HAILEY GATES

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.

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.

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

A sudden intimacy occurs when someone does your hair.

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.

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 is unique. It's a leveler, not a divider.

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.'

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

I think, in a lot of ways, we underestimate how much clothing plays a part in achieving our identities and in how we want the world to deal with us.

I ate better in Liberia than I did in Ohio.

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.

When I was young, I made all of my own clothes.

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.

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

Fashion weeks tend to be places of refuge for outsiders.

If you take the fashion out of it, clothing has a lot of information - about how we feel about ourselves, how we'd like to feel about ourselves, and what we'd like to be: If you show up to an interview in sweatpants and a T-shirt, I'm going to deal with you in a really different way.

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.

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

I was writing a lot even as a kid.

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

Women's bodies have become a real battleground for politics.

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

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.

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