Latest news with #CuttingRoomFloor
The Star
3 days ago
- Business
- The Star
A new generation of fashion lovers are just getting to know Steve Madden
Steve Madden, the eponymous founder of the famous shoe brand – and a man with a somewhat complicated history – said he had never seen anything quite like this in his 35-year career. He did an interview with the Cutting Room Floor fashion podcast that was posted online recently, and the reaction on social media (and beyond) has been overwhelmingly positive. 'Usually people are like 'what do you want from a con man?'' he said in a phone interview. But this time, 'people were calling me and they're like, 'Did you read the comments?'' he said. 'Some people want me to run for president.' He referred to the controversies and struggles he has been a part of over the years before pausing and adding that 'it's nice to be appreciated'. Political office isn't in his future, but later in the phone interview he said that he would consider running 'for the president of the board in my building' after all this positive attention. In the podcast interview, Madden and the host, Recho Omondi, touched on a range of topics, including his past white-collar crimes and the current government. Clips of the interview have been viewed by millions of users on TikTok, and Omondi's Patreon, which is where the podcast is posted, received 'thousands' of new subscribers, she wrote in a recent post. Read more: Style reigns supreme: Catherine, Princess of Wales, proves she's still got it In the days after the interview was released, stock in the Steve Madden brand rallied to its highest point in a month, and many TikTok users noted they were going to buy his shoes. In an emailed statement, the company said Google searches for 'Steve Madden' were up more than 60% and website visits from organic search had increased by 10%. The Steve Madden brand offers popular footwear styles at more affordable prices. Photo: Instagram/Steve Madden It's a case study in the best kind of press engagement, particularly for a brand that has, for years, been outside the trendy spotlight and more often associated with clearance aisles and outlet stores, said Matthew Quint, director of the Center On Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School. In the podcast interview, Madden owned up to the securities fraud he committed with Jordan Belfort, which landed him in prison in the early 2000s (Belfort's story inspired Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street ). 'I was too ambitious, I was too greedy,' he said. 'I was complicit – I'm not blaming anybody.' On tariffs and the global trade war, he noted that policymakers, and in particular president Donald Trump, 'fundamentally do not understand what they're doing'. He also embraced the brand's reputation for copying styles from luxury fashion houses at cheaper price points. 'It's like calling the Beatles a knockoff band because they would take a little bit from Motown and a little bit from Elvis,' he said in the podcast interview. On the day the podcast was released, Madden sued Adidas for its 'efforts to monopolise' stripes after the sneaker brand complained that two of Madden's sneaker designs, with two stripes instead of three, infringed its trademark on the three stripes. Most of the reaction to the podcast interview on TikTok and Reddit praised Madden's candor and his plain way of speaking. Others found it refreshing for a business leader to speak so bluntly about the current administration's policies. For a younger generation, the interview also served as a moment of discovery, with many learning for the first time about Madden – his background, his struggles – or just putting a face to a name they have seen or heard over the years, Quint said. 'Suddenly it's like, Oh, that's Steve the shoe guy?' he said. 'There's sort of a surprise factor in all of it – the uncovering of who he is and thinking of that brand in a new light.' Madden admitted that perhaps a younger generation was meeting him for the first time. 'I'm kind of like an author, an author that you know very well but you don't know what he looks like,' he said. 'Then they get to see me – they've been wearing my shoes forever but I'm a real guy. I'm a real guy who goes to the grocery store and curses too much, you know, and tries to be a good dad.' In fact, his story – already extensively covered in the media, in his autobiography and in The Wolf Of Wall Street – is seemingly so fresh for a younger generation that many TikTok users suggested Netflix should produce a documentary about him. Read more: How today's best-dressed men aren't just wearing style – they're shaping it During the podcast interview he was shown a pair of Alaia shoes that his brand had replicated. His reaction was to ask, referring to his customers, 'Do you think some of my girls even know who Alaia is?' That line struck many who viewed the interview as endearing. 'From day one, I have loved Steve Madden and now I love him even more,' Gabriella Masseran said in a TikTok post, reacting to the interview. 'He's for the girls,' she added, before walking her followers through her personal collection of Madden's shoes. 'It felt really genuine – he wasn't snooty,' said Victoria Thompson, 31, a government worker and content creator in Augusta, Georgia. 'I felt like that could have been my uncle. And he called us his girls. I'm like, you know what? Let me go support him.' After seeing the clips on TikTok over the weekend, she drove to the nearest Dillard's department store and bought a pair of Steve Madden slippers. They look like a type produced by Hermes, but are far less expensive. – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How Gordi went from doctor to musician, and back again: ‘In the hospital, you have to learn how to disassociate'
Sophie Payten has lived two lives. In one, she is Gordi, the Aria-nominated singer-songwriter who has worked with Bon Iver and Troye Sivan, and made Chris Martin cry (more on that later). In the other, she is a medical doctor. 'In the early years of my career, I tried to really not talk about medicine in my music life, because they felt so separate,' the 32-year-old says. 'The pandemic really merged them together in a way that I didn't ask for or anticipate.' We meet midweek at Heartbreaker, a Melbourne dive bar close to Payten's heart – 'I'm a huge advocate for a late-night pizza slice,' she grins. But the time we're talking about is far removed from the hustle and bustle surrounding us. In early 2020, Payten had just completed her first year as a junior doctor and quit to focus on music. But when touring ground to a halt, she was whisked back to hospital wards for the next 18 months. 'I didn't write anything during that period … I had no space for creativity,' she recalls. 'I am an intensely emotional person … but in the hospital, you have to really learn how to disassociate in a way, because you're surrounded by suffering, and if you take all that on, you would explode.' It was a while before Payten started writing her third album, Like Plasticine, the title inspired by the medical exam performed to certify death: 'I was really struck by the way that people appear after they've just passed away, and how their skin has this waxy appearance … That made me think of plasticine and how we change into all these shapes in our lives.' A 'very nice friendship' with a patient inspired the ethereal Anaïs Mitchell duet PVC Divide, which opens with a powerful, harrowing lyric: 'She said that she watched him die on FaceTime.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The patient was recovering from a brain tumour and preparing to go home – but then it aggressively returned. Payten sat with him while he video-called his daughter to say he wouldn't survive. 'That was just indescribable, to witness someone contemplating that,' she says. 'I'd never been motivated before to take my experiences from the hospital into my songwriting, but I was so profoundly affected by that.' After lockdowns ended, Payten booked herself into a studio for two intensive 10-day writing sessions, six months apart. 'It was a funny sensation, because I had always felt like songwriting was this impulse that I couldn't control, or like a tap that I couldn't turn off, and suddenly it was off,' she says. 'It was – not to harp on the water metaphor – more like fishing things out of a well.' Payten's partner, fellow singer-songwriter Alex Lahey, accompanied her to the studio on the first day, resulting in the album's latest single, Cutting Room Floor. 'It's truly a positive, inspiring force in my life, to be that close to another songwriter,' Payten says. 'It's like having two brains instead of one.' Plasticine's first two singles, Peripheral Lover and Alien Cowboy, are sonically worlds apart. The first is a glittering synth-pop anthem that Payten was initially unsure about. 'I was terrified of that song for so long … I just wasn't sure if I was ready to embrace that kind of deep pop,' she says. 'I got to a place where I was like, 'I'm just going to get out of the way of this thing and [let it] be what it wants to be.' The latter is all distortion and experimentation, as Payten ponders a speculative queer utopia. On the album, fuzzy iPhone recordings sit alongside polished pop, with one thing holding it all together. 'The reason I love making music, and the reason that I think some people relate to my music, is simply because of the emotion of the thing – I wanted to preserve some of the rawness of those emotions,' Payten says. 'In some moments, you feel so close to the origin of the actual song, and [in] some of them you feel like you stand back and are looking at them from afar.' The album's eclecticism reflects Payten's own diverse taste; her influences include Tegan and Sara, Broken Social Scene, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lomelda, Hurray for the Riff Raff and Caroline Polachek. That range makes Payten's music widely accessible, too – it has featured on soundtracks including The Walking Dead, To All the Boys and, in a full-circle moment, Grey's Anatomy. 'When I was a teenager, I absolutely feasted on Grey's Anatomy and the One Tree Hill soundtrack,' she says. These days Payten lives between Melbourne and Los Angeles, but tirelessly advocates for the Australian music scene as a member of the Music Australia Council, and with Over Our Dead Body, a live music initiative she co-runs with Lahey. 'The issues that the music industry is facing … are very big cultural, economic, social issues,' she says, listing the discoverability and charting of Australian music, and dwindling gig attendance numbers, as some. 'Sometimes it feels like Whac-a-Mole.' As for the moment she shared with Chris Martin? The story goes that Coldplay wanted to meet local artists during the band's Australia tour last year, and Payten went along. Martin singled her out, inviting her to play a song on the piano. She performed her song Lunch at Dune, and when she opened her eyes, he was crying. Her video retelling the story went gangbusters online – but sadly, there's no footage of the actual moment. 'The only viral moment I'd had previously was a video I'd posted of someone brushing their cat in a park,' Payten laughs. '[I was] pleased that this moment actually was so attached to the song, because I just want people to listen, at the end of the day.' Like Plasticine by Gordi is out 8 August (Mushroom Music) Each month we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death. What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it? Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 1998. Believe by Cher, Together Again by Janet Jackson, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, Wide Open Spaces by the Chicks, Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden. What's the song you wish you wrote? I Know a Place by Muna. What is the song you have listened to the most times this year? Marvin Descending by Christine and the Queens. What is your go-to karaoke song? Sorry by Justin Bieber. What's a song you can never listen to again? Shortnin' Bread (the Wiggles version). What is the first song/album you bought? Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park. What song do you want played at your funeral? This Year's Love by David Gray. What is the best song to have sex to? Thinkin Bout You by Frank Ocean.
