Brenda’s Business with Youssef Marquis

BRENDA WEISCHER: Your office hints at a very distinctive personal affection to fashion and design. So, before we get to your career, I would like you to talk a little bit about your personal journey with aesthetics. I think it led you to create your job, right?

YOUSSEF MARQUIS: Part of the reason why I love Riccardo [Tisci] and Rick [Owens] is because I was the kid and teenager who was obsessed with The Matrix, grunge, the gothic aesthetic, The Addams Family, vampires, and all of that. Helmut Lang, Yohji [Yamamoto], [Martin] Margiela, and all the designers who had this very specific approach to fashion were very formative for me. Two things came together in my career: this deeply rooted love for darker fashion and the educated knowledge that came out of that, plus an obsession with popular culture. I love big landmark movies, bigger things that move society. Keeping up with celebrities. This was all before the social media era. These two things could potentially move towards each other, I kept that in mind while starting my first internships in communications.

A defining moment for me was working at Lanvin under Alber Elbaz, who really made me fall in love with the process of how fashion is created through incredible talent. I was a press assistant, but things were still so old school that I found myself in charge of celebrity requests, dressings, and stylings even at the very beginning because it wasn’t such a big thing yet. It was more like, “Do you like this? Ok, you do it.” So I ended up dressing Alicia Keys and Celine Dion. Alber was one of the first people who truly understood placing product on celebrities.

I then met Carine [Roitfeld], who was the EIC of Vogue Paris at the time and was often working with Riccardo at the very early stages of his Givenchy era. She told me, “You have to meet Riccardo.” She’s not only a creative but a visionary. She saw potential there, saw how it could work. She introduced me to Riccardo, his comms team, and I left Lanvin to work at Givenchy. Mind you, we were four people in the comms team when I started. I came to work on the celebrity side of things.

The first giant thing we did was the Madonna tour. At that point, Riccardo had been at the brand for two years and people were like, “Why is it getting so dark?” or “that’s not Givenchy.” But one thing Riccardo taught me and everyone around him was that when you are sure about something, you keep going. You ignore the noise and you keep going with your vision. And people eventually started to get it. Around 2007 was the tipping point and people started being like, “Oh, this is it.” And for the next ten years, it never stopped being it. We worked so hard; we didn’t have the means of communication that the other big houses did.