LINDBERGH: How is your life going at the moment, John?

GALLIANO: I’m doing well. It’s a great journey that I’m on. I’m really grateful and enjoying life and being able to talk to you.

LINDBERGH: You know, as photographers, we do pictures, and people either like them or they hate them. But thinking about the pressure on designers—especially when they’re at a point where they have the whole world looking at them … And then you have the business people saying, “We have 4 percent less sales. What’s wrong with you?” Even if you do the most beautiful things, it’s not enough—you have to sell, too. So it seems like there is so much pressure from every side and it must take a lot to stand up to it. I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes as a designer.

GALLIANO: [laughs] It was an enormous pressure—and, I have to admit, I was perhaps not ready to deal with a lot of it. But I was enjoying what I was doing so much that the creative process is really what carried me through. Everything has a price, though. It was a great experience, but something had to give.

LINDBERGH: Well, I remember days when I would go the Café de Flore with a newspaper because a story I shot in the new Italian Vogue was coming out. I would go to the newsstand and buy it, and I would take a breakfast and watch the people. I was really fucking proud of myself. I would stay there until one o’clock in the afternoon sometimes, enjoying myself, reading the newspaper, seeing the people coming in and out. But things are different now. I mean, where do we get inspiration from now?

GALLIANO: Well, that’s a good question. What do you do to find inspiration now? It sounds to me like you enjoy being sort of voyeuristic and watching the world go by. But what do you do now for inspiration?

LINDBERGH: Like a little dog, you pick up things in the street. I have not taken inspiration from the fashion shows. I don’t even really go to too many of the fashion shows—and have not for 15 years—because I don’t want to be inspired by the same things as everyone else. If everyone is inspired by the same things, then of course, you all do the same pictures. Everybody comes from the show and says, “Military is it this year. Photographers are going to do military stories!” But I’d rather be somewhere totally different and get my inspiration from there. That, for me, is a way to do different pictures.

GALLIANO: I can totally relate. It’s funny because sometimes I’ve missed connecting flights and I’ve ended up stuck in some badly designed airport, so I start watching people, and the things that you see at airports are just incredible from a stylistic point of view. You see people who have left countries with hope, and then you others returning from a crazy holiday with remnants of what they brought with them. You see people from different ethnic cultures, a surfer boy with bleach blond hair, people all dressed up in different kinds of clothing, and everything mixing together and all of these characters crossing. For me, that’s the beginning of a line—of a silhouette, of a collection—and I’m finding that sitting in an airport.

LINDBERGH: I remember the inspiration trips that you like to take, which I’ve always thought were a fantastic idea. To go somewhere where nobody knows you and to keep your eyes open … That was a beautiful concept in terms of putting yourself in a place to be inspired.

GALLIANO: I loved those trips. To be able to immerse yourself in a completely different culture … Sometimes I would get through two or three guides because I wanted to see the real China, the real India—I was fearless. But little by little, we’d get to see real things, which sometimes meant hiking or taking a bus to cross through villages for three days. You’d be traveling and nothing would be happening, but then, all of the sudden, you’d come across a village and a hundred ladies would run out in red saris that were embroidered in gold, and it would be a wedding festival. You can’t see that kind of thing in books, Peter—not in the same way. It’s just a moment where you’re there by chance, where god says, “You’re ready to see this. We’re going to let you see this.”

LINDBERGH: That’s how the first-class trips and lounges kill you. All that stuff keeps you away from the real world by makes everything uniform.

GALLIANO: Yes, you’ve got to get out of the office. It’s essential. Even if it’s just to understand how women live all over the world or to discover different clothes, a different cut, a different drape, or a different way that people put themselves together. All of those kinds of inspirations and influences find their way into your pictures. As I mentioned earlier about Stéphane, with the feline eye and the idea of bracing against the elements … There are real things inspire the artistry of the images, which is part of what makes them so powerful.

LINDBERGH: You can only really invent something if you connect yourself to the real world—whatever that means. It doesn’t even have to be something as exotic as the backstreets of Bombay, but you have to be connected to the real world, and from there, you can find something that becomes your thing. It seems, though, like a lot of photographers sit in their offices or in their studios now and look through fashion magazines and say, “Wow, that story is great! Let’s do something like that!” And when you come to the shoots today, editors or clients will come with a pile of pictures by other people and say, “This is what we want to do.” Then they say, “But it’s only for inspiration. We don’t want to do exactly that.” But 20 minutes later, when everything is done—the hair, the makeup—and you’ve started to shoot, they come with one of those pictures in hand and say, “Let’s start with this one.” As a photographer, what can you say? You can only say, “Fuck off.” No? [Galliano laughs] So that’s how it seems to work today.

GALLIANO: It’s true from a designer’s point of view, too. I’ve had a little time to visit some schools, and you find that the kids are also tearing pages out of magazines and that’s their inspiration. It’s great to like a picture, but you have to try to understand it and get behind it and connect with where it’s coming from. You’ve got to really feel it, which is what you’re saying as well. You need to have your own experience, your own connection, your own vision to create something different.

LINDBERGH: I learned something very early in this business—or whatever this is, because this beautiful thing that we call photography isn’t really a business. But if I was starting to work on a project, like a big story for Franca [Sozzani] for Italian Vogue, I would look at other pictures. But I learned very early that the more I was looking at other pictures, the less I knew what to do myself. So I figured out that you have to set that aside and just sit down, take a pencil and a piece of paper, and think what you want to do. That is the only way, I think, to do things that are important later.