New York City. I’m broke, bartending and hustling music out of a bedroom studio in Manhattan. My beeper goes off.
Nobody important ever paged you. Important people had assistants who called from offices. This was a page. From a friend. Working for some fashion designer named Cynthia Rowley.
Their music guy quit. They needed someone. Fast.
“Hey, you want to do a fashion show?”
I didn’t know what a fashion show was. I mean, I knew what it was. But I had no idea what it meant professionally, creatively, financially. None.
Five hundred dollars. To make music. I was in.
So I did it. Produced the whole thing. At the time, in the late nineties, there weren’t many musicians who could also sit down at a computer and write, edit, and remix in a sequencing program. I was one of them. I went by Onda. Wave in Spanish. It felt right since my last name means “The Water” in Italian.
Apparently the show made noise. The kind of noise that travels fast in small rooms full of powerful people.
A few days later the phone rings. Kevin Krier. Legendary. A name that meant something in fashion the way certain names mean something on stages. He wanted me to audition for a client. Unnamed. Unknown to me.
The assignment: remix Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again.” Three different styles. Go.
I did it. Sent it off. Waited.
“The client wants to meet you. In Paris.”
Paris. I had never been to Europe. Never been anywhere that required a passport and a sense of occasion. Inside I was losing my mind. Outside I played it like this happened every Tuesday.
It did not happen every Tuesday.
We landed. Got into a car. Nice car. The kind of car that makes you sit up straight without being told to. We’re moving through Paris, down Avenue George V, past things I’d only seen in movies, and Kevin turns to me with the weight of a man about to deliver news that will either make or break you.
“You’re about to meet Tom Ford.”
I turned to Rene, my roommate, my new business partner, the only other person in that car who had any idea what was happening.
“How is he related to Ford Motors? And why are they doing a fashion show?”
Kevin looked at me like I had just asked what wine goes with a gas station sandwich.
He told me to get serious. That moments like this don’t come twice. That lives get changed in rooms like the one we were about to walk into.
I was twenty-something, clueless, and carrying absolutely zero reverence for a man that the entire fashion world treated like a deity.
And that, it turns out, was exactly the right way to walk into that room.
Tom Ford. The room. The music. He talked about how he creates, what he hears in his head, what he needed someone to translate into sound. I listened. I talked back like he was a normal human being, because to me, he was. I didn’t know enough to be intimidated.
He found that refreshing. Or at least that’s what I was told later.
Music Directors for Gucci. And Yves Saint Laurent.
We flew to Milan. Produced the Gucci show. Then to Paris for Tom Ford’s first YSL show. Yves Saint Laurent himself, the man, the myth, the most iconic figure in the history of fashion, was stepping down. Passing the torch. To Tom Ford. In front of the entire world.
And we made the music for it.
I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of what was happening until years later, when people who had been in that industry their entire lives would look at me and say, quietly, with a kind of reverence I never expected:
“Do you know what that moment meant?”
We produced eight collections for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.
