Chung, 32, got her start in the basement of her parents' dry-cleaning store. Critics have loved her clothes--New York magazine says she "achieves sultriness with the most minimal detail."
"Most people believe that designers sit there and sketch through divine inspiration. A lot of people do, but I'm very old school and that's from my training with Geoffrey Beene. I sit in front of a mannequin and experiment with the fabric. Not many people work that way. But it also distinguishes me. I have to offer my audience something new that they can't get from Donna Karan or Calvin Klein. I work with a fabric called jersey, which falls around the body, and you can't predict what it's going to do unless you're really hands-on. That's pretty much how the ideas come. Most of the time, I just sit there and stare at the mannequin, and nothing comes up. And then there will be a week where it's just idea upon idea.
I also learned from Mr. Beene that there's discipline required--knowing that there is this monotony of business that interferes with the creative process, and you need to establish a routine to tackle those things before they take away from your creative process. After the shows, after the selling season, after market, after production, you've got this one moment of time when you actually get to be creative. And it's that 8% of everything you do that inspires you, what drives you. That's a pretty hard thing, to constantly be inspired by that.
I've seen so many creative people become caught up in the mundane parts of the business until everything else sort of dissolved around them. You get trapped in the fashion-show aspect of it and lose track of everything else, creativity as well. If you start worrying more about which celebrity is wearing your clothes, you lose focus on what got you there in the first place."
Born in Queens, New York, not far from Peter Parker's neighborhood, mild-mannered Quesada, 43, oversees the Marvel publishing universe by day and sleeps at night. We think.
"My dad introduced me to comics in the late '60s, when I was about 8 years old. Stan Lee [Marvel's founder] had just done a couple of issues of Spider-Man that dealt with drug addiction, and my dad thought it was a cool way to talk to me about the evils of drug abuse. What he didn't realize, of course, was that it started a whole other addiction. I never did drugs, but I did a lot of comics.
The past five years have seen a huge resurgence in comics, not just in people being interested in them but also in the quality of comics and the higher quality of talent that's creating them. What's helped, particularly for me, has been that we aren't too reverent anymore. In the mid to late '80s, comics were in a very bad state, almost extinct, because the stories became very insular and lost their edge. People started writing comic-book stories about comic-book stories, valentines to Stan Lee, and at the end of the day, fans were reading stories that had no relevance to their world whatsoever.
When I came here, I didn't know the characters that well. And that was good. I've seen creators say their lifelong dream was to write, say, Thor. If you let them, they'll do their worst work. They can't be creative with it. You have to play with the characters and break them, and then put them back together. Stan will be the first to tell you that. He has less reverence than anybody, and he created them. You have to be able to take that character and push him to the wall, and sometimes through it, if need be."
John, 38, has helped Tony the Tiger earn his stripes and recharged Visa's ad campaign since taking the reins at Leo Burnett's Toronto office in 1999.
"My peers at other agencies are always looking at advertising and reading award-show books for their inspiration. I think that's how you end up with advertising that's very much like other advertising. Every creative person consumes a lot of magazines, music, art, and design, but the really good ones are observant and watch how people interact with brands. It's so telling to watch body language or eavesdrop and overhear conversations. That's how you find out things you can never learn by asking questions directly.
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