Nicole Richie: Confidence is the Best Thing You Can Wear

Who are some LGBT celebrities you think are great style icons?
I love a man who owns his own fashion. I love a man that sticks to who he is and stays true to it. Somebody who I think is doing that right now is Brad Goreski. I think that he has such cute style. I think Ellen DeGeneres has really cute style. To be honest, I think Samantha Ronson has the cutest style and even though we have very different senses of style, I get a lot of my personal fashion inspiration from her. She wears really, really cute clothes. She’s got a killer closet. She always gets mad at me because I bite her style and I say, “At least I’m honest about it.”

Who else inspires your style?
I’m usually inspired by the '60s and '70s. Twiggy is clearly a big inspiration of mine. Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards.

Which celebrity would you like to give a fashion makeover?
I
wouldn’t say that anyone needed a fashion makeover unless they truly
thought that they did. I don’t think that you need to necessarily be
wearing the new Balenciaga leather jacket just because that’s trendy if
that’s not you. I’m always encouraging people to dress for themselves
and make themselves feel confident because confidence is the best thing
that you can wear.

You have two young children Harlow and Sparrow. What advice will you give them about bullying and standing up for others?
I grew up in L.A., and my parents are from Alabama. So we did grow up very, very different. I don’t want this to sound ignorant, but my parents did talk to me a little about how mean people can be and how hard it is, even to grow up as an African American. It’s something that I never really understood. My dad’s best friend in the world was gay and would talk to me about how hard it was and it was something that I didn’t understand because I didn’t experience that growing up in Los Angeles. There was no such thing, at least as far as I was concerned, there was no such as the idea that being gay was different or that being Jewish was different, or that being black was different. I was actually one of the very few people who wasn’t Jewish in my school. I used to lie and pretend that I was half-Jewish so I could take the same school days off as my friends. That’s actually the biggest thing that I admire about growing up in L.A., and I do get asked a lot if I worry about raising my kids here. The reason why I love L.A. so much is because I do believe that people in Los Angeles are so accepting and it’s just part of life. I had never heard a negative word about anybody that was gay until I went to college in Arizona. Never heard anything different about being African American until I went to college. It really was something that was not a part of my life at all. So I’m definitely going to raise my kids to be worldly and accepting and loving and judge people by their personalities, actually not to judge people at all because that’s not their place, but to really look at people for their personalities. I’m hoping that that’s not even going to be an issue because it was not for me at all.