Interview with Lauren Cerand

You work in publicity, and a lot of my readers have professional lives in which they have to consider their own public image. What is something everyone can be doing to manage their “brand” (for lack of a better term)? What is a common mistake you see in how people manage publicity? Is it in how the topic itself is understood?

The biggest challenge is presenting the messy reality of who we are as curious, flawed, passionate human beings who are fundamentally living real life elsewhere as this virtual reality unspools beside it. My best advice is not to conflate the latter with the real thing, for better or for worse. Your social media should be an edited version of who you are in person that puts forward your principles and expresses that which you care about most. I have absolutely zero time for people who go online just to tear other people down. I’d rather be walking in the park, looking at the birds. The biggest mistakes I see people make are typing before thinking and being shy about sharing their success with people who already like them.

You love fashion. Tell me more about how your relationship with clothes. Has has it changed over the years?

When I was younger, I was more seduced by novelty, I suppose. I definitely have had a consistent style over the years, but I was also moving through one phase or another, rather than doing that thing that we all know is really smart: slowly building a small, reliable wardrobe of the best key pieces I can afford. I’m very confident in wearing whatever moves me. Most of my fashion cues come from books, art, old movies, things I see on the subway; rarely from a runway or a current trend, so I suppose I’ve always been bold about doing what I like in that regard. I remember a very specific period when I was about seven and could not be convinced that a polo shirt with the collar up and my pink suspenders was not the last word. I certainly wore that look like I believed it, and I did. 

How do you get dressed each morning? How do you choose what to wear? 

I tend to have a certain vision at any one time that is so specific that everything falls into place pretty quickly in the morning. My assistant said she knew it was me when I walked into a bar years ago wearing all white. I do feel myself being very powerfully affected by colors, so my wardrobe often reflects whichever one I feel has the strongest influence over me at a given moment (right now everything that catches my eye is cobalt blue).

What are some of your favorite everyday pieces? What about those special, treasured ones? Do these intersect? 

I’ve lost about 25 pounds since the beginning of the year and I’ve given most of my clothes away at this point including some ballgowns I nearly shed a sentimental tear over parting with yesterday. In one of them, I ran barefoot down a very staid street in London, right past a man who was stunned to then be seated next to me at dinner. Much later, he reminded me when I was unsure of myself what a striking vision I had been, doing my thing. Right now I’m mostly alternating two black leotards from a tap-dancing class I took last year, with a pair of black velvet palazzo pants that I can’t bear to part with just yet, and dangling earrings by Angela Caputi, an iconic jewelry designer based in Florence. And I’m very into the look. My absolute favorite pieces would be a winter white custom-made coat by Cozbi Cabrera, that half-way through I asked to have altered in the cutaway style to match a wonderful Joshua Reynolds portrait of Lady Seymour Worsley, whose biography I happened to be reading then; old French handbags given to me by the important women in my life; and seven silver molten rings I made in a jewelry class taught by Savannah King at Jewelry Arts in New York. I like to wear them all at once. My most consistent habit would have to be wearing a silk scarf tied under my chin like an old-fashioned grandmother with my Emmanuelle Khanh sunglasses I found at a thrift store in San Francisco many years ago. And red lipstick.

in her apartment, image via Sunday Routine

We both share a love for Marella Agnelli. Who else do you admire, so that I may also purchase their coffee books and pretend to have naturally excellent taste?

Marella is pretty singular. When I was in Turin last summer, I turned to my sister after we visited the Agnellis’ art museum (Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli) on top of the old FIAT factory, over the rooftop race track, and said, I’ve done everything I came to Italy to do. I admire her Italian elegance, her ability to highlight her best characteristics also in a very Italian way, and her canny way of drawing a nearly inimitable through line between personal style, entertaining and life in gardens. Right now I have a picture of Leonora Carrington on my refrigerator next to a quote by Natasha Ramsay-Levi that I cut out of a magazine: “To make a good fashion moment, you have to deal with the past and the present. It’s this combination between what has always been beautiful and the zeitgeist, l’air du temps.”

You said something recently that’s stayed with me, in relation to being open to how much you charge for your services and not being shy to command a certain rate – you have no reservations about the value of your work. Can you please expound?

I have been doing what I do for nearly twenty years, and I consider my personal time priceless, in part because I gave so much of it away while I pursued my career relentlessly in my twenties and thirties, when in retrospect I wish I had focused on being young. I really beat myself up over that one, but it’s not that original to feel wiser with age. So when I sell my time now, it’s not cheap. There isn’t much of it to go around, and I am well aware of the value it commands. Decades as a freelancer will teach you like no school on earth that the first person who pays for underestimating you is you.

I want to talk a little about ambition. When you were younger, how did your ambitions manifest themselves? And where are you now in relation to them? How has your ambition changed?

When I was younger, I really thought money was all there is. That was very much of the world that I came out of, that shaped me (not having it as much as having it, and experiencing the former after the latter). I rebelled in every conceivable way, from beginning my career working for labor unions to shifting to a freelance career in the arts, but I confused passion for my work with passion for my life. I’ve had to undo a lot of that thinking, mostly along the lines of realizing that almost everything in life matters more than money. But it does pay the rent. I’ve cut my work by about sixty percent in the last two years, and made a conscious choice to live more simply. Now that I’m not sad like I used to be, I don’t shop as much. Spending time in Italy last year reset a lot of my habits, and made me want to live there, or elsewhere in Europe, long-term, where money is not the measure of quality of life. Long walks bring me solace. As do the faces of the people I love.

Lauren’s garden (and kitty!)

From our conversation, it seems like you have struck an ideal balance between work and engaging with the world outside of it. How did you get outside of that mindset of all work, no play? Did some of it come with professional maturity?

A month ago, I had a minor medical crisis and remember thinking, if you hadn’t spent your whole life working, you wouldn’t be alone now. What you need is an emergency contact. I’m fine now, but the moment was profoundly sobering and immediately transformed my relationships.  So did being in Florence last fall, when I spent two weeks with a small group of friends and talked to the same people every day and rediscovered depth and nuance in the process, while living a life steeped in what I experienced as the most concentrated beauty of all time. So much of my New York life was sorted by the perceived value of the transaction, booking drinks and dinner dates six months out, and seeing people maybe twice a year. And prioritizing those meetings as work, with the social aspects coming second, or third, or last, or not at all. I woke up one morning in Florence and I walked down to the river and stood on the Ponte Santa Trinita and I saw my friend rowing and I waved to him and I ran to the other side and waved again, and then I went for a coffee and then we met for lunch, and I remember thinking that I had the same responsibilities to my clients that I have in New York, but that my life was completely different and that I could make different choices about how I spent my time, and with who. That was the beginning of the biggest shift to date, and I edited every aspect of my existence, including accepting painful endings, too. I used to sell my time like it was a stock market of one, and honestly considered anything unsold as wasted. I wish I could go back and help that woman, although I also know that was how I was able to make myself a success in my field, so I am grateful to her, too. She made the life I have now not only possible, but plausible. I think of my time as the exact opposite now; if I am going to sell it on demand, it has to compensate for whatever I might have done for myself in those hours.

What are some of your other passions and hobbies?

I recently took up jewelry making and I love it, especially working with metals to explore organic forms. This week, I’m taking a basic skills intensive that will happen over two weekends, and I’ve signed up for another short course in wax molding this spring. If it keeps satisfying me as much as it has, I’m going to go to night school this fall at Pratt Institute for a certificate in Jewelry Design and Marketing. I love sculpture too, and am deeply inspired by artists like Louise Nevelson. Today I spent the afternoon with my neighbor, sharing a homemade Sunday lunch with half a bottle of wine and giving our garden furniture a fresh coat of paint for the season, and it felt so good to work with my hands after years of a job that can sometimes seem so ephemeral, in a medium that can disperse like dust. I don’t think of the garden as a hobby as much as an exercise in tenderness, and I often say that I feel that it tends me, too.

And one book related question – what are some of your favorite books? What have you re-read, many times?

Right now, for pleasure, I’m on a big Andre Aciman kick. And I’ve read and re-read everything that James Salter wrote so many times that when he said the following, when asked about the topic of great novels in history at the Center for Fiction, I memorized it without notes: “The Leopard was published posthumously. His wife didn’t care about literature, she liked smoking and clothes. He was an aristocrat. They lived in Palermo. That’s everything in the world right there.”

Finally – please share something surprising about yourself!

Every few months I take a trip up to the Cloisters just to look at one mysterious piece of 15th Century jewelry that has no known provenance and says only, Autre ne veut (I want no other). But I doubt that would surprise anybody.