Kelly Cutrone: On Femininity, Fashion Week and Whitney Port's New Boyfriend

By Michelle Lanz, reporting by Mary S. Park
People's Revolution PR Firm founder Kelly Cutrone has made a name for herself by being one of the fashion industry's most famous no-nonsense, straight-talking fashion publicists. Her saucy personality even helped land Cutrone a new reality series, "Kell On Earth," which follows every blood, sweat and tear that she and her minions shed to produce the worlds most high-end fashion shows. Wonderwall caught up exclusively with Cutrone at Bryant Park where she spilled about her worst Fashion Week experience, femininity and what she thinks about Whitney Port's new boyfriend.
Wonderwall: Why do you think you can't be a strong female boss without being labeled all sorts of pejorative labels?
KC: It's true, you can't. It depends on who you ask. My take would point to religion and there's something called Christianity. I think that the concept of the feminine was bastardized. I think that people had a hard time controlling their sexuality when they went to find God and so they made women the enemy. There were civilizations where women were equal and
had power and sometimes more power than men and it's not really prevalent right now. And I think the sad thing is that we go to churches that don't let us speak and we give birth to these children as the light bringers and we raise them and we tell them it's OK. I never really thought of myself as a feminist.
WW: People are talking about Whitney Port.
KC: She still works for me. I’m still doing "The City" and we still work together.
WW: She has a new boyfriend, Ben Nemtin. What about her makes her such a great girlfriend?
KC: Whitney likes nice guys. She just likes very handsome [guys]. I mean, she's like the perfect daughter if you think about it. She likes the kind of guys my mom always wanted me to like that I never could. She just likes really smart, really rich, sweet, cool handsome guys.
[That's] never been my thing. I like mean, broke ... yeah, I totally love the bad boys.
WW: Have you met Ben Nemtin?
KC: Her new boyfriend? We met for a second, but I knew about him probably before anybody else did. He's sweet, [but] I don't really know him. I can't say yet. She knew that I didn't like Jay [Lyon]. I thought Jay and I were going to go for blood on the show. One night we were actually going to throw down because my daughter, who is 7, was the one who discovered that his name wasn’t even Jay. Ava found it on the Internet. I just couldn’t stand his overbite and his accent, they drove me crazy.
WW: What advice would you give to people who want to make it in the fashion industry?
KC: I think you should really understand the business before you understand the buzz. I think a lot of people follow the buzz and they don’t really understand the business. If it appeals to you, it's kind of like being in the circus, you have to really want to do it. It's like a special dog. You know what I mean? It's not for everybody.
WW: What is your fondest memory of Fashion Week at Bryant Park?
KC: I think the first time I came here was with Randolph Duke and Vivian Tam and I had no idea what I was doing. I remember walking in and Bob
Mackie, I don't know how, had pushed me by accident up against the wall and I took that as a blessing. I walked in and Fern [Mallis] winked at me. I came here a stranger, and I left here a member of the community. When you're an adult and you enter into a world and you leave a friend of that world and provocateur of that world and a member -- and also a leader and a thinker of that world -- I feel like that's what we want our kids to do, right? So I feel good. I’m going to miss Bryant Park. If I really think about it, I’ll cry. It totally raised me up. When I came here, I had no clue what was going on.
WW: What's the worst thing that ever happened to you at Fashion Week?
KC: There was a hurricane, and there was a power outage all over the city. Our computers went down in the middle of the night and we had to walk with those old-fashioned MACs and cover them in garbage bags, because laptops weren't even around, and march 42 blocks up to an all night Kinko’s trying to retrieve our database. It was probably my most humiliating time. We had no seating chart. We pretended we knew what was going on and we did our best. It was like slice and dice. We sliced and diced.
By Michelle Lanz, reporting by Mary S. Park @ wonderwall.msn.com