“You got to put your best idea out there right away,” Jim Moore said, former Creative Director and current Creative Director At Large at GQ, addressing a room of students inside The New School’s J.M. Kaplan Hall. An ode to instinct and immediacy, the comment captured the creative risks that have guided his decades-long editorial decisions in fashion. 

On April 10, Moore joined Ivan Shaw, Corporate Photography Director at Condé Nast and former Photography Director at Vogue, for a conversation hosted by the Parsons School of Design AAS Fashion Design and Fashion Marketing and Communication program. The evening brought together two long-time collaborators and friends for a discussion on image-making, process, and what it means to recognize style before it becomes fashion. 

Behind them, a slideshow flicked through Moore’s four-decade tenure at GQ, where he served as Creative Director from 1980 to 2018 and produced more than 540 covers. Many of those images and the stories behind them are collected in Moore’s monograph, Hunks and Heros: Four Decades of Fashion at GQ, a project Shaw encouraged him to pursue and later helped bring to print in 2019. 

Moore’s editorial legacy includes defining portraits of influential figures like Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Virgil Abloh, Tom Ford, and Barack Obama. His collaborations with photographers including Richard Avedon, Walter Chin, and Mario Sorrenti shaped the visual vocabulary of modern menswear. These images, Moore emphasized at the talk, were not born from trend forecasting but from intuitive, collaborative moments between the subject and a creative team — those responsible for the image’s direction, styling, and expression. 

“I’ll always bring an editorial point of view,” he said. “Whether it’s the way I sell the clothes or how I see the story … because deep down inside we’re journalists.” He explained that this philosophy guided not only his editorial work, but also his commercial projects. 

For Moore, styling is never about self-projection, but understanding and elevating the subject. “It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with image-making … I want to make this guy look incredible,” he said. “You want the person to feel comfortable in the clothes … you’re not just using them as a coat hanger.” 

Shaw echoed the sentiment: it’s about revealing personality, not imposing aesthetics. Drawing on his experience overseeing Vogue’s visual narrative from 1996 to 2016 and now as visuals editor at The World of Interiors, he emphasized that compelling imagery often begins with adaptability. “I think one of the things we both value is our ability to adapt to a situation,” Shaw said. Both emphasized instinct over formula, and process over polish. 

When asked about inspiration, Moore pushed back against the idea that it comes from predictable places. “Fashion shows are only one place to find ideas. I can probably get more ideas just walking down the streets of New York than I do a fashion show,” Moore said. “They can come from anywhere.”

While inspiration may begin on the street, its circulation now moves at digital speed. Reflecting on the shift in media, Shaw mentioned that digital platforms have transformed the pace and reach of publishing. “It’s so fantastic because so many people can read the story and see these pictures right now,” he said.  

The conversation then opened up to questions from the audience. Isaiah Gryniewicz, a second-year fashion marketing and visual communications major, asked Moore about risk-taking and the pursuit of meaningful work — both personally and professionally.

“Commit your life to something,” he said. “You have it all in you and need to find that north star and just go after it,” Moore said. 

Reflecting on the event afterward, Gryniewicz added, “Just seeing how deep that iceberg gets and the amount of people that this man has worked with, and the influence he has on men’s style in general is just incredible.”