ET spoke with the designer about her new House of Harlow collection, featured at the REVOLVE Gallery at NYFW.
Nicole Richie is no stranger to reality TV, but she's not sure she would let her children sign up for it.
Fans met the TV-personality-turned-designer on The Simple Life with bestie Paris Hilton. The first-of-its-kind show ran for five seasons from 2003 to 2007. And as Richie tells ET's Denny Directo, times were different back then for reality television.
"First of all...there were only two reality shows before then. It was The Osbournes and The Real World, and this show wasn't that, so it was a completely new concept altogether. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into or where we were going," Richie explains, while promoting her new House of Harlow 1960 collection. "And I think one of my favorite things about The Simple Life and one of my favorite things about doing it was, it really took us out of our everyday lives and put us in somebody else's world," she continues. "So I was always able to maintain a level of privacy and able to have my own life."
"I think it would be a different thing going into it now, it just depends on what it is," Richie -- who shares daughter Harlow, 13, and son Sparrow, 11, with husband Joel Madden -- continues. "But if my kids said to me, 'I want to try this new thing that hasn't been done before.' You just say... Well, obviously now they're preteen, so I'm going to say no. But yeah, if they're 18 and they want to go do whatever it is, as long as it feels good and authentic to them, I'm fine with it."
With that in mind, Richie doesn't envision a Simple Life reboot to happen. "I think it would be hard now because we're older and we have traveled and we have been everywhere. So, I think that concept was so great because you were able to take people's phones away for a month," she expressed, before jokingly adding, "I think if you took someone's phone away right now, you'd have to have a therapist on site and make sure they were OK. No one's trying to deal with all that, including me. So, I think it would be such a different thing."
These days, Richie is focusing on her lifestyle brand and raising her little ones. Richie launched House of Harlow in 2008, naming the company after her daughter. Her last collection is set to be featured at the REVOLVE Gallery at New York Fashion Week.
With a fashion designer mom and a musician father, does Richie see her children following in their footsteps?
"I see them developing into themselves. My mom used to always say, anytime I would do something she'd be like, 'You're just like me,' or 'You're just like your dad, or you're just like…,' and I was like, 'Stop saying that,'" she recalls. "So I have been really conscious to not say that around my kids. And my daughter loves fashion, but she has her own style. It doesn't have anything to do with me. She takes my clothes all the time. I have just started writing an N with a Sharpie on all of my stuff so that [she knows it's mine]."
"She's wearing my current clothes now, she's just like, 'What do you have? That's what I want. I'm taking it,'" she notes of her daughter's current style choices. "And then I got to go in her closet, steal it back."
Richie will soon be making her Fashion Week debut, giving ET a mini peek at what her presentation will look like during the interview. House of Harlow 1960 will create a room to transport consumers into a mythical forest of natural beauty at REVOLVE Gallery, an innovative, multi-room fashion experience at New York City's 20 Hudson Yards on Sept. 10 and 11. REVOLVE has created an immersive multi-brand exhibition featuring a real-time shopping component. Attendees can shop on site via the REVOLVE Gallery IRL pop-up shop presented by Afterpay, or via QR code that will also be available for immediate purchase on REVOLVE.com.
"House of Harlow, just as a brand is a late '60s, early '70s, music-inspired, vintage-inspired brand. And with this collection I kind of leaned into more of the '70s glam, Hollywood glamour, '70s glamour, using very rich tones and so many different fabrics, lots of layers, using amazing faux furs and knits, velvets, beautiful silks, printed silks, fringe," she describes. "I was thinking about people wanting to be excited to get dressed again and wanting to bring color, even though we're going into fall and winter. But really wanting to bring in some beautiful rich colors because to me color changes my mood completely."
She's also ready to give people a whole experience when they enter the NYFW experience, sharing, "You're able to walk in the room and just grasp the entire vibe."
"And what I wanted, just on top of people to appreciate the clothes, was I wanted people to feel like they were in nature because that has been what my past year-and-a-half has been," she continues. "I really took a tour of California like I never have before. And California is just such an amazing state. It's so beautiful, it's my home state. And I just was able to really appreciate it in a whole new way. It was something that I wanted to bring into the collection."
See more of Richie in the video below.
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