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"Greatest Triumph - My work with Tori. We've been together seven years and she knows I'll deliver what she wants. She loves to promote new designers - her favourites are Fake London, Preen and Uniform."
-- Karen Binns, Elle UK magazine, October 2001
[Tori is] what her stylist, Karen Binns, describes as "raw but glamorous � she wears her jeans, but when she gets a glamorous dress, she puts it ON." But she saves the glam for work; at home, it's Seven jeans, Fake London and Prada sweaters and T-shirts she picks up on tour. "I wear librarian stuff. But cute librarian," she laughs. Cute librarian found at Selfridges and Concrete in London and Fred Segal in LA.
-- InStyle magazine, October 2002
Amos' Virgil in London's underworld was fellow U.S. ex-patriot Karen Binns. "She looked like a teenage bag lady," says Binns, a fashion stylist who took the late bloomer under her wing, "poor white trash and completely out to lunch. I didn't know what planet she was on, but it was definitely the right planet. I said 'Honey, I can give you a Galliano dress and tell you you're fabulous, but just keep it real. Reality always sells.'"
-- Karen Binns, Rolling Stone Magazine, June 25, 1998
"I don't like to be enclosed in a style, but there's a limit I will never cross. Generally, I have collaborators around me. Karen Binns, which was there since the beginning, is my reference about look and gives me many choices. For the make up and the hair, I work with different teams, depending if I live in England or in the U.S. Photographs change all the time, but my clothes are always from Karen. It's a friend coming from Brooklyn (New York). She's a little mad! She lives in London but grew up in the ghetto. She attends photo shoots and creates my looks."
-- Tori Amos, Best Magazine, October 1999
Tori: Ah, you have to be really discerning about which train is running which train. And there's no way that fashion is gonna run my train when I take that stage. I'm a lioness, I could just walk out there in... oh... I don't know... say leather heels, leather bra, leather up to the neck that just got ripped off a couch. And I'd own that stage. Or, I could call up somebody in the fashion world, take their advice, and feel like a hostage to the clothing. It's tricky. Live performance is theater. And I do have help. Karen Binns has been styling me for years. She's from Brooklyn, she's black with Jean Harlow white hair, she's loud, and she doesn't mess. She's seen every movie there was to see. She was very much a part of the Basquiat era here in New York. She hosted some of the ridiculous clubs. And she's been really instrumental in inspiring a lot of young designers. Susan Deakon, for instance, just designed everything I've been performing in.
Shuz: So Karen Binns has really inspired your fashion sense?
Tori: Cindy Palmano, the photographer, turned me on to her. She said this person has access to the underworld of fashion. When you get into the overworld, the problem is that someone is gonna show up wearing what you're wearing. Or what's been on the catwalk. So I try to pick pieces that nobody's seen. I go to Karen, to the designers that have a private line going. I'm wearing stuff from this company called Preen. The shirts are tight but flared at that three-quarter length. And they have a T-shirt look, which I love. You know, just things that I haven't seen by other people.
-- Shuz Magazine, Spring 2000
I had lived with the "girls" for a few months, and when I talked to the teams and was going to be working on the visual side, I would tell them things that I knew about them� sometimes very private things about them to help make them come into the third dimension, to be tangible in the flesh. So [Kevin Aucoin] did the make up, [Thomas Schenk] was the photographer. He brought in the hair guy�the wig guy�[Ward Stegerhoek] and [Karen Binns], with whom I�ve worked for years and years as a stylist helped�she brought the encasement for the flesh. One of my friends, [Karen Binns], a stylist from Brooklyn who is out of her mind but probably says the most accurate things said "It�s easier to get a record deal than it is to work in a bank!" So anyway, the mainstream a lot of times is not about musicians, and as a musician I�m kind of fortunate to even be able to work in the music business. It�s an oddity. And there�s some of us, but a lot of us aren�t in the mainstream."
-- Tori Amos, Request Magazine, Nov/Dec 2001
"I saw her sing the song, and I just started to cry."
"She had a slight devastation. But the devastation of a teenager who's lost the love she had in high school and what is she going to do now?" [on the breakup of Tori and Eric Rosse]
"They feel that she can save their life. We are talking about a fan base that goes beyond fans."
-- Karen Binns, VH1 Behind The Music 2, March 21, 2000
"This video was tricky because it was close to the bone, having only been married for 2 1/2 months. Karen and I would talk about how "She" - the girl in Jackie, the bride in Jackie was a parallel on some plane somewhere who had made different choices in her life. A medicine woman told me once that alternate dimensions existed where a different you, a different me play out choices we could've made. The girl in Jackie is an artist of some kind but "it ain't neva gonna happen" to quote Miss Karen as she and I
went back and forth over this alternate 2x2x2x reality. We re-built my life, with the help of LL (fondly called Double L) who was
referenced in that book -- The Top 100 Psychics. We knew what she ate. I knew she drew with pastels. I knew she was never going to make it to the church that day. It's not that she didn't love him -- they'd been together since they were kids. It's just about a promise she had make to herself a long time ago. When James called me for the 17th time that day and said, "I've got it.
As you go through your old neighborhood interspersed with present and past, you finally run into young Tori." We started to talk about casting and Karen convinced us with the help of Lesley (make-up) of course that we could pull of young Tori. Having to face my younger SELF was pretty wild -- her position being very clear -- "we had a vision you've become numb, we may never succeed
but you never even tried." So the answer is NO, I don't know if "she" ever eventually marries her childhood love -- but she doesn't that day."
--Tori Amos, description of Jackie's Strength video, Tori Stories Promo Booklet for The Complete Videos 1991-1998.
Mon. Nov 21: Still Monday
Go over to see Cindy P. I have an argument with somebody on the phone. It�s stupid. Me and this person both handle it badly. Cin takes me for a hot chocolate and talks to me about Cathedral thinking, and how intention is everything and if my intention in any facet of my work is not about making the world a better place, whatever she says that means to me, then I�m basically just wasting trees. She calls me a cab and sends me home. I get home, go up the steps, see the spider that�s been by the door now for six weeks. I�ve been away for three; it�s good to have consistency somewhere. And I can�t get the keys in the door. There are three locks and I�m not good with locks and I start screaming and kicking the door. I�ve been up two days. The door and I negotiate terms. I get inside. The alarm goes off. I don�t know the alarm code. I call my friend Karen and I start crying, Karen�s from Brooklyn and she says not to move, she�s coming over. The whole neighbourhood is yelling at me to do something and I can�t find the landlord�s number. Twenty-five minutes later, one of the neighbours gets me the number. I call, get the code and turn it off. I was freaked to go outside because, when the police came, if I went outside they�d put these guns to my head and Karen shook me and said, This ain�t LA, baby, chill. Let�s push through this moment of horror and get some mushroom polenta. So me and Karen and Matthew leave after we turn on the heat. We come back and the place is an igloo. Matthew says my heat�s broken. We split and I crash on their couch.
-- Tori's Diary, Q magazine (UK), February 1994
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