What should a couturier wear? It’s a question Edmund White put to me during the course of this interview, and the answer is complicated. While a couturière can wear her own creations, a couturier depends on other designers for his clothes. What should a fashion writer wear? A writer’s concern is stylish sentences, which can’t be worn, alas. What does fashion care for words?

Since he began publishing, in the early 1970s, Edmund White has put out novels, short stories, and all manner of belles lettres. Many are classics: the coming-out novel A Boy’s Own Story, the AIDS-inflected The Beautiful Room Is Empty. His biography of Jean Genet, Genet: A Biography,won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris is White’s most recent work. It’s a memoir of the decade and a half—from the early 1980s to the late 1990s—that he spent in the capital of fashion. During that time he befriended some of the great couturiers of the day. I asked him about them, and about fashion, and about fashion and writing. I asked him for gossip. He obliged me.

—Derek McCormack

THE BELIEVER: I first saw your work in an issue of Vogue; you were writing from Paris.

EDMUND WHITE: When I was there I wrote for all the Condé Nast magazines. I think they gave me a monthly stipend. It was enough to pay the rent. One of the first things I did was interview Éric Rohmer, and it was absolutely insane because my French wasn’t very good, but I lied about it and said that I spoke perfect French. I could ask the questions, but I didn’t know what he was saying back. I couldn’t ask follow-up questions.

BLVR: You covered fashion stories, too. And you were friends with Yves Saint Laurent?

EW: Yves Saint Laurent was very drugged and drunk and just out of it. He was a fascinating man who could sort of get it together to produce these shows every year, and he probably had the best sense of color of anybody in the twentieth century. But Azzedine Alaïa was my favorite—as a designer but mostly as a person. One of the biggest problems that any couturier has is: what is he himself going to wear? Many of them go for this sort of business suit. That’s wrong, because it looks so common. Savile Row, that’s not right either. Azzedine’s solution was to wear these black silk Chinese pajamas.

BLVR: They’re his signature.

EW: He liked to work all night. I remember he’d have the sixteen-year-old Naomi Campbell—who was a dream, so sweet—on a dais, and he’d run around like Nebuchadrezzar...