Quotes from Hailey Gates

I would wear entirely one color: tutus, furry pants. It was totally outrageous. My family was deeply embarrassed to be seen with me.

High fashion has become representative of stability in unstable places; that allows you to have a voice in the world stage.

In China, I had my body lit on fire. And in Russia, I took a bath in reindeer blood, which apparently had some kind of youth-enhancing elements.

Women's bodies have become a real battleground for politics.

A sudden intimacy occurs when someone does your hair.

I always struggle auditioning, actually, because I'm so obsessed with era-appropriate clothing.

Everybody gets dressed every day, and whatever you decide to get dressed in that morning is communicating something.

Some of us are lucky enough to choose what we wear, and some of us don't have that luxury, but we all are communicating something to the world around us by what we wear, no matter if it's sweatpants or a tuxedo.

I have a 'Mailer-Breslin and the 51st State' poster, and a neon-pink sign of Raoul's in SoHo, one of my favorite restaurants.

Maintaining a sense of humor is key to getting people to also focus on the crises at hand.

I was, like, a really embarrassing, precocious child.

At one point, we were across the street from the Sharon Tate house; at another, we lived in Elvis's old Bel Air bachelor pad. It was where he first met the Beatles.

This idea of 'laicite' has been weaponized, in a way, to discriminate against people, and this idea of who gets to be French is really complicated and interesting.

It's wild, how many places of conflict that have fashion weeks. It's becoming some sort of marker for these countries that says, 'We are in conversation with the rest of the world.'

We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.

Fashion weeks tend to be places of refuge for outsiders.

The Congo is so fun. The ideal body type coveted by women in the Congo is this extremely curvaceous body. They're going through a number of extreme measures to get that kind of body form, and one of them is by using bouillon cubes.

I actually find it a lot easier to interview people I don't agree with because I'm far more curious about how they've arrived at that place.

If you take the fashion out of it, clothing has a lot of information - about how we feel about ourselves, how we'd like to feel about ourselves, and what we'd like to be: If you show up to an interview in sweatpants and a T-shirt, I'm going to deal with you in a really different way.

Having long hair has allowed me to enter orthodox or religiously conservative situations with slightly more ease.

It's really just my Hammurabi code of journalism ethics, that I don't want to ask someone to do something that I won't do myself.

I'm not a journalist. I have not gone to school for this.

I never thought I would go to Gaza. It's incredibly difficult to get into, and when you get there, it's a war zone. Then they have this beach, and there's this incredible, vibrant beach culture there, which is something that I grew up with in Southern California.

I wrote a play that I directed and I was in, and I paid for the sets and the costumes and to put it up in a theater all through modeling. It really afforded me a lot of creative control in my life.