locations. A stylist is not a designer, and that’s what I love about it—it’s all about tweaking. It’s mixing