Hailey Gates

It's wild, how many places of conflict that have fashion weeks. It's becoming some sort of marker for these countries that says, 'We are in conversation with the rest of the world.'

I was writing a lot even as a kid.

I was, like, a really embarrassing, precocious child.

I always struggle auditioning, actually, because I'm so obsessed with era-appropriate clothing.

I have always been very into pagan hairstyles. If I were alive a long time ago, I would probably have been burned at the stake.

My parents separated when I was young, and as a result, my father had to learn how to braid our hair on the nights my sisters and I would stay with him. We would arrive to school the next morning with these incredibly endearing lopsided braids he had fashioned. This may have expedited the process of my learning how to braid my own hair.

Having long hair has allowed me to enter orthodox or religiously conservative situations with slightly more ease.

I think why I was attracted to making something with Vice is that level of intimacy that you get as the viewer, getting to see some of that production element where we don't exactly know what we're doing, where we're going, or even if it's a good idea.

There are a lot of people who don't want things like fashion weeks to happen.

Maintaining a sense of humor is key to getting people to also focus on the crises at hand.

The Congo is so fun. The ideal body type coveted by women in the Congo is this extremely curvaceous body. They're going through a number of extreme measures to get that kind of body form, and one of them is by using bouillon cubes.

In China, because Chinese is a tonal language, it can be kind of hard to follow people's emotional tracks. There was one moment where a woman I was interviewing just sort of burst into tears, and I can usually sort of tell when things are coming on, and in that moment, it was very unexpected.

Everybody gets dressed every day, and whatever you decide to get dressed in that morning is communicating something.

Some of us are lucky enough to choose what we wear, and some of us don't have that luxury, but we all are communicating something to the world around us by what we wear, no matter if it's sweatpants or a tuxedo.

Fashion weeks tend to be places of refuge for outsiders.

I'm not a journalist. I have not gone to school for this.

I wrote a play that I directed and I was in, and I paid for the sets and the costumes and to put it up in a theater all through modeling. It really afforded me a lot of creative control in my life.

I never thought I would go to Gaza. It's incredibly difficult to get into, and when you get there, it's a war zone. Then they have this beach, and there's this incredible, vibrant beach culture there, which is something that I grew up with in Southern California.

I actually find it a lot easier to interview people I don't agree with because I'm far more curious about how they've arrived at that place.

At one point, we were across the street from the Sharon Tate house; at another, we lived in Elvis's old Bel Air bachelor pad. It was where he first met the Beatles.

We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.

High fashion has become representative of stability in unstable places; that allows you to have a voice in the world stage.

A sudden intimacy occurs when someone does your hair.

I have a 'Mailer-Breslin and the 51st State' poster, and a neon-pink sign of Raoul's in SoHo, one of my favorite restaurants.

In China, I had my body lit on fire. And in Russia, I took a bath in reindeer blood, which apparently had some kind of youth-enhancing elements.