Julia Chaplin [journalist]

By: Editor | August 18, 2009 | Ten by Ten

Julia Chaplin is a New York-based journalist and editor who covers contemporary art, fashion, design, lifestyle and travel. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Vogue and Wallpaper. Assouline recently published Chaplin’s book titled Gypset.

Walk us through your most colorful childhood memory.
I’m from Boston, but my dad moved our family to Key West, Fla., for a few years in the late ’70s-early ’80s so he could write a novel. It was a very hedonistic time there. It was pre-AIDS, and almost all my friends’ parents were some combination of artist, hippie, and small-time drug dealer. Bails of pot used to wash ashore on the local beaches and islands all the time. One of my friends had a coffee table in her living room that her mom had made from a bale of pot with a slab of glass over it. It all seemed normal enough.

What is the strangest number you have programmed into your phone?
Natalia Vodianova

Describe your closest brush with death.
Getting caught inside while surfing in Todos Santos, Mexico (the town, not the island). The waves were easily double-over-head with back-to-back sets, and I had to battle it out under whitewater as high as a house with a long-board attached to my ankle five times. Terrifying!

If you could choose any five people, dead or alive, to have dinner with, who would they be and why?
Egon von Furstenberg, Jane Digby, Gerry Lopez, Buckminster Fuller, Barack Obama

What do you consider your greatest failure?
Not being able to plan my life beyond the next three months

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Not being able to plan my life beyond the next three months

What is your most cherished possession and why?
Good health — its very hard to travel without it.

How will you spend this evening?
Flying to Los Angeles.

Describe a vivid or recurring dream you’ve had?
That the word gypset becomes an adjective in the dictionary

How would you define love?
That’s a good question. When I interviewed Bill Clinton last summer, my dad told me to ask him the same thing.

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