STEVIE BOI

"Currently my life has changed because of my new found love for cooking. Me being a chef has giving my hope and longevity".

STEVIE BOI

Q. Tell everyone who you are and what you do.

A. My name is Stevie Boi. I am a fashion designer. I’m 32 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland.

Q. What are three things you love about the area?

A. Oh, wow. There are so many. Only three? I love the Inner Harbor; I love Baltimore City itself. I also love the cuisine here, which is another reason why I got inspired to get into cooking, et cetera. And I just love the culture. The culture of Baltimore is rich, it’s very, very strong, from Baltimore club music to, like I said, the food and stuff is like that.

Q. Who or what motivated you to be a fashion designer?

A. Wow. So, I always had the spirit of building. When I was younger, living in Germany, I used to play with Legos just like a lot of kids did. But then one day I fell in love with the Addams Family, and Morticia is my favorite character. My mom had some black curtains, and you know what happened? I cut it up and tried to make my mom dress while she was at work. So, I just want to use my hands to create. So, yeah, that’s how I got into fashion at a young age. And then the sunglasses happened in 2009 when I started SP Shades. I wore them to a club, and a rapper that was performing took them off, and it ended up on the cover of Baltimore Sun and City Paper. It was linked to me. And my name is Stevie Boi, but .com Was always how I would tell people my name. I got 10,000 sales in just a week from the support of the city of Baltimore.

Q. How do you keep up with the trends and fashion nowadays?

A. So ... and this is not to sound cocky or braggadocious (if that’s the way to say it), I never really caught it with the trends. I never read fashion magazines, even though I’ve been in over 500 plus of them. I’ve never flipped through a page and was like, Ooh, I want to do something like this. I just created it. And I was even solidified with this name, they call me the rockstar designer because I just went on my own and just did what I wanted to do, and still do what I want to do. And I still do not go to fashion magazines. I have not one subscription to one. I read more like business enterprise. I’m one of those people. I read Martha Stewart. But yeah, I just created the trends. And keep in mind, the clientele that I worked with, I literally was creating the shape of the world with these artists, these A-list artists.

I’m the trend creator. But Michael Antonio, the guy that helped create the image of Stevie Boi always told me that I was really good at repurposing old things. So, if you want to talk about trends, pretty much I brought back older style things that people used to laugh at and I made it fashion.

Q. What are your three best sellers?

A. Oh, wow, that’s easy. All my friends will tell you. So, it’s the SB Shines and then SB Aztecs. And then I used to do something called Orbitz, in which I made for Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey and a couple of other celebrities. And it was just metal glasses that Amber Rose wore them to a popular photoshoot me and her did at our hotel. It’s literally metal glasses that have no brim on it, no nothing. It’s just metal. And you just pop it on your face, and it literally adjusts to anybody’s face, no matter how big it is, how small it is, you just bend it.

Q. Who do you look up to or who inspire you in the fashion world?

A. I love Naomi Campbell. Rest in peace Andre Leon Talley. Dapper Dan. All of these people that paved the way for me to obviously have the space that I have in the fashion industry. When it comes to designers, Alexander McQueen hands down probably my favorite designer of all time. And then, of course, I love like the Prada and then Chanel, but I like the older school stuff because that’s when I started to take sewing seriously because I would look at the patterns and stuff, and then I realized I can’t do patterns. I know it’s not good to say you can’t do it, but I literally ended up creating a business behind that. So, I do something that’s very complicated in the fashion world called blocking.

Q. What can we look forward to for the rest of 2022?

A. Well, during COVID, I wrote three more books. I already have two books out right now. So, I am going to possibly be releasing at least one or two or three of the books this year going into next year. I have to go to Panama this year to host a music festival that I do every single year. I’m currently on a Stevie Boi meets tour which is me doing fashion shows while I’m cooking for the audience. This isn’t a runway show, this is literally like being in a mansion or like an Airbnb or on a beach or something like that. We change the setting. We want to refresh it every time. But then that also we created a spinoff. We go to Stevie Boi Eats Picnic, in which obviously it’s in the title. And then Stevie Boi Eats Movie Nights. I have a cartoon that I’ve been working on for years in Japan that is finally going to see the light of day in 2023. Oh, and of course, how can I forget the most important thing? I’m now a private chef. Next week, I’m going to be helping someone cook for 70,000 people at the Broccoli Festival in D.C.

Q. How did you get into the cooking world?

A. So, when I started off as a fashion designer and I traveled with all these clients of mine, there wasn’t so much of a big budget so we would get ... this was before Airbnb so we would stay at these nice hotels that had kitchenettes. So, some of them could not leave the hotel because of paparazzi stuff like that, so I was like, Hey don’t nobody knows who I am, let me go down to the bodega and I would get ingredients, come back up and cook. And that was like 13 years ago. Fast forward to when COVID happened, I didn’t think that my fashion business was going to do well, no one focused on fashion. I was in Seattle at the time at my sister’s house. I went out there for three days and ended up staying a year and a half. I just start cooking a lot and taking pictures of it. And then that’s when I created the Stevie Boi Eats book.

I got on a certain platform, and I was able to be hired as a private chef. And I practice so much, going to so many different people’s houses, including my neighbors, different soldiers that I work with in the past. And now it’s a legitimate career to the point where I have Michelin chefs reaching out to me saying, you’re doing a good job.

Q. What is one of your most memorable moments you’ve had so far in this career?

A. I am from Georgia, but I grew up in Germany. I lived in so many countries, but Germany is my favorite place. When I got the call from your Europa Amusement Park to host Halloween nights, which is like their American version of our American thing that we have here. But they didn’t tell me that it was going to be 50,000 plus people there. So, I’m serious. And yeah, it’s my fault. I should have looked it up. When I tell you I had to go back and to learn how to speak Deutsch ... And well, that was tough. But I’m standing there and I’m just staring at literally 50,000 people on a stage by myself. I felt like Dave Chappelle or something, or like a comedian because I’m a jokester, so I’m always trying to make people laugh. Then I’m forgetting were in Germany, I got to be careful what I say because I don’t want my joke to land incorrectly. No script, no nothing, just a teleprompter that tells me every once in a while, what to say. This was one of my memorable moments.

Q. Where can the readers follow you?

A. Just go to stevieboi.com.