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My Life in Style: Nick Haramis

Inside the mind of Interview magazine’s editor-in-chief

Words: Jack Becht, Hero shoot: Simonas Berukstis

Nick Haramis enjoys the rare distinction of editing not just the magazines he’s led, but a culture he has, in part, helped shape. It’s an impressive CV: 14 years across four publications (BlackBook, Bullett, T, and Interview). His retinue is equally expansive – celebrities, luminaries, starlets – a stable from which, in 2017, he corralled 19 ‘untouchables’ (from Anna Wintour to Gloria Steinem) to release Courage is Contagious, a collection of essays penned in dedication to the enduring legacy of the former First Lady, Michelle Obama (yes, she thanked him).

Nick recreates the iconic photobooth images of Interview founder, Andy Warhol, via a Zoom shoot with photographer Simonas Berukstis.

In 2018, Haramis undertook his most ambitious project to date: the resurrection and redesign of America’s favourite pop page, Interview magazine. Founded in 1969 by Andy Warhol, and helmed thereafter by a pantheon of creative virtuosos (Glenn O’Brien and Ingrid Sischy among them), Interview (like Haramis) is now more than ever what it has always purported to be: an inflatable bouncy castle packed to the parapets with pop glitterati, cultural memetics, and a radically inclusive, socially exclusive dollop of delirium-inducing fun.

We caught up with Haramis at his lockdown retreat to reflect on the moments and milestones that characterise his inimitable life in style.

LIFE

Nick’s early inspirations and idols

"Me in my Crispin Glover phase" - Nick Haramis (and his pet hamster)
What is your earliest pop-culture memory? 

I was raised in a small paper-mill town in Canada. My access to culture was limited, although I do remember going to Phantasmagoria, the music shop in the mall, to buy the soundtrack to The Bodyguard. I’m pretty sure that was my first CD. Either that, or the original Broadway recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was very ‘not straight’.
 

Walk us through your early influences. How would you characterise your impression of them now? Did magazines matter then?

I’ve always loved freaks. It didn’t matter to me if they were nerds or goths or dropouts, only that they didn’t quite fit in: Andrea Zuckerman on Beverly Hills, 90210; Dolores Price from She’s Come Undone; Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces; Donnie in Donnie Darko. I’ve always had a crush on the underdog – still do. That’s why in any given issue of the magazine you’re just as likely to find a creative weirdo as an A-list actor. The equal embrace of the mainstream and the marginalised has always been a big part of Interview, which is why it was one of the magazines that really shaped me growing up. That, and Vanity Fair – but that’s because they always had Calvin Klein underwear ads.
 

Who were your teenage idols? And who are your greatest inspirations today?

The Mansons – Shirley and Marilyn. I’m still so in love with them today.
 

Describe your earliest celebrity encounter. 

When I was a kid, I used to hang out at the lobby of the Four Seasons in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival, waiting to spot famous people. I remember following Nick Stahl into the bathroom and waiting until he was done in the toilet to ask for his autograph. I think security asked me to leave.

 

I’ve always loved freaks. It didn’t matter to me if they were nerds or goths or dropouts, only that they didn’t quite fit in.

Nick shot by actor Jonah Hill
Nineties fashion was a hell of a scene. What stands out?

I was seven at the beginning of the ’90s, and that was around the time I was exploring a sort of Crispin Glover-like vibe. I had a pet hamster named Butter, and I wore suspenders as much as I could. The hamster later killed herself, and I haven’t really been into suspenders since. As that decade progressed, I really got into expression through neckwear. There was a bolo tie phase, a skinny tie phase, a leather tie phase, even a corduroy tie phase. I also had a year when I wore my pyjamas to school every day – in retrospect, I was going through something.
 

Let’s talk college days. What did you study? Were you writing then?

I studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal. It’s arguably the best school in Canada, and yet, at least when I was there, there was no school spirit. Everyone just chain-smoked cigarettes and spent all their time in coffee shops. Our teacher’s assistants were members of Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade. We took pride in the fact that Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright went there, even though I’m not sure either of them graduated. I was a good student, but I never took part in the school [news]paper. Instead, I reviewed movies for a free Toronto-based publication and contributed a regular column to a magazine called Maisonneuve, which involved me consuming the evening news from the night before, and four of the national newspapers that morning, and then trying to suss out the truth in all of the political spin. I’d stay out drinking until 2am and then wake up to start writing at 4.30am. I miss it.
 

What’s an article/interview you read that made you want to be a journalist?

‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’, written by Gay Talese for Esquire. Sinatra refused to give Talese an interview, so the writer followed Sinatra around for three months, observing him from a distance and talking to members of his entourage. It’s the kind of ballsy reporting that simultaneously deifies and destroys the idea of celebrity.

Nick shot by actor Jonah Hill

Nick's edit of talking-pieces for the home

CAREER

From Bullett magazine to Michelle Obama

Kate McKinnon shot by Collier Schorr on the cover of the Fall 2019 issue of Interview / Juliette Lewis shot by Yu Tsai as a diehard Daniel Radcliffe fan for the cover of Bullett magazine
What was the state of New York culture when you first arrived?

My dad drove me to the city from Montreal the day after my college graduation in 2007. Before that, I had only ever spent one day in New York. I didn’t own a cell phone, I knew no one there, and I lived with a stranger I’d met on Craigslist who always seemed to be cooking pierogies. The New York music scene was in the process of shifting from rock to pop music, but there was still a sense of grit to the city. Everyone wore tight jeans and leather jackets. The bars felt lawless and horny. Or maybe I was just in my early twenties.
 

You’ve got a knack for recognising emerging talent. Tell us about some early run-ins that left a lasting impression.

I went to New Orleans to interview the Oscar-nominated actress Quvenzhané Wallis when she was 11 years old. She was getting ready to play Annie in a remake with Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz. We went roller-skating and played arcade games and ate pizza, and by the end of it I thought we were for sure best friends. And then she said, “You get one more question. I’m done here.” Of the cover story that eventually ran, one website wrote, ‘Quvenzhané Wallis Finds New York Times Mag Interviewer So, So Boring’. It’s my own personal Pulitzer.
 

How did BlackBook happen?  Do you remember the interview for the role?

I remember the interview well. I was in my senior year of college, and I took the bus down from Canada to meet with an editor named Jess Holl. I stalked her on Myspace before our meeting, so I knew what her favorite music was, what books she was reading, and when she asked me what sort of cultural stuff I was into, I just parroted her own interests back at her. It sounds sociopathic now, and it was, but it worked.
 

After BlackBook you took a job as editorial director of Bullett magazine. What year was this? What was the vibe?

That was in 2011. I started at BlackBook as an intern and I left five years later at the top of the masthead. When Idil Tabanca and Sah D’Simone, the founders of Bullett, asked to meet me, they made it clear right away they were really creative and likely insane. Both things turned out to be true. The team at Bullett felt more like a family than anything. Everyone brought their emotional baggage to the office, no one knew what they were doing, and we were making something really special. I remember going to the National Magazine Awards the year we were nominated for Best Design, and being so aware of the fact that we were gutter punks in borrowed designer clothes who’d unintentionally crashed someone else’s fancy soiree.

 

The team at Bullett felt more like a family than anything. Everyone brought their emotional baggage to the office, no one knew what they were doing, and we were making something really special.

  • Kirsten Stewart interview for the cover of T

    "Here I am with Kristen at her house in Los Angeles, interviewing her in 2016 for the cover of T, The New York Times Style Magazine. A few months ago, we were together again watching Scream 3 and eating homemade spaghetti in a repurposed cork factory in Pittsburgh, which only strikes me as weird now that I've said it out loud."

  • Nick with Lady Gaga ahead of the release of Joanne 

    "This one time, I thought it would be interesting to have the essayist Daryl Pinckney interview Lady Gaga for me at T. When Gaga arrived, she wanted to play a few songs from her then-upcoming album, Joanne. When she got to the title song, about an aunt of hers who had died before she was born, Gaga began to cry. Like, really cry. She grabbed my right hand and grabbed Daryl’s left hand, and together, us three strangers stood holding each other while tears rolled down her face."

  • Nick and his boyfriend Misha Kahn with Amy Sedaris

    "My boyfriend Misha and I share an obsession with Amy Sedaris, so when the opportunity to put her in the magazine presented itself, I asked Mish to build a robot for her to fall in love with in the pictures. That was the fourth time I've done something with her for a magazine, and each time I wonder when she's going to file for a restraining order."

  • Nick with Dick Cavett and Seth Meyers

    "At T, I started a column called Perfect Strangers, in which we'd put two people who didn't know each other in a room together, to just see what would happen. This one was so fun."

Talk us through those first few covers.

Each issue, we ran two covers with two cover stars that somehow worked in dialogue with one another. For my first one there, we shot Daniel Radcliffe as a teen idol from the ’50s. We used the pictures from that shoot and printed them on cakes, underwear, wallpaper, and effigies – and then we shot the inimitable Juliette Lewis as the world’s most enthusiastic and most terrifying Daniel Radcliffe fan. For our Sin Issue, we had Alexander Skarsgård pose with an angelic baby goat on the streets of Chinatown, and then we reimagined Blake Lively as a fashionable Norma Desmond tromping around in her empty Upper East Side mansion.
 

So, you’re in your twenties, it’s your second job in NYC, you’re running an indie fashion mag. What’s going through your head? Was it all lights, camera, action?

Our offices were in New York’s Flower District, which isn’t exactly the filet mignon of the island. A pimp manned the entrance to the building. When we were closing an issue, we slept at work. There was one assignment I’ll never forget: I was profiling Susan Sarandon, and we met at a private club earlier in the day for lunch. That afternoon, a few hours after we’d said goodbye, I noticed I had missed a call from her. The voicemail was an invitation to meet her at the ping-pong venue she owned in Gramercy Park. We did tequila shots that night, and at some point there was a dance-off in the middle of the room.
 

You then landed the job at T, The New York Times Style Magazine – how did that change in setting feel?

Working in that building with so many esteemed journalists changed my life. I remember standing across the street from the offices on my first day of work, pumping myself up for the day ahead. I stood there and said, “Nick? You got this.” And someone stomped past me yelling, “Got what, bitch? Get out the way!”
 

Was this a foray into assignment journalism?

I travelled for the Times to India with Aziz Ansari. I flew to Shanghai to shadow Michael Kors as he made his way through Asia. I went to Singapore to learn about luxury fashion, I dined with the real-life Addams Family at their mansion in rural Ireland, and I went to Los Angeles to spend time with people like Kristen Stewart and Brad Pitt. But what I truly loved about my time there was being able to assign and problem-solve stories as an editor, which included working with writers such as Rachel Kushner, Jeffrey Eugenides, Augusten Burroughs, Bret Easton Ellis, Karl Ove Knausgård, David Byrne, and Mary Gaitskill.

Personality-driven pieces for the home, selected by Nick

Left: Nick with boyfriend Misha Kahn / Right: Nick at The White House with Michelle Obama, T Creative Director Patrick Li and photographer Collier Schorr
What makes for a truly brilliant story? Got any good ones from T?

The best ones for me are always the most surprising. When I asked Miranda July to profile Rihanna, I knew she’d come back with something unexpected. What I couldn’t have predicted was that the first half of the piece would be about the Uber driver who drove her to the interview. She and Oumarou are still in touch, and that piece remains a career high to this day.
 

Let’s talk art. Any contemporary influences we should know about?

I think that we’ll look back on this time as a really exciting period for innovative design. I’m biased, but my boyfriend Misha Kahn makes furniture that feels both prehistoric and otherworldly. There’s nothing else like it, and it appeals to me as a practice that lives at the intersection of practicality and pandemonium. I’m also currently enjoying the paintings of Christina Quarles and Louis Fratino.
 

You edited a book of essays celebrating the life and personality of Michelle Obama, which included 19 contributions from prizewinning writers, Hollywood stars and political leaders – how did this come about?  

I booked her for the cover of T, and while she was able to sit for a portrait (going to the White House to help oversee that shoot was one of the best days of my life), she wasn’t able to give us much time for the interview. Instead of doing her the injustice of a puff piece, I asked four very different types of writers – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rashida Jones, Jon Meacham and Gloria Steinem – to write essays of appreciation for the former First Lady. When that came out, I was approached by an editor at Penguin Random House to see if I would turn the idea into a book of essays. I’m really proud of that little book.

 

Fashion through the Interview lens has always been in service of the people – not the other way around.

OK, onto Interview magazine: is this the inside of your brain on paper?

I took over as the editor of Interview when it was very much a slick fashion magazine. I love fashion, but to me, fashion through the Interview lens has always been in service of the people – not the other way around. I wanted to return to the colourful, fame-obsessed era of Andy Warhol’s magazine, of the Richard Bernstein era, when it felt like you were really learning about people and scenes with unfiltered, conversational candour. That’s the magazine I grew up loving, and it’s the one I hope we’ve succeeded in bringing back. The product is very much a team effort, but, yes, it does reflect the cacophony of my brain, and the high-wire act of simultaneously loving celebrities and being amused by their absurdity.
 

What’s been your favorite celebrity-on-celebrity interview pairing?

One pairing that will always be among my favorites is RuPaul in conversation with Judge Judy. We put their call on speakerphone in the office that day.
 

Interview has such a big legacy – does that come with a sense of pressure? Where do you see Interview going?

Nah, no pressure. Of course, it comes with pressure! It was started by Andy Warhol 50 years ago, and in the time that’s passed, it feels like every important artist, writer, designer, actor, thinker, musician, and club kid has passed through its halls. But it’s a messy magazine, let’s be honest. In its half-century of life, it has seen almost everything – the moments of genius, the hard times, the scandals, the reinventions. That’s what I admire so much about this thing – it’s a love letter to the past, a mirror held up to the present, and a fairly accurate prognosticator of the future. For as long as I’m here, I want this thing to evolve and grow and keep getting better, and, most importantly, weirder. 

A selection of recent Interview covers featuring Selena Gomez, Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, Richard Madden, Jennifer Aniston and RuPaul

THE TEA

Nick spills the tea on his most memorable celebrity encounters

Is the old adage true that ‘you should never meet your heroes’?

Luckily, that hasn’t been my experience. I was working on an oral history of the life of Robert Mapplethorpe, and one of the people I interviewed for it was the author and Vanity Fair correspondent Dominick Dunne. I met him at his apartment, which was covered with ephemera – portraits of him by Annie Leibovitz, letters written to him from Princess Diana. I’d always wanted to be him and he couldn’t have been nicer. And he was a great gossip. He died shortly after we met, and I feel so lucky to have been able to spend that afternoon with him.
 

Describe your most awkward celebrity moment.

I once interviewed Sean Combs. We were sat next to other at a mixing board while he played a few songs. At one point, he asked me if I liked the music. I said, “Yes, of course, uh, Sean… Mr. Combs… Diddy… Daddy?” And then he responded, “How do I know you like it if you’re not dancing?” So, then, for the rest of our time together, I kind of lurched self-consciously back and forth to the beat.
 

How has celebrity culture evolved over your career? Is it better or worse now?

Even in my relatively short time as a journalist, I’ve watched as the power dynamic has shifted between publications and publicists. There are now so many ways for a celebrity to interact with their fans, that they don’t need magazines the way they once did. It’s now the job of journalists and editors to figure out how to cover famous people without regurgitating press releases. I remember feeling like the tide had shifted when, in an elevator on my way up to Nicki Minaj’s hotel room, her publicist said to me, “Don’t ask if she’s had butt implants.” It had never even occurred to me to ask about her butt, and yet, because of that brief exchange, it became the opening line in my story.

Nick’s everyday uniform? It’s got to be Thom Browne

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Nick at a Thom Browne fitting with Kelly Connor and Matthew Foley
People always ask who you’d invite to your dream dinner party…we want to know about a dinner party you can’t forget!

I went to a dinner for Megan Thee Stallion not long ago, and they sat me next to her. She was lovely to begin with, but got even lovelier when, early in the dinner, she started pouring Cognac, straight from the bottle, down everyone’s throats. She calls it ‘driving the boat’.
 

…But who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

I know this sounds like a line, but I approach each issue of Interview like a dinner party: who is the intellect? Who is the eye candy? Who is the funny one? Take, for instance, last year’s summer issue: Rihanna was in there, as was Courtney Love, Thierry Mugler, Tippi Hedren, Harmony Korine, Bad Bunny, Rosalia, Pee-wee Herman, and Pamela Anderson’s two hot sons. I would pay good money to sit at that table.
 

Who are your favorite designers/brands to wear day-to-day?

As far as favorite designers go, I’m a walking Thom Browne advertisement. I love how powerful and put-together I feel in Thom’s clothes. I stand taller in them. My boyfriend loves colourful, irreverent designers such as Henrik Vibskov, Bernhard Willhelm and Walter van Beirendonck, and that’s definitely rubbed off on me.
 

What’s your most standout fashion week story?

I was there when Jennifer Lopez closed the Versace show in Milan wearing a version of the famous green gown she wore to the Grammys in 2000. I remember standing next to Carine Roitfeld and we were all cheering and clapping. It was a rare display of giddy enthusiasm from a crowd whose go-to expression is sometimes a scowl.
 

Biggest fashion flop?

Don’t ask me to explain it, but there was an ill-advised and short-lived attempt to make the bow tie my sartorial calling card.

 

I know this sounds like a line, but I approach each issue of Interview like a dinner party. Who is the intellect? Who is the eye candy? Who is the funny one?

Nick and Christina Ricci, shot by Yu Tsai for BlackBook magazine
What words come to mind when you think of Selfridges?

I have such an affinity for Selfridges. Not just because of what you sell – although that is great – but also because of your interest in sustainability. I’m always ready to support a business that knows the value of both a Rick Owens coat and protecting our oceans against plastic pollution. But there’s another reason you’ll always have a place in my heart. I grew up obsessed with Christina Ricci and her movies, and everyone knew it. In high school, I worked at an Irish pub where I befriended this girl who had been close to a guy who also loved Christina Ricci. This girl used to work at Selfridges and one day Christina had come into the shop, and the girl used the opportunity to ask for her autograph, for her friend. Well, that friendship ended before she could give him the note, so I inherited – and subsequently framed – a Selfridges receipt, on the back of which was written, “Dear Chris, Happy Birthday. Love, Christina Ricci.”
 

How do you see the fashion landscape changing post COVID-19?

I don’t think anyone knows, and that’s what’s interesting to me. Just as we at Interview are being challenged to rethink how we tell stories, and how we share them with our readers, fashion companies everywhere are being forced to look at how they make clothes and how they get them into the hands of consumers. Limitation often gives birth to innovation, so maybe out of this chaos and catastrophe can come something good. At least that’s my hope.

Nick and Christina Ricci, shot by Yu Tsai for BlackBook magazine

And finally: more extraordinary moments from Nick’s camera roll...

Clockwise from top left: Maisie Williams with Thom Browne and team / A T-shirt inspired by one of Nick's old articles / Nick and Ladyfag at a Telfar fashion show / Nick at his first Interview magazine party as the new editor / Joan Collins at the Interview magazine 50th anniversary party / Inset: Kim Kardashian and North West at an Interview shoot / Nick with Felicity Jones and Mackenzie Davis / Nick and Courtney Love at Fashion Week.