Style guru Todd Oldham turns his sights on the next generation of fabulousness
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com
Have you ever cut a child’s pencil in half? Todd Oldham has. And what he discovered profoundly saddened him.
“We saw in the most popular brands, when we cut them, that the lead didn’t even go through the entire pencil,” he says, perched on a large, funky ottoman on the second floor of Forty Five Ten, the tony boutique in Downtown Dallas. The message that shallow lead sent was clear: The makers were so certain about the fatally bad design, they knew nobody — certainly no kid — would ever uncover the deception. Why not, Oldham thought, improve the design, rather than give into its obsolescence? “Kids deserve so much more.”
And that, along with a genuinely curious mind and rangy, sweeping interests in the way we live our lives, has informed Oldham’s latest project: A line of products designed specifically for children.
If you think designing for kids is easy — how would they know a bootcut from a capri pant? — guess again.
“You have to work 10 times harder when designing with kids in mind,” Oldham says. He follows, you might say, the Hippocratic Oath of design: “You must be exemplary and not cause harm.” And when it comes to books, games and educational products, you need to cast a wide net, “making items whether you’re a cognitive learner or a visual learner.”
Oldham speaks from the experience of having been, as we all were, a kid himself. But he channels those memories into his designs.
“When I was 7, I wanted to know what gouache was,” he says. (It’s a kind of opaque watercolor paint.) Finding that out — exploring his creative side — led directly into his career. He assumes children today have similar compulsions and need to find resources. “I love the weird kids. I love things that are visual. We’re here to demystify” the natural world.
He was inspired to do the best by his own parents — both still alive — whom he describes in ravenously loving terms.
“My parents are the coolest, smartest, most open-minded and generous people in the world,” Oldham says. “Just deeply lovely people.” His mom, in fact, is still one of his business partners; she and Oldham’s grandmother cultivated his interest in sewing at an early age and expressed support for his efforts.
His line at Forty Five Ten — called Kids Made Modern, following the title of Oldham book (one of two dozen he has produced over the years) — aims to, if not fill in the gap for parents, at least supplement their efforts to educate, encourage and develop children’s curiosity. And it does so in the most concrete, real-world ways.
“There are so many great things about the digital world,” Oldham says. “We can now live in our own island instead of relying on old retail models. But we have to [acknowledge] that the digital experience certainly isn’t as fulfilling [as the real world]. I still love those analog experiences. We see a modern kid as one who holds digital and analog sensibilities equally. We think of the digital as a matrix of creativity, when really it’s just a big pencil” — i.e., an instrument of creation, not the source… and definitely not the endpoint.
Working in publishing honed this desire to explore the physicality of things, which is essential to ambient learning (that is, taking in the world around you, not just what pops up on your smartphone).
“That’s the stuff that is so potent,” he says.” It comes from the tactile quality of every paper in our books. We try to be good-earth citizens.”
It’s such attention to detail that focuses his mission on overcoming what he calls a blight of design schools: The tendency to copy, not innovate. “Design schools teach [how to] cut out and duplicate. We want to show kids how to be inspired by something, but not copy it. It’s synergistic — opening up pathways of inspiration.”
Oldham’s line (not just clothes and books, but games and activities) “breaks down the functionality of things. It is a human experience — very tactile. We already have enough digital exposures but not enough analog ones, so we have tipped all our stuff into analog experiences.”
Certainly, one aspect of ambient learning he’s aware of countering is the current political/social climate, where the president has made it acceptable to normalize bad behavior.
“We now have permission to air hideous thoughts — I don’t know how we agreed to that; I certainly didn’t,” he sighs. “Bad behavior tends to be the most propelled in the news. I know I live in a bubble, but I just don’t know people who act that way. Thankfully we are moving in many cases into a move fruitful and accepting life for people who don’t line up like everyone else. Of course, some parts are accelerating and some are putrefying.” His message seems to be: Children need to engage in meaningful and creative ways to develop their empathy and shared experience, not retreat into selfishness and anger. (Oldham says New Yorkers have long barely tolerated Donald Trump as a buffoon, someone he says “lives in a purely sycophantic world — a very sad kingdom.”)
Oldham is especially happy to bring that to Dallas, where he lived in his youth and where he first began manufacturing his clothing.
“Premiering this collection at Forty Five Ten [is very meaningful to me], not only because of my connection to Dallas, but because the person who founded Forty Five Ten, Shelley Musselman, was an extraordinary woman and very influential and helpful to my career,” he says. In fact, he names icons like Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani as generous supporters of his early career who recommended Oldham to tastemakers, fashion editors and the like.
And generosity is a lesson we can all learn and pass along.
Kids Made Modern by Todd Oldham, available at Forty Five Ten.
