Carly Simon: romance, pain, anticipation—if it's a human impulse, then Carly Simon has sung about it. Now the singer who has provided the soundtrack to a thousand breakups reveals how it all came together

Interview, July, 2004 by Michael Kors

Along with Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Laura Nyro, Carly Simon was at the fore of a generation of female singer-songwriters who not only bared their souls, but brought an urban, intellectual spin to pop. With a rare mix of sophistication and eclecticism, Simon's songs--"Anticipation," "My Romance," and "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," to name just a few of her king-sized hits--startled with their passionate intimacy about living as a searching woman of the world. Famously, the double-edged wit of "You're So Vain" even spawned one of pop music's most enduring debates: Who, exactly, among Simon's noted paramours, is so vain--Mick Jagger? Warren Beatty? The question remains. Now, with the release of her new greatest-hits package, Reflections (BMG Heritage), Simon talks to fashion designer Michael Kors, who took inspiration from Simon and other 1970s songwriters for a recent collection, about her singing, her iconoclastic personal style, and surviving.

MICHAEL KORS: So, Carly, it's funny for me to be sitting here with you right now because I wake up to your new best-of album, Reflections, every morning. It has the best selection of songs, all my favorites.

CARLY SIMON: Good. Well, they're the songs I've done that are considered the most commercial. It doesn't include some of my favorites, which are on the anthology version put out a year ago. Those are the ones I feel particularly close at heart to, but these are the best.

MK: It's like in fashion--there's this skirt that every woman clamors for, and we have to redo 20 versions of it: anything that makes your ass look higher and rounder. It's so funny--there's such a change in how people get dressed today from when I was younger. Back then it wasn't everyone's main objective to look skinny.

GS: Certainly not. Look at the fashion icons of the '50s, like Marilyn Monroe. But very soon [the new look] is going to be down and dumpy. You'd better start designing skirts that make people's asses look flat and little.

MK: [laughs] You know what's weird? When you're 20 and you look great, you don't think about it. You don't appreciate that it comes to you naturally.

CS: You're lucky you had that when you were 20. I sure didn't. I was overweight, and I had acne.

MK: You're kidding! So, as a teenager, were you totally tortured by fashion?

CS: No, because I've never really changed my style that much. I never thought about it. Early on I became attracted to capes--I think because I had a romantic nature, and I'd always wanted to be a spy--so I fit in perfectly at Sarah Lawrence [College], where everybody had pierced ears and was artsy. [Kors laughs] I admired people who had that style, and it fit my body best, I guess. There was a French singer, Francoise Hardy--I used to look at her pictures and try to dress like her.

MK: Not a bad person to want to look like--or sound like.

GS: No, certainly not. I lived in France for six months, and people started to ask for my autograph; I obviously copped the look pretty well. [Kors laughs] But all the girls at school I idolized were funkier or more bohemian, and that lifestyle appealed to me. I knew I wasn't going to make the grade as a scholar. [laughs] And I wasn't going to fit in with the WASPy enclave--which I kind of wanted to, but I was just a lankier sort with frizzy hair. I always associated WASPy girls with bone-straight hair. They could whip their heads around and--

MK: Their hair just went right back into place.

CS: Even their gym uniforms looked great on them. And their socks never slid down. [both laugh] Mine always did. So I suppose this slightly mature fashion sense happened because of what I had. In other words, I built on what I had. My look was even more solidified when I started singing in Greenwich Village with my sister Lucy. We wore matching dresses as the Simon Sisters.

MK: An interesting thing about your music--and I think it's indicative of the way you look as well--is that it's very eclectic. I remember the first time I ever heard you sing, it was "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" [1971]. It wasn't strict folk; but it wasn't rock 'n' roll, either. It was like the "60s and "70s were blending. You had broken new ground.

CS: Well, I tried to get a record deal in 1966 or '67, and everyone thought I was too eclectic. They couldn't tell what I was. "Is she a folk singer, is she a country singer, is she jazz?"

MK: But by the early '70s, all the rules went "phhfft" and dissolved. Suddenly music changed, fashion changed. I remember going out to dinner with my grandparents in the late "60s, and my grandfather would say, "Look at all these hippies!" But then the '70s came, and my grandmother--this upstanding matron--without even knowing it, was wearing fringed suede. Maybe she didn't buy it on McDougal Street, but it was fringed suede nonetheless. And music was not so specific that you thought, Well, this is the new R&B, this is the new folk, this is the new pop. The most interesting things were a blend.