Cyndi Lauper Says the Fashion & Music Industries ‘Squeeze’ Creatives: ‘How Much Money Do You Goddamn Need?’

For Cyndi Lauper, her Suitcase of Memories auction/exhibition currently open at Bonhams in her native New York City isn’t just a trip down memory lane – it’s a wake-up call.

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“The fashion stuff is very important to share because it’s inspirational. We spray-painted this, we put that together with safety pins,” Lauper tells Billboard after giving us and a few other outlets a personal tour of her auction block. “This is a great time to do this. Now that we’ve become so corporatized it’s good to look back at what we were. If you look back at rock n’ roll fashion in the ‘80s, it was a time of individual expression. In a time when we’re being forced into a square peg, it’s time to either remember or inspire.”

The Suitcase of Memories lot — named after a lyric from her 1984 Billboard Hot 100-topper “Time After Time,” one of four top five hits off her blockbuster debut She’s So Unusual — is colorful, screaming proof of Lauper’s point. There’s DIY (the iconic True Colors skirt Lauper and Screaming Mimi’s owner Laura Wills made from ripped newspapers and magazines); couture (stage-worn Vivienne Westwood outfits); pieces of music history (the plaid dress she wore to the inaugural VMAs); and even hand-me-downs (those leopard-print PJs she wore in the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video were her grandmother’s). Plus, there are Gold records, mixing boards, shoes, furniture, dolls, handwritten lyrics and an explosion of accessories.

Suitcase of Memories is open to the public through the live auction date on Thursday (Oct. 22); the online auction stays open through Friday (Oct. 23). For Lauper, whose outrageous, eye-popping looks helped define the ‘80s, fashion isn’t just part of her life — it’s family history. “[When] my family came over, the first relative was a seamstress. That’s how she made her money,” Lauper says of her Italian family. “Everybody sewed and could take a pattern and add to it. They could get hand-me-downs, look at you and measure and it would look like it was made for you. My mom, I can’t even get over how talented she was like that. My uncle was a cutter in the Garment District and became a sought-after pattern maker and then he became a women’s coat designer. I had to go to Fashion Industries [High School in New York] because they felt that was my lot in life. But I wanted to sing. I wanted to go to [High School of] Music & Art so bad.”

Obviously, the whole music thing worked out for the Hot 100-topping, Grammy- and Tony-winning singer-songwriter who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025. And though a teenaged Lauper flunked out of Fashion Industries, her substantial impact on fashion since then nearly rivals her enormous influence on music. So when she rings an alarm about the state of the fashion industry, it carries some weight.

“It’s big, gigantic corporations buying up little companies that are creative and the creatives are squeezed out. Or you take a guy like Alexander McQueen and then you make him do 12 shows a year,” she says, referencing the game-changing couturier who died by suicide in 2010. “Do you know [how much work] that entails? When they do that, they squeeze these people dry. They either lose their minds like [John] Galliano or they turn to drugs and alcohol, because after a while, coffee ain’t doing it. And that is where the problem is. Why do you have to be that greedy?” she ponders. “Once you homogenize everything there is no more creative. That’s the danger of all of this. How much money do you goddamn need? You’re already a billionaire.”

She also sees the deleterious efforts of that corporate mentality — and the idea that every quarter must outperform the previous one — on the music industry. “The shareholders are not any of the creatives,” she states, though she adds that banking can be a creative field, too. “If you squeeze people dry, you wreck it. When Michael [Jackson] sold 35 million copies [of Thriller] they didn’t view it as a phenomenon. They brought a chart in and said, ‘Well, next year….’ What?! You’re not making a car. It happened; it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen every year. Grow up and don’t be so greedy and shortsighted.”

Over the last few decades, she’s also seen how billionaires and corporations have quashed creative life in Manhattan. “When things become too expensive, you don’t have those young neighborhoods anymore in your city,” she says. “What happens is the city becomes dull. This used to be the city that never slept. Not anymore, pallie. This island that was so fantastic has become Work Island and that’s sad. I remember when Greenwich Village wasn’t just a college dorm.”

Still, there are plenty of creatives who continue to inspire Lauper in the fashion world. “Obviously, I still love Vivienne and I love Jean-Paul,” she says. “I still have the coat I bought from him in 1985, which I will never, ever part with.” Another personal item she held back from the auction block was a piece of furniture from the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video. “I painted it, so I kept that.”

For better or worse, the closet-cleaning Bonhams auction also led to her inadvertently parting with a few beloved items. “I didn’t go through everything. I had other people help me and there were a few things that slipped right through that I didn’t mean to have go. But what are you gonna do?” she muses. “After a while, you can’t be tied down and hold onto the past. You should share it.”