Hanan Bešović, aka @ideservecouture, on humour, brands and becoming fashion's favourite “yenta”

I’ve worked in hotels my whole life. I also have a college degree in hospitality. I started out as a bellboy, then moved to the front desk and into reservations.

Yes. I like spending time with people; I like talking to them.

When the pandemic hit, seventy percent of the staff was laid off, including me. That was the first time I had been unemployed since I was thirteen.

I sold pillows at a market. My parents grew up under communism, and they taught us to work. Our worth was measured by our work, which is wrong and toxic, I know, but that was just the way it was. That’s why I couldn’t imagine being unemployed. Sorry, I’m just going to see my husband off. He’s going for a walk with the dog.

I don’t show him online. I asked him at the beginning if I should introduce him to my community. He said it was just my space and to leave it at that. It was the best decision we ever made, because some people in the online world are terrible.

I asked my husband what he thought I should do. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to talk about fashion. He handed me the phone and said, “Talk about fashion”.

Of course. I talked about Elsa Schiaparelli's 1938 Skeleton Dress and Daniel Roseberry's interpretation of it, because I thought it was absolutely perfect. And then Daniel Roseberry became the messiah of fashion.

It got about 22 likes, which seemed like the whole world to me at the time.

Not at all. I was having a lot of fun. You know that saying: “If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work again in your life”? That’s exactly how I saw it, and I gradually built a loving and enthusiastic community that fully supports me.

About two or three years. I was constantly making new posts, reviewing fashion shows, and getting up at four in the morning to watch them live.

Lady Gaga once announced that she would perform her new song Bad Romance at the end of Alexander McQueen’s show. We didn’t know then that Plato’s Atlantis would be McQueen’s last show. Nick Knight streamed the show on his website, SHOWstudio, in what became a watershed moment in the history of fashion livestreaming. There were so many of us watching that we overloaded the stream and the site crashed. When I met Nick the other day, I said, “Nick, before we start talking, I want to apologise because I was one of the people who overloaded your livestream of the McQueen show”. Later, I watched the show again and realised that I enjoyed it even more than Lady Gaga’s new song. That’s when I asked myself, “Who is McQueen?” I started reading about him, studying him, watching all his shows. I still believe that The Horn of Plenty is the best show of all time. Every time I came across a new name, I wanted to know more. There was Olivier Rousteing. He worked at Balmain. Then there was Pierre Balmain. Who was he? I looked up every name I came across, and eventually I realised that the fashion world is one big puzzle, and everything fits together.

My content is very diverse. I love creating historical videos because there are so many stories from the fashion world that haven’t been told! Most people don’t know about them, and the people who do often don’t share them. If I had to invest all my money in one thing, it would be a book by Suzy Menkes. She’s seen so much, she knows so much, and I find everything that happened in the past absolutely fascinating. And when it comes to fashion show reviews, I’m a person who has an opinion on everything. I have a clear stance on human rights, on being gay; I support transgender rights and abortion rights. I have my opinions, and I like to express them and explain them. I do the same with fashion shows, and people seem to like it. Designers, however, are a different story. They don't always like hearing other people's opinions about their work. Even though I'm neither malicious nor offensive, I’m careful about that.

Probably my humour. Not many people in fashion make jokes. Everyone is serious and pays attention to how they look. But I like to joke, and I don't mind not fitting in. I didn't fit in even as a child, so now, as a thirty-six-year-old man, it doesn't bother me. And there’s nothing better than a good dose of sarcasm.

The fashion world is often said to be out of touch with reality, and unfortunately, it really is. The best example is Balenciaga’s campaign featuring teddy bears dressed in BDSM-inspired harnesses. Brands are always looking for ways to shock us, and they keep pushing the boundaries because we’ve seen so much that it’s increasingly hard to shock us with anything. When Balenciaga came out with that campaign, we didn’t even think twice about it. It took people outside the fashion world to speak up before we realised that the campaign wasn’t okay at all. I genuinely think that people working in the fashion business see the world differently. That’s why I believe it’s important for brands and designers to respond to what’s happening around them. Virgil Abloh’s collections have always held a mirror up to current events. These days, Willy Chavarria is highly political, as is Matières Fécales. They draw attention to what's happening in the world. But that takes courage. I wish more people in fashion were willing to be courageous.

I don't know if it's a topic, but there are people I won't talk about. People who don't deserve to be given my platform. In some cases, it really annoys me. For example, Dolce & Gabbana was the first brand I fell in love with when I was living in Croatia. My friend Ivona and I devoured all those Sicilian collections, the campaigns full of people and life, the models wearing fruit on their ears. I still love their aesthetic and it's a shame that there's been so much controversy around them.

Brands want to sell. They think about business, sales and survival, which is 100% legitimate, but in doing so, they suppress creativity. I feel nostalgic for the 1990s, for that flood of free creativity and great designers. Even today, brands show amazing pieces on the catwalk, but then you go into a store and find T-shirts with logos. Where are the original pieces from the show? They aren’t there because they’re too specific, and retailers are afraid that they won’t sell.

I honestly think we don't need so many collections. Brands are also merging with each other and starting to resemble each other. Which is understandable because they always have the same designers and very few of them can truly adapt their design aesthetic to the brand they’re creating for. John Galliano is a genius at this. The Dior he created was completely different from the Margiela he created later. With Demna, I feel that at Gucci he is just reworking what he did at Balenciaga, and the approach no longer feels fresh. No offense, but when you look at what Gucci offers now, you don't see Gucci, you see Demna. On the contrary, Alessandro Michele has influenced not only fashion but the entire culture. He has changed the way people perceive clothes. Matthieu Blazy has brought new life to Chanel. It’s not Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel of the 1990s, but it shouldn't be. It's fresh, exciting, juicy. Why do we love Schiaparelli so much? Because Daniel Roseberry is creating haute couture unlike anything we’ve seen before. And we’d never seen Alaïa interpreted the way Pieter Mulier interpreted it. If it were up to me, I would put young, unknown designers into these brands and let them finally breathe some fresh air into them.

I don't think so. Their sales have dropped, that's clear, but the media is increasingly concerned with good covers, because a quality cover is like a work of art that I buy to put on my coffee table. The content of printed magazines has changed, of course. We no longer read them for hot news from the fashion world, because we get that on social media almost in real time. At the same time, I think that the media has access to absolutely everything and could make much better use of it.

Beautiful fashion editorials and long, high-quality interviews with people who have something to say. I like the way Edward Enninful does it with his EE72. The media has access to an enormous amount of information, and yet they write about looksmaxxing and collarbones. I understand that it’s a trend, but not every trend deserves valuable editorial space.

My husband is Jewish and in Yiddish there’s the word “yenta”. It’s someone who’s always talking. So I would call myself a yenta. Or a fashion commentator.

In my private life, I’m most looking forward to celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary with my husband after returning from Paris Fashion Week. I look forward to every moment I spend with him and our dog. Spending time with them makes me the happiest person in the world. And as for fashion – I look forward to fashion itself. I can never get enough of it, and I can talk about it endlessly. I probably sound like a person who’s been brainwashed by fashion, but I can’t help it. I’m its biggest fan.