When Athena Calderone arrived in New York City from her native Long Island in 1995, she shaved her head, pierced her septum, and rimmed her eyes in black liner. She was determined to leave her small town behind and find out who she wanted to be, what shape she wanted her career to take. Acting? Modeling? Something else? That desire took her to nightlife, where she started as a bartender and met creative people–artists, designers, drag queens, and more–for the first time. Filled with curiosity, she wanted to take everything in–she remembers the first time she ate sushi, when she started going to galleries and museums. Now she knows who she is, and her curiosities are always evolving and changing, the way she herself has. 

Athena’s roots in design and food begin in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and have resulted in a multitude of successes, including a recent Architectural Digest cover and her own furniture collection, not to mention a James Beard Award for her 2018 cookbook Cook Beautiful. She also walked the Gucci Cruise 2027 show and will soon appear in the upcoming David Weil film Tyrant alongside Charlize Theron, Demi Moore, Julia Garner, and Hudson Williams. “All of that comes from years of building my confidence up because I’ve self-educated. I’ve taught myself about every period in design, and I understand myself,” she says. “I needed to experiment and follow so many crumbs of life that I now have…I think some of the success is coming because I’ve done the work.” Here, the multihyphenate discusses her artistic development, the influence of nightlife, and her paths to self-expression with her husband, lauded DJ Victor Calderone.

VICTOR CALDERONE: When did you move to New York, and what brought you here?

ATHENA CALDERONE: My heart was broken. My high school boyfriend broke up with me, and I needed to get out of this small town I was living in. I got an apartment, found a job. It was 1995. I shaved my head and got a septum ring. I was such a good Long Island girl. I didn’t drink, I never got in trouble in school or with my mom. I was very responsible. I had only one boyfriend at that time in my life. And then I was like, I want to be a bad girl, move to New York, shave my head. I had charcoal, smoky eyes. I would wear a wife beater without a bra. Enter Victor. That’s who you saw for the first time.

VC: I was like, yes, I need to know who that is.

V: What town in Long Island? 

AC: I grew up in Nassau County, in Valley Stream. Without traffic, 25 to 30 minutes from the city. But I did not grow up with any culture, any art, any diversity. I didn’t experiment with food and flavor. We didn’t travel, I didn’t go to museums. I grew up very sheltered, and this was my big moment to understand. I’ve always been a creative. I was a dancer in high school and college. I knew I wanted to find new ways to express myself. My mom said to me that, at even four years old, she knew I would never stay in our small town. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was bartending in nightclubs, it was the first time I was  around creative people, artists, fashion designers, drag queens–people who were expressing themselves, singers, actors, models. I came alive. All of a sudden I started going to art shows and museums. I was in New York because I wanted to act and model, but that never happened for me back then, only in a very minimal way. I got a modeling agent, they sent me to Paris, this was in ‘96, but modeling never happened for me. But I was discovering myself, I was in acting school, and I was figuring out who I wanted to be. 

VC: What did you want to become? 

AC: I was fueled with so much curiosity, I was ripe with wanting to soak everything in. This sounds so silly, but I remember the first time I ate sushi, the first time I had Thai, and was trying to use chopsticks. I almost felt like this newborn deer in this city that was a forest that was going to help me discover what my taste buds were, what my love of expression was. I was figuring myself out alongside our courtship. 

VC: Around the same time. 

AC: Yeah, and nightlife was a huge part of that. My entire community was from nightlife, whether it was an artist, and mostly the gay community too. All of my boys would carry me up. They taught me how to walk and dance in heels, showed me fashion, and pushed me to try a different version of Athena on for size. I loved it. There were no cell phones. It was pure discovery, curiosity, and expression. 

VC: How have you seen yourself changed since then? What changes strike you as most significant?

AC: I kept trying many different versions of Athena. I immersed myself in method acting, I also was in therapy for the first time, so I was using my trauma as my art. Victor would come scoop me up off the floor in tears, sobbing, from this acting studio where I studied. Victor and I were very fortunate in that we had the wherewithal to invest in real estate young. We got married in ‘99 and before that, we bought an apartment in Dumbo together. Our best friend from the club was John Rawlins, an interior designer and architectural designer with an encyclopedic knowledge of design. He helped us design our home, and encouraged me to explore interior design. He said, “you have a good eye for this, this is something you should continue to explore.” Victor and I bought and sold multiple apartments in the span of four or five years. Each one I would design with John. That was the first inkling that pushed me into exploring design. I enrolled in Parsons and started taking some interior design classes. Around this time, Victor’s career took off. He was working with Madonna on the Ray of Light album, and we were thrust into this world of Madonna and Sting and Dolce & Gabbana. Victor was doing all the music for all the Dolce & Gabbana and Versace shows. At the same time, I was figuring out who I was. I was so young at the time, I was probably 21 or 22. I didn’t have a sense of self because I didn’t have a career to speak of. People would ask what do you do, and I didn’t have that answer. It was debilitating. We were around Madonna for a few years in very intimate settings, and she used to say to Victor, “she’s so great, she’s so pretty, but why doesn’t she speak?” I hadn’t found confidence in who I was and what I was meant to offer the world, and that made me get small. I didn’t want to be small. Around that time, like I said, Vic’s career took off, and neither one of us came from a family that traveled and we didn’t grow up with affluence or culture. It was 1997, and he was getting all these DJ shows and opportunities, and we were seeing the world together, discovering wine, food, flavors, and architecture together.

For the first time, I was seeing patina on the walls in the souk in Marrakech; in Greece I was trying fish because I didn’t grow up eating seafood, understanding the importance of spices and herbs. I was so alive with curiosity and soaking everything in. I would come home from these trips so inspired by what I was seeing, using that within our homes—they were an expression of this new version of ourselves. I started to experiment in the kitchen. We had this beautiful home but for a few years we weren’t using the kitchen. Then I got pregnant in 2002 and I stopped studying acting. I threw myself into family life and homemaking. I know that sounds archaic, but I was struggling in the acting world, I was beating myself up, I put a lot of pressure on myself, I didn’t feel I was succeeding. When I got pregnant, I thought I was putting me on hold, but what I didn’t realize is that the home and my family life would eventually be what gave me that sense of self. It led me to being a mom, cooking a meal, setting the table. It was all of my senses coming alive, it was food and flavors, lighting, ambience and flowers. The home became this incubator for me to express myself. I would put a newborn baby to bed, Victor would be on the road sometimes for weeks or a month at the time at a time and I would be rolling out pastry, reading cookbooks voraciously to teach myself cooking techniques. I would test them out 10 times before I would have a dinner party and lure all my 25-year-old friends to my home–they were all out in the world, partying and going to the clubs, figuring out their careers. I used what I had, my home, and that’s how I was expressing myself, how I was bringing people to me. Simultaneously I was going to Parsons, and I started interning at an interior design firm. So many people think design is new for me–design people ask, “What came first, food or design?” I always say they happened simultaneously. My first book was my cookbook that won a James Beard Award, and that became my focus, for my mid 30s. Now I’m more focused on design. Even when my son was one or two years old, I was interning at an interior design firm. Being a mom  gave me so much connectivity to myself and my family. It pushed me–I used to get in my own way, I used to let fear stop me. I could stand within the pride of raising this baby, creating this family, making a home, and finding myself through being a mom.

VC: How would you describe yourself now?

AC: I still have the curiosity I came to the city with, but it’s turned into drive and tenacity as well. I started to slowly begin working with brands, doing larger scale events in my home, taking on the vision, creative direction, and even photography, choosing the photographer and styling. Then I would jump into the kitchen and make a recipe. I was developing our cookbook as I was designing our townhouse, so I was bouncing between different creative realms, and that became my sweet spot. Now I’m still curious to learn and see more, and find what I love in design, product, styling, and photography. I want to find ways to continue incubating myself. I say to myself all the time, and you say to me all the time, why can’t you say no? Why don’t you slow down? There’s so much more to learn. It came out this year, but over the past two years I’ve been working on a furniture collection. I had two furniture collections with Crate & Barrel, and a rug collection with Beni, but those were both collaborations. I wanted to figure out the furniture cycle, including the manufacturing and the sales myself. I hired an incredible design director on my design team. We must have taken 500 calls with different manufacturers or furniture designers, because we were learning something from ground zero. I get filled with so much pride to not know something at all, and to slowly figure it out, ask the questions, and feel more confident. I’m constantly trying to prove that I can–not to the outside world, but to myself. I always felt I was starting things, and they weren’t necessarily always materializing. I used to beat myself up about it, but now I think that tenacity, that drive is what makes me special and unique, and keeps me curious.

VC: It’s interesting to see you look at things with a different lens, too. Food led to how you wanted to design your kitchen, and it led to incredible kitchens.

AC: I’ve definitely been known as “the kitchen girl from the townhouse” before. Everything feeds into one another. The design of our kitchen was quite unique in our townhouse, and at the time I was shooting so much food and cooking content because my cookbook had come out. That kitchen was, in a way, born because I wanted the light to hit a certain way when I was cooking. When raising my son was my focus, and when I was trying to figure out a career, I stopped going out, I stopped going to nightlife, but it is my foundation of who I am. It is the wild side of me, the side that lets loose. I’m in my head a lot. I’m constantly outside watching, planning. When I’m at the club, I am so in my body. I release a lot through dancing. It’s the one place where you’re not in your head at all, and so freeing. Only recently, in the past,  I’d say five or six years, did I say, okay, we raised our kid, I’m ready. Hence why we’re in Ibiza for seven weeks. For years, as I was building who I was on social media, with brands, doing creative direction, and people didn’t know that side of myself. All of a sudden, I’m this club girl, and everyone’s like, “Where’d that come from? And I’m like, “Oh no, you have no idea.”

VC: What was your personal style when you first arrived in New York? What were you wearing?

AC: When I first moved to New York, I knew nothing about fashion. I was obsessed with Audrey Hepburn. I had wore capri pants, a little bandana. I was very minimalist. I only shopped at Macy’s. I never once spent more than $40 on a pair of shoes. Then going to the clubs and bartending, we started to meet all these people that worked in fashion. Victor started working a lot with Dolce & Gabbana. My vintage Dolce & Gabbana collection is off the charts–our friend was doing the PR at the time, and every single Saturday night before Victor would DJ, I would go to his house, and he would dress me in  the pieces that came off the runway, do my hair and my makeup, then push me out the door in this skimpy little belt that was meant to be a skirt and a Swarovski crystal bra. Susan Batson, my acting teacher at the time, used to say to me, if you can take the bravery, the fearlessness that you take into a) how you dress, and b) how you dance, into your acting, you’ll be a star.

VC: Yeah, that’s your confidence.

AC: It’s true, I always took risks with fashion, and with dancing, I always loved to move and express myself.

VC: How have you seen your style change over time?

AC: I turned 50 last year, and I still love to express myself in a fashion-forward or provocative way. But I feel I’ve almost come full circle back to more minimal–maybe it’s fancier now, it’s The Row and Khaite– but it almost goes back to those Audrey Hepburn roots. But I think that makes sense too, because now I’m more comfortable in my own skin. I don’t have to be something through my clothes–my clothes don’t have to speak for me anymore.

VC: Do you feel that’s channeled itself into your interior design aesthetic as well?

AC: As I have experimented more with different periods of design, and especially early 20th century, 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s–Art Deco, at its core, was about stripping away excess. The spaces that I’m designing are following suit because it’s what I’m attracted to right now. I’ve always said that how I cook, how I dress, and how I design, that sophistication and timelessness mixed in with whatever that bold contrasting element is here and there. I never put that together, that I started this Audrey Hepburn Pure, and now I’m back there. In thinking about the successes I’ve had in recent years, from the Architectural Digest cover and the furniture collection, and even the Gucci show, and doing this film Tyrant, all of that comes from years of building my own…I built my confidence up because I’ve self-educated and I’ve taught myself about every period in design, and I understand myself. Who knows if the reason acting and modeling never happened for me back then is that I needed to find myself, to experiment and follow so many crumbs of life that I now have. I think some of the success is coming because I’ve done the work.

VC: It was your education.

AC: It was my education.

VC: What are your career and creative goals moving forward? 

AC: I love creating worlds that touch all the senses, and I want home to always be a piece of that. I  think hospitality, design, and overseeing the creative direction of a boutique hotel is what I’m manifesting and working towards for my next project. I would love to work with the chef and design the restaurant, but also the common spaces and the programming, everything I love about expression and connectivity in the home. The reason I found myself in my 30s, and when we had Jivan, was because I was pulling community to me, to a home. I have never found a place where you are more true, pure, open-hearted than when you’re sharing a meal with someone around the table. I want to keep designing furniture and lighting. I want to continue to push boundaries and say yes to things I would have never even dreamt of in the design and food worlds. 

This cover story appears in the pages of V162: now available for purchase!

Photography Luigi & Iango

Fashion Arut Arustamyan

Interview Victor Calderone

Makeup Georgi Sandev (Forward Artists)

Hair Mari Watase (87 Artists) using Oribe

Manicure Leanne Woodley (See Management) using CND

Fashion Market Editor Copelyn Bengel

Production Louis Guillemain (2b Management)

Styling Assistant Gabby Buchan

Photo Assistant Francisco Betancourt