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Trebay is The New York Times' fashion and style writer, and we spoke about escaping familial binds, the workings of memory, and why experimentation has died.

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Q&Ave : Guy Trebay

Since the 1970s, GUY TREBAY has been New York’s keenest culture reporter – unearthing characters and trends, both high and low, for publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times where he writes regularly for the Styles section. This past year, Trebay, turned his pen inward, publishing the critically acclaimed, brutally honest memoir Do Something. PETER DAVIS discovers that Trebay’s youth and pre-New York Times life was as fascinating and colorful as the eccentric people and places he has famously profiled.

Your memoir ends in 1975 with your mother’s death.

That was the structure the book took. The original draft was probably twice the length. Whereas it’s not linear, there is a kind of chronological integrity. I kind of migrate in both directions from 1975, but that’s the anchoring year. I wanted to end it at that peak. The period that is mostly described, the period of emergence, was complete.

That period of New York is such a big character in the book.

God bless you for saying that. If I had to write about New Yor

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SA: There’s this idea of the “self-made man,” of someone who “makes it” through their own efforts and not through money, education, or social status. One could say that this is true of you and the way you moved upward. At the same time, I think there’s this belief that this is no longer possible. Nowadays, it seems like you need a master’s degree before you can even apply for an internship. Do you think it was easier to do such when you were coming of age or was your story also an anomaly at the time?

GT: I was an anomaly then. I had grown up substantially in very fortunate, upper-middle class circumstances. Certainly most of the kids I knew were tracked for conventional lives: great SAT scores, Ivy League college, marriage, and family. But there was this parade of calamities in our lives that upended everything. That is pretty much the substance of the book. I mean, my father lost his business to an embezzling business partner and my mother died suddenly at age 42. Our family house burnt down and one of my sisters committed a federal crime, was arrested and then bailed out—by me

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This is Not A Fashion Critic: An Interview with Guy Trebay

Illustration by Nathan Gelgud

Guy Trebay, of the New York Times, defines himself as a cultural critic and even when working the traditional fashion beat, allows his attention to wander into that broader realm. Although he operates without a column, Trebay’s articles are easy to spot. Like some debonair newsman of Hollywood lore, he reports from exotic corners of the globe. He is cynical without being closed-minded or small, and writes about glamour with neither aspirational veneration nor wanton bloodlust. His writing on style betrays a love for the fashion world, yet he does not hesitate to shiv those who have it coming. Most conspicuously, his every sentence is spun with a panache that seems perhaps too opulent for newsprint, even that of the Times. “The lush mane was ratted and back-combed into a frowsy beehive, the kind in which hoodlums of legend used to conceal their razor blades,” he wrote about Amy Winehouse shortly after her death. “Her basic eyeliner became an ornate volute, a swath of clown makeup, a cat