Deez Interviews: Tilden Bissell, on how fashion media has pivoted + where she goes for visual inspiration
Today’s interview is with W Magazine’s digital designer Tilden Bissell. We talked about how the pandemic has changed her work, especially when everything shut down right after fashion month; ways she’s seen designer lines adapt, and the unexpected superpower she’s picked up from working in the industry. Enjoy!
What is your day-to-day like nowadays?
Fashion Month wrapped up two weeks or so before everything started closing down; now I’m working out of Philadelphia, where I grew up, and my idea of “me time” is walking to my neighbor’s farm to feed their llamas and emus — a far cry from W’s downtown Manhattan office.
Someone once told me about finding your “golden hour” for productivity, and I’ve come to accept that early mornings are when I do my best work. Usually I’ll focus on projects with a longer lead time, such as video editing, animations and collages, or I’ll use the time to knock out any writing projects I want to get ahead of. I feel very lucky to have found a place that lets me produce visual content as well as contribute as a writer. I just finished a piece on Evanie Frausto — a hairstylist who has been creating “digital dos” in quarantine — and a fun piece about Baby Foot, of all things.
After that, I pivot to daily Instagram stories: I design and adapt copy for them, which takes up a good chunk of my day. I try to treat our Instagram stories as daily mini zines — packaged around a theme, franchise or even color palette, so they tell a cohesive story.
I’m sure it feels like several centuries have passed since Fashion Month, but what was working it like?
Every Fashion Month, we create GIFs for each show our photographer shoots to run on W’s Instagram stories — it’s so much fun to capture these little moments of Gigi Hadid, Anok Yai, or Kaia Gerber before the runway. The biggest change is working late during New York Fashion Week because we cover so much, then waking up a little earlier to stay on top of things coming from different time zones for London, Milan and Paris.
It’s strange to go from a period of high energy to staying at home, especially because the future of fashion shows are a bit of a question mark. If you don’t follow WWD, Business of Fashion or The Fashion Law, some brands have started to eschew fashion shows altogether, with Saint Laurent being the first to formally announce moving to its own schedule and Gucci announcing their plan to do the same.
The Spring/Summer 2021 men’s shows have already been shifted online, leaving the September women’s shows to be determined. Additionally, brands like Dries Van Noten published an open letter pushing for clothes to be sold in the season they’re meant for, which would reduce waste, and also customer discounts.
How has the pandemic affected the way W thinks about covering fashion?
There are a lot of industry-wide questions we should consider: what do fashion editorials, digital and print, look like if you can’t have photoshoots? Some people consider non-essential shopping — which obviously is a huge part of fashion — an ethical dilemma, so how do we pivot articles to reflect that? High fashion has historically been a fairly elitist endeavor, which is antithetical to the kind of content people are gravitating towards during a pandemic.
At W, we’ve developed a bunch of new series in the past few months: “W Movie Club”, where a member of the staff picks their top 5 films to stream now; “Stuck in my Head”, a rumination on weird fashion nostalgia, like Roisin Murphy’s outfits or the Fashion Cafe of the early 00s; and “One Fun Thing”, a Q&A with artists, designers, and celebrities about an activity that’s keeping them sane in quarantine, in addition to some polls around quotes and images from the W archive. We’ve also been leaning more on self-shot videos and on photo illustration done in-house as necessary for features.
Something that really interests me is the intersection of design and social media since it’s a large portion of my job. There are a few other brands — aside from W, of course — who’ve done a really great job of marrying their voice on Instagram stories with the current situation.
Take, for example, Man Repeller’s series #GoingNowhereButFuckItImGettingDressed; it’s fun, snackable content that builds a dialogue with their community which is really important right now. Bottega Veneta’s “Bottega Residency” series is a very on-brand pivot to personalizing their own content creation — and more importantly — I just love how it looks.
In general, what's something that has surprised you about working for a high fashion magazine?
Being able to identify a piece of clothing’s brand and season just by looking at it. I can’t do it for every designer, but it’s a skill I never thought I’d develop.
Also, I always get asked “just how much is it actually like The Devil Wears Prada?” Honestly, not that much. It’s just a bunch of cool people who are really into clothes, and even then, a lot of us — myself included — just wear all black every day.
And finally, what's one place where you've been getting visual inspiration from lately?
It’s been feeling like a treat to take a break from the digital world, so I’ve been getting back to my painting roots (I actually majored in Fine Arts, not Graphic Design) by looking at a lot of classical art books. It’s amazing how much detail is packed into every work and it’s so different from my day-to-day, where everything has a tight turnaround and only really lives for 24 hours.
Before quarantine, I really loved taking walks to pick up matcha, buying magazines and reading them in McCarren or Washington Square Park. It’s fun to see what smaller zines, journals and creators outside the fashion bubble are doing, so this feels like a variation on that. Growing creatively doesn’t happen in a vacuum — you have to constantly seek out new (or sometimes revisit old) inspiration to question how you make work.
Don’t forget to follow @tilden.bissell on IG, and have a good (well, you know) weekend!