SPRING 2019
WHAT TO WEAR NOW
ACTOR
Caleb Landry Jones ARTIST
Tom Sachs SKATER
Jason Dill
VIRGIL ABLOH
And the Dawn of a New Era in Men’s Fashion
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V I S I T N O R D S T R O M .C O M A N D O U R M E N’ S S TO R E AT 2 3 5 W E S T 5 7 T H S T R E E T, N YC
SPRING 2019
VA L E N T I N O
BALENCIAGA
CONTENTS
GQ STYLE SPRING 2019 WHAT TO WEAR NOW: LABELS ON FIRE: STARRING CALEB MARNI, MARTINE LANDRY JONES ROSE, CAV EMPT P40
P72
THE LOST GRATEFUL DEAD ARCHIVE THE LONDON SCHOOL OF TASTE-O-NOMICS
P92
P80
A PARADIGM SHIFT IN PARIS
P100
COVER STORY: TOM SACHS:
VIRGIL ABLOH P120
ON THE COVER Virgil Abloh in Paris, at his first show as Louis Vuitton men’s artistic director, on June 21, 2018. Photograph by Pari Dukovic
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19 THE HOURS HANDYMAN IN OF HIGH ART MIAMI P130
SKATE HERO JASON DILL
P140
P158
Letter f rom the Editor
Spri ng 2019
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Will Welch Editor-in-Chief
F R O M TO P : M AT T M A RT I N ( 5 ) ; M E I N K E K L E I N
I was in middle school. The Grateful Dead were coming to Atlanta, and I was a lock to see them, thanks to my best friend, Ben, and his generous Deadhead father’s tickets. Then disaster: Ben called an audible and invited his new girlfriend, Lucy, to the show instead. All I got was heartbreak—and the T-shirt above. Five months later, Jerry Garcia was gone. To be fair, it’s a great shirt. Skeletons enacting scenes from Mark Twain. It’s faded and frayed now—better than ever. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve since spent—first in head shops, then on eBay—collecting Dead merch like it. Maybe I buy all this stuff out of genuine passion, or maybe I’m compensating for the fact that I never saw the Grateful Dead play. Either way, I was thrilled when I got a tip that the Dead’s longtime sound engineer, Dan Healy, had found his forgotten archive of tour shirts in a crawl space. If you’ve ever collected anything— or just obsessively archived something frivolous—the fairy tale on page 80 is for you. To me, it’s the perfect GQ Style story: Sure, it’s about clothes— boxes of old garments. But once you start to unpack those boxes, strange wonders unfurl. The Dead were outlaws, as rowdy and mythical as the Colt-carrying ones before them. And Dan Healy was at the center of it all, making his rich, innovative, largely unrewarded contributions to American counterculture. Dan, I salute you—and, hey, while we’re at it, how much for that Lyceum ’72 tee? THE YEAR WAS 1995.
here to just merely survive but do it with style.” Amen. 3. The graphic on a sweatshirt by Jerry Garcia’s guitarmaker that I bought via Instagram from the vintage dealer @deadhead.
Wh To Wear P o rtraits by T h o mas W h i teside
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S t yl e d by M o b o la ji Da w o d u
Sti l l Lif es by Ma tt Ma r tin
at
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PLUS THE
36 FLYEST DESIGNER PIECES OF THE SEASON
STARRING HOLLYWOOD COWBOY
CALEB LANDRY JONES
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A handbeaded shirt from Kim Jones’s Dior debut showcases the house’s couture capabilities. (The flowers pay homage to Christian Dior—they were lifted from his personal china.)
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What to W ear Now
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BLACKANDGOLD jacket $6,500 pants $900 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello tank top $148 Boss belt, his own necklace (throughout) $125 Miansai
Actor Caleb Landry Jones is leaving his indelible mark on any movie that will let him get weird. Light one up with the Texan on page 68—and check out how he owns the flyest fashion of the season throughout this section.
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FRENCH TRENCH Givenchy $3,290
Berluti (price upon request)
Berluti, whose name is built on divinely beautiful leather shoes, has a new designer (Kris Van Assche), a new logo (see left), and a brandspanking-new bag.
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COLOR-BLOCKED COAT Stella McCartney’s paneled trench proves that vegan leather and suede can be even more covetable than the real stuff.
coat (price upon request) Stella McCartney pants $1,295 Giorgio Armani shoes $545 Tod’s
ring (throughout), his own
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07 SUEDE TRUCKER jacket $1,498 Michael Kors t-shirt $40 (for pack of three) Calvin Klein Underwear
The only thing as dope as this sand suede trucker? Caleb’s cowboy hat, which he inherited from his grandfather.
jeans $378 John Elliott belt $690 Gucci his own hat, vintage
What to W ear Now
This season, Tom Ford smashed the leopard button and made our favorite spring-shoe silhouette even better.
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Family-owned Herno doesn’t sacrifice any Italian elegance in the pursuit of superior wind-and-rain-resistant outerwear.
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INTRECCIATO TOTE
Bottega Veneta’s new creative director, Daniel Lee, came out swinging with his first release: a bag that goes gigantic with the house’s iconic woven-leather technique.
Bottega Veneta $9,500
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What to W ear Now
11 Gingham Fur
This season, Thom Browne explored the sartorial codes of American prep, and in his hands the gingham shirt became a full-on fur coat.
coat (price upon request) Thom Browne track jacket $595 pants $375 Victor Li loafers $890 Gucci
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Dior’s new line of impeccably crafted inside-out suiting challenges the assumption that tailoring can’t be as hype-worthy as streetwear.
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Rock ’n’ roll might be dead-ish, but Hedi Slimane—and his effortless sense of cool—is back and ready to take over the fashion world once again. (See what we mean on page 100.)
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SHIRT Dunhill $3,195
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15 Embroidered Suit jacket and pants (price upon request) shirt $1,245 Alexander McQueen loafers $775 Jimmy Choo socks $29 Pantherella his own hat, vintage
Alexander McQueen designer Sarah Burton takes wearable art to a new level—the hand-done embroidery on this suit references the work of Surrealist painter Francis Bacon.
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What to W ear Now
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17 STATEMENT SHEARLING
jacket $2,200 Coach t-shirt $40 (for pack of three) Calvin Klein Underwear jeans $378 John Elliott belt $690 Gucci
Coach figured out how to make the best fleece jacket—craft it from 100 percent shearling.
What to W ear Now
Prabal Gurung’s first menswear offering showcases his renowned sense of color and construction. Case in point: this silk shirt, which
Prabal Gurung (price upon request)
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20 SILK TROUSERS Gucci $880
In his debut collection for men, Simon Porte Jacquemus convinced us that every breezy patterned shirt should come with a jaunty matching pouch.
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What to W ear Now
jacket $4,900 shirt $1,190 pants $900 boots $1,895 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello belt and hat, his own
Yee-haw! Saint Laurent don Anthony Vaccarello proves that westernwear can look modern and downright chic with his très Parisian touch.
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23 ZIGZAG SILK SHIRT
shirt $185 SSS World Corp tank top $149 Boss jeans $378 John Elliott belt $690 Gucci watch $83,320 Patek Philippe
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SSS World Corp’s rowdy designer, Justin O’Shea, is here to remind you to dress irresponsibly this season.
$185 (purple) and $175 (blue)
Fashion’s beloved dad sneaker is now available in a range of tasty spring colors.
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jacket $1,072 pants $725 Lemaire
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Think of this season’s offerings from Italian tailoring powerhouse Canali as arrabbiata for your closet.
A FULL FIREENGINE RED FIT jacket $2,130 sweater $2,130 pants $490 Canali sunglasses $310 Moscot
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28 LEATHER PARKA coat (price upon request) Bally shirt $340 Etro pants $1,425 Wales Bonner boots $1,031 Alyx
Bally took the best thrift-store army green parka, electrified the color, and gave it a luxurious leather upgrade.
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Ermenegildo Zegna $295
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Follow the yellow brick road: Virgil Abloh’s bleached-denim pieces portray the iconic Wizard of Oz image of Dorothy asleep in the poppy fields.
jacket $2,530 pants $1,600 Louis Vuitton shoes $140 Clarks
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34 QUILTED BOMBER
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Giorgio Armani $2,195 Giorgio Armani has been making cool pants since before most contemporary designers were born, and he’s at the top of his game with these deeply pleated, drapey trousers.
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T H E S E PA G E S , F O R C A L E B L A N D R Y J O N E S , G R O O M I N G : D A V I D C O X U S I N G K E V I N M U R P H Y. P R O P ST Y L I ST: TO M W Y M A N AT TO M W Y M A N D E S I G N S . S E E A D D I T I O N A L C R E D I TS .
Takahiromiyashita The Soloist $5,995
What to W ear Now
Combining ribs and bubble knits, this chunky Prada sweater is retro and futuristic at the same time.
36 Zip Knit sweater $1,230 pants $1,260 Prada
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E V E R This is the ballad of Caleb Landry Jones, a nice Texas boy whom you may vaguely recognize as the creepy brother in Get Out. Or maybe as the ginger sweetheart in Three Billboards. Or perhaps as the face of the latest Saint Laurent campaign. How he even got here is a small miracle, but it’s probably better to let him explain.
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St y le d b y M ob o laj i D awo du
By Ale x Papp ademas
P hotogra ph by Thom as White side
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all these sheep
for real in 2017, with a string of indelible and occa-
walk by,” Caleb Landry Jones is saying,
sionally skin-crawly performances as unsavory white
“and I’m thinking, I don’t know if they got
dudes—the brother who grills Daniel Kaluuya about
it more figured out or less figured out. They seem all
MMA in Get Out; Amanda Seyfried’s abusive burn-
right. But unlike the geese, they can’t fly away. And
out husband on Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return;
the geese can fly away. I think they just don’t know
and Red Welby in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
that they can.”
Missouri, whose decision to rent some outdoor ad
“WELL, I’M WATCHING
It’s a Tuesday, just after the New Year, and Jones
space to an aggrieved Frances McDormand leads to a whole movie’s worth of complications.
is calling from Texas, where he grew up. Talking to him over a spotty cell-phone connection is a cosmic,
The magnetic anti-charisma and blackout intensity
enjoyably disorienting experience. His sentences spin
he brought to these parts were nothing new—way
out into riffs, one-man dialogues featuring drawling
back in 2014, as the “douchebag, black-metal, fuck-
impressions of his piano-teacher mom or his contrac-
ing dirt bomb” boyfriend in the Safdie brothers’
tor dad, Boomhauer-esque verbal vapor trails. Right
micro-indie Heaven Knows What, he was already
now he’s doing his best to answer questions about
doing work that made you wonder if you were even
the craft of acting, about balancing preparation and
watching an actor. But movies like Get Out and
instinct, reality and, uh, hyper-reality, so when he
Billboards and the sneakily topical third season of
brings up sheep and geese it sounds like a metaphor.
Twin Peaks found broader symbolic use for his white-
But it isn’t. He’s calling from his parents’ farm. The
bread malevolence, casting him as the avatar of that
sheep are sheep and the geese are geese, and Jones is
which is unseemly about that which is all-American.
watching two circling hawks, hoping they don’t make
Few actors in recent memory have committed more
off with a chicken.
thoroughly to playing real creeps or worried less
“It sounds like a nice metaphor,” Jones concedes.
about picking up baggage that could render them
“Let’s use it as a metaphor, Alex. You know, Alex, it’s
uncastable as anything nicer. “I don’t know,” Jones
just like sheep, you know?” He laughs. “Oh Lord, man.
says when this concern is brought up, “if there’s such
I shouldn’t be talking about any of this.”
a thing as doing too good a job.”
Jones turns 30 at the end of this year. He was born in
Lately he’s modeled Sailor Ripley snakeskin
Garland and grew up in nearby Richardson, once the
for Saint Laurent’s spring-summer campaign and
home of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson. He discovered acting in speech class in high school and started doing it professionally shortly thereafter, mostly in films and on TV series shot in and around his home state. That’s
“I don’t know if there’s such a
a teenage Jones making the most of his moment as Boy on Bike (“Mister, you got a bone sticking out of your arm!”) in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old
recorded most of an album of original songs, a project
Men. He also played the drummer in Landry Clarke’s
that’s been compared to Sgt. Pepper by people he’s
Crucifictorious (best-ever death-metal band from
played it for, although Jones doesn’t quite hear what
Dillon, Texas) on Friday Night Lights and Walt Junior’s
they’re hearing. “I don’t think it’s anywhere close to
best friend on Breaking Bad.
as good as that,” Jones says, “but it’s trippy and it
He figured he’d pursue music; he moved out of his
doesn’t ever repeat itself.” The songs flow together
parents’ home, got his heart broken, and poured out 40 songs about the experience in a few months. Then he booked a part in 2010’s The Last Exorcism. His role consisted of more than one scene; he took it as a sign and relocated to Los Angeles to act. He broke through
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continuously, “like some of the later Wings stuff, PREVIOUS PAGE tank top $148 Boss necklace $125 Miansai grooming by david cox using kevin murphy
or the end of Abbey Road, or [Pink Floyd’s] Atom Heart Mother.” There’s a project he’s excited about but can’t discuss yet; it’s a big movie, but he’s “not gonna be a superhero
“My uncle, man,” Jones says, “brings my grandma to see Three Billboards. I said, ‘Grandma, did you like it?’ She said, ‘Sure was a lot of cursing.’ ” He doesn’t enjoy getting those calls from her. “Well, they had to blow you up, didn’t they?” he says, in a Texas-grandma voice. “Yeah, they did. They had to set you on fire. Yeah, they did. They had to shoot you. Yeah, they did.” Jones begins imagining the internal monologue of a sadistic casting director: “I don’t know what it is about that guy—I just want to see him thrown out of a building.” Honestly, though, he can’t believe he’s gotten to work with any of the directors he’s worked with. “I did [a movie] with…what’s his name—the singer from Limp Bizkit. I’ve never been a big fan of Limp Bizkit, but I was still very surprised to get to work with him. Ice Cube was in it.” That’d be The Longshots, released in 2008, directed by nookie fancier and then budding auteur Fred Durst, with Cube as a washed-up football player helping his niece chase her dream of playing Pop Warner, and Jones as—well, he plays some guy. “Jonesy” in the credits. It’s not a big part. He scrounged gas money to get himself from Texas to the set in Louisiana, showed up toward the end of shooting, and wore a football helmet most of the time. He’s still never seen the finished movie; a buddy (“who bought a Mexican bootleg of it or something”) watched it and told Jones he’s not really in it that much. But even that job was a dream job, at least in the sense that they’re all dream jobs.
thing as doing too good a job.”
“I missed graduation [from high school] to be in that movie,” he says. “I just had a blast. I was supposed to be silly, so I was, y’know, doing high kicks. Made Ice Cube giggle, I remember. I thought, ‘Okay, you made
or anything like that.” The film turns out to be Bios, a
Ice Cube giggle, that’s good’—because he’s supposed
sci-fi thriller starring Tom Hanks as the last man on
to be cold as ice, y’know?”
Earth; Jones plays a motion-capture robot learning
Did you feel like you’d made it when you made Ice
to love. So instead we discuss the more immediately
Cube giggle?
forthcoming The Kindness of Strangers, in which SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.
director Lone Scherfig (An Education) has cast Jones against type, as a guy who just wants to help people and doesn’t get thrown out of even one window. Jones is excited to have finally made a movie he can take his mother and grandmother to see: “They haven’t been able to watch too many of ’em.”
“No,” Jones says. “But it did feel like maybe I could Above: Jones brought his live-wire mischief to a few of 2017’s wildest pop-culture spectacles: in Get Out (top), as the lacrosse-stick-wielding brother; on Twin Peaks (center), as a classic haunted David Lynch archetype; and in Three Billboards, as, well, a salesman.
get another job after this. It was positive reinforcement. You’re good enough for us, kid. I was thrilled to have gotten that job. I was so happy to have a reason not to be at graduation. Because I hadn’t paid for the gown. Sixty dollars for a gown. It just seemed ridiculous.” A L E X PA P PA D E M A S I S A W R I T E R W H O L I V E S I N L O S A N G E L E S .
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LABELS
A playful Italian design phenom, an all-star of the London underground, and a mysterious streetwear iconoclast prove that today there’s no one path to creating fashion with major street heat.
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MARTINE ROSE
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MARNI 1
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Fashion through a fun-house mirror
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1. Designer Francesco Risso spent the first four years of his life on a boat. The experience makes him a naturalborn explorer, he says. 2. Risso wants Marni to stand out because of its signature playfulness. “Logo mania,” he declares, “is over.” 3. After he has designed a collection, there is no color, print, or pattern left in Risso’s toolbox. 4. Jonah Hill is one of the brand’s many highprofile fans. The love is mutual. “He’s the perfect person to enjoy Marni,” Risso says.
WHEN MARNI CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Francesco Risso was growing up, he would raid his parents’ and siblings’ closets like a mad scientist in search of parts. His sister would go out and return home to find jackets with sleeves lopped off or a skirt sprouting pant legs. His habit “tragically created dramas,” he laments over the phone from Milan, and earned him the nickname the Virus of the Wardrobe. Risso just wanted to express himself. His childhood home, he recalls, was like a “commune” that bustled with extendedfamily members and the random architect, artist, or agriculturist whom his dad would bring around. Risso says he wasn’t shy but he wasn’t chatty, either. He preferred to express himself through clothing— slicing up whatever he could find to make it just right. “It was like a drug,” he says. Not much has changed since Risso’s days as the Virus. If he was hooked on cutting up clothes and mashing them together, it’s safe to say he is still awaiting an intervention: The creations
that shuffle down the Marni runway are compellingly bizarre, peculiar, magical, funny, joyous, playful, and as vibrant as acid-powered visions. In Risso’s hands, shoes erupt with fur, stately brown jackets are Frankensteined together with hippiedippie floral prints, and googly-eyed gloves channel elementary-school arts and crafts. At 16, Risso exchanged his self-taught curriculum for proper training. He left home for fashion school in Florence before transferring to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, then London’s prestigious factory of successful designers, Central Saint Martins. By 24, he was working for Prada. At 33, in 2016, the designer took over Marni upon the exit of Consuelo Castiglioni, who’d founded the label in 1994. Now Risso is ready to infect closets en masse. No one is immune to the Marni epidemic. The world of fashion is too often self-serious and painted in black and white, but discovering Marni is like gaining access to the jumbo-size crayon box with the sharpener on the side. Risso stepped into Marni at the perfect time, just at the dawn of menswear’s wild-style era. But his brand of maximalism pushes something that is totally fresh in our irony-addled time: earnestness. His clothes don’t ask you to be in on some joke or to get some obscure reference. Instead, they are generous in proportion, print, and color. “I would like people to feel at home when they go in the shop and try something on,” Risso says. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that Risso is inspired by cartoons. He loves
Disney movies like Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland, but rather than referencing them directly, he strives to convey the feeling of wonder they evoke. “It’s like a primordial way of speaking,” he says of his designs. “It’s like you’re laughing and everyone in the world understands why.” For Risso, though, making playful clothes is serious business. He doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the designer who trades only in the childlike. Risso often finds inspiration by constructing worlds or envisioning movie sets where his designs might be worn. For the spring collection that’s in stores now, he imagined what Olympians in the ’20s and ’30s wore. Even while mining the highest levels of competition for ideas, Risso burrows for the fun. “I was trying to make a sport collection for Marni that wasn’t grounded in the hyperhuman [but] in the joy of the sport,” he says. Fittingly, the men in the show looked less like gym rats than guys who just moments before had vowed to kick-start a diet. When asked if flamboyant colors and prints will continue to be the touchstones of his collections moving forward, Risso replies after an extended pause, “I don’t know.” He imagines a future where the Virus of the Wardrobe mutates Marni’s colorful universe so extensively that it pops out an all-black collection, then quickly clarifies that what makes Marni irresistible won’t go anywhere: “But black can be fun, too.” —CAM WOLF
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MARTINE ROSE Nobody makes bad taste look better
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2019 show, Martine Rose skipped the Fashion Week runways and instead staged her show on a sleepy cul-de-sac in northwest London, where neighbors mingled on the sidewalk with the international fashion corps while models clomped about in square-toe loafers embellished with sleazy gold chains. As designers appropriate the anti-fashion of the ’80s and ’90s, the sworn-off angular shoes have made a semi-ironic comeback in menswear. But nobody makes bad taste look as good as Martine Rose. Rose’s billowy trousers and parkasized button-down shirts appear less extreme today than when she was the star of London’s underground fashion scene a decade ago. But just barely. For Rose, who founded her namesake brand in 2007, exaggerated proportions are how she tells stories about the characters that inspire her—the crusties, rude boys, and ravers she encountered growing up in London. Though she was the youngest kid in her large extended family, Rose, a self-proclaimed tomboy, could hang with her elder siblings and cousins. She remembers, for instance, watching reggae star Dennis Brown, a friend of her sister’s, sing in a London recording studio. The blocky loafers hark back to the slick footwear worn by “a wide boy,” a seedy figure, Rose says, who “has a little bit of attitude, a little bit of arrogance or flash. He wore Patrick Cox loafers, which at a particular time in England were a statussymbol shoe. It said so much.” Rose, who admits she is “not much of a planner,” approaches each collection based on memory and feeling: She starts designing the clothes; then the story of the season reveals itself. She credits her early access to London’s club scene with sparking her fascination with subcultures and their sartorial symbols. She was only 9 years old when the London rave scene peaked, in 1989, and vividly remembers watching her elder cousin and his friends get dressed up to go dancing. Luckily for her, the party would inevitably migrate to a more accessible venue for her age. “Hundreds of people used to come back from the rave and go to this park, and because it was a park, I could go,” Rose recalls. “I was basically in the club with them. People would open their car doors and play music, and everyone would continue dancing. When I think about it now, they were completely off their faces, but it felt very warm. It was the first time that all these different tribes came together in one mush, all wearing different types of clothing.” Rose attended fashion school at Middlesex University London, but she developed her eye for proportion by looking
FOR HER SPRING-SUMMER
at art. “I was actually really drawn to sculpture [at the time],” she says. “I always had an interest in form. That translated in my early collections into a sense of scale, and what that does to the human form.” For her Nike collaboration, which launched this past season, she redesigned the ultimate dad shoe, the Air Monarch, by adding enormous uppers to normal-size soles and molding the extra leather into bulbous, bone-like protrusions. In Rose’s universe, clothing doesn’t have to reflect or flatter the human body—it can distend and disrupt it, too. Demna Gvasalia, another designer fond of disruption, fell in love with Rose’s work before he launched Vetements. When he took over Balenciaga, in 2015, he hired Rose, who served as a design consultant until late last year. (“Basically my first job,” she jokes.) It’s easy to see Rose’s fingerprints on Balenciaga’s boxy menswear and retro graphic language. But now that her lane is getting more crowded, she is staying one step ahead with a surprisingly pared-down spring collection. Paneled-leather police jackets are slouchy but not super huge; denim track-pant hybrids are cut in an eminently wearable taper. “I’ve been using oversize proportions a lot,” Rose says. “And while I think it’s important to own something, it’s just as important to move on and to keep telling new stories.” — S A M U E L H I N E
1. Martine Rose has been a designer since she got out of school in 2002 and started a brand called LMNOP. 2. The Nike x Martine Rose collab made an already polarizing sneaker (the Air Monarch) even more so—and it was an instant hit.
3. Martine Rose began as a shirting brand. Rose adapted the logo, which appears on the chest of each shirt, from a signature she found on a vintage-army-jacket tag. 4. The spring-summer 2019 collection showcases flamboyant, gloriously clashing patterns.
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A mysterious streetwear cult from Japan
CAV EMPT
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1. Cav Empt’s spring-summer 2019 collection includes a reference to Karl Marx (the text here is from “The Fragment on Machines”).
T H ES E PAG ES,
SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.
2. Cav Empt emerged from the soup of pure street culture, but before Bape, Toby Feltwell was a music A&R for Mo’ Wax and XL Recordings and studied law. 3. SK8THING suggested the name Cav Empt after reading a Philip K. Dick book in which a character had a CAVEAT EMPTOR tattoo.
was born, in 2011, it was not a bolt of lightning but rather an earthquake that struck Toby Feltwell and his fellow founding partners, the designer known as SK8THING and Hishiyama Yutaka. Quite a large one. Nuclear reactors were shut down, and much of Tokyo, a city of endless, dazzling light, went dark. The result was eye-opening. “You end up in the same place,” Feltwell recalls, “but you see it immediately very differently.” Feltwell and SK8THING were nearing the end of a long stint at A Bathing Ape, after the hugely influential and successful clothing brand was sold by its original owner, Nigo. Feeling disenchanted by mass appeal but eager to work together, the founders had a seed of an idea that was just germinating when the power went out. Then an ethos took form and the idea began to sprout. “It doesn’t happen so often that you are able to wake from this semislumber state that we’re in most of the time,” Feltwell says, “and be excited by the reality of your surroundings.”
WHEN CAV EMPT
Cav Empt, which gets its name from the Latin phrase caveat emptor, a legal term meaning “let the buyer beware,” grounds itself in precisely this reality. The other reality. The reality that we don’t see every day but is no less real. Take technology, for instance. “It creeps onto the door,” Feltwell says. “It doesn’t impress you with all the amazing stuff it can do. It tries to pretend it’s always been around. The stuff just appears before you realize it. It’s always sliding in at the edges, and before you know it, everybody’s using it.” Many Cav Empt designs have featured images of outdated hardware. The effect, Feltwell says, is a “flash of realization about where we are now.” So where exactly are we now? “I think the overriding value currently is popularity,” Feltwell says. Historically, in music, fashion, and art, what’s popular and what’s considered cool have been at odds. Cool comes from the fringes and belongs to the underground. Popular is
confirmative and for the masses. But Feltwell began to sense a shift while working on A Bathing Ape. Once a cult of authenticity for only the initiated, Bape quickly became one of the most recognizable, in-demand brands on the planet. That set Feltwell and his founding partners on a path toward creating a collection that would resist the kind of rapid expansion that could easily compromise the vision. “What we’re doing,” he says, “is trying to fight against this banal popularity.” For Cav Empt, that means quietly launching a ’90s-inflected clothing line full of pixelated images, cryptic symbols, and haunting figures, many looking sandblasted and bathed in acid. The brand is available globally and has a store in Tokyo, but information about it is scarce, and a real marketing effort beyond an Instagram and a Twitter account is nonexistent. “It is an exciting time,” Feltwell says, “because there’s quite a lot to fight against.” — N O A H J O H N S O N
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A recovered gem from the Dan Healy T-shirt archive, commemorating the four Lyceum shows that concluded the Grateful Dead’s firstever European tour.
As a longtime sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Dan Healy pioneered the way live music hits you in the gut—and he amassed a rich collection of tour tees along the way. Then he forgot about it. We visited Healy at his home in Marin, for a look at his newly re-discovered archive—and to hear the untold stories of his years on the road.
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boxes are found
remember wearing a Grateful Dead shirt,” Dan Healy
across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin
says. Doing so would have gotten him laughed at by
County, past San Rafael, through a canyon,
his co-workers. “We didn’t really do that.”
THE 12 CARDBOARD
up the drive, at a house situated on an idyllic green hill-
Healy, now 73, has short white hair and looks like
side. Then: into the basement, past the meticulously
the semi-retired audio engineer he is in a neat button-
organized antique-radio workshop, and down another
down shirt and glasses. The old co-workers he’s
set of stairs to the dirt-packed crawl space beneath.
talking about happen to be the Grateful Dead’s travel-
Inside the boxes are some several hundred T-shirts,
ing sound crew, of which he was a legendary member.
constituting both the vintage-fashion score of this or
From 1967 to 1994, with a few breaks, Healy worked
any year (but especially this one) and an incomparable
with the Dead—serving as primary sound engineer
historical collection. Spread across them, emblazoned
beginning in the early ’70s.
in a quarter-century’s worth of gaudy design trends, is
For all the things the Dead are best known for
the story of the Grateful Dead, Marin County’s psyche-
today—improvisation, songwriting, even their role in
delic cowboys and now mythological American legends.
engendering the transformation of American culture
Upstairs, the bemused shirt owner watches as they
through psychedelics—it might be easy to overlook
unfold and bloom across the living room, like rain-
the fact that the band was also responsible for the
bow spores from cardboard seed pockets. Despite
virtual invention of modern live-concert sound. Much
their age—the earliest of the shirts are more than 50
of that owes to the effort and obsession of Healy, who
years old—they’re in remarkable shape. “I don’t ever
not only operated the soundboard but had a hand in innovations along nearly the entire signal chain that fed into and out of it. The importance of the T-shirt collection in his sub-basement isn’t merely in the shirts but in their owner. The shirts are the spoils from the band’s official mer-
Healy’s backstage pass and program from the Dead’s 1978 shows at the foot of the Sphinx. Healy wired up the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza for sound.
chandising arm, as well as from promoters to commemorate specific concerts. Healy’s collection includes some infamous parking-lot bootlegs, too, as well as a FREE DAN HEALY
shirt with his face behind bars, made
by the band after Healy’s scuffle with the Bakersfield fuzz in 1978. (“They were out to get us that tour,” he says of the police.) Wherever the band played, Healy would politely take the swag and then get back to work. At tour’s end, he would put them in a box, and when the box was full, he would move it to the basement of the Marin house he’s owned since 1970. Always treasured by Deadheads, originals have long since turned collectible, sometimes selling online for as much as $500. Improbably, though, the shirts have now risen into their own kind of high fashion, too. Emphasis, of course, on the high. Many of the shirts feature the Grateful Dead’s logo—a skull with a 13-point lightning bolt shooting through the middle—which has become a red-white-and-blue symbol of American freedom all its own. The Stealie, as Deadheads call it (after the 1976 album on which
Healy plays a Stratocaster once owned by Jimi Hendrix.
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it appeared, Steal Your Face), was created by LSD chemist and soundman Owsley Stanley and artist Bob Thomas. Now cherished by Instagram influencers, pop stars, baby boomers, underground noise musicians, and Walmart shoppers alike, it’s an enduring signifier of the band’s participatory psychedelic revolution. Throughout his years with the band, Healy was well aware of the Dead’s profoundly American adventure, but he was also surrounded by the day-to-day issues of keeping the strange mechanical bird in flight. A serious rock vet, he never really bought into the Dead’s mythology—perhaps one reason he completely forgot about the boxes of shirts and never even wore them in the first place. He’s not gruff about it, but neither is he nostalgic. “I’ve never been a very good look-back person,” Healy says. His view of the revolution wasn’t from the front row but the cockpit. As a veritable member of the band, his job was tending to the sound. The music, the gear, and the emerging new world were indistinguishable, a revolution that came with swag. THE STORIES SLOWLY unfold along with the shirts,
which track the band’s three-decade rise from San Francisco’s DIY counterculture, across festivals and college campuses and desiccated movie palaces, to theaters, arenas, sold-out football stadiums, and American legend. Healy wasn’t yet with the Dead when the band issued the first of its shirts, which featured mustachioed frontman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. But the earliest pieces in his collection are nearly as old—and just as rare. Healy raises his eyebrows and smiles at a design from 1967 that’s become infamous in the Dead’s circles for the way it (perhaps intentionally) framed women’s breasts. “The girls didn’t like that one,” Healy recalls.
1. A bootleg honoring Dead-concert tapers, 1980s. 2. The tee for a fournight April Fool’s run at Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 1984.
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3. The official shirt for Watkins Glen, where 600,000 saw the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band, 1973. 4. The back of the tee for New Year’s at home at Bill Graham’s Winterland, 1977–1978.
5. A bootleg for the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, depicting the Dead’s sound system, 1973. 6. A FREE DAN HEALY tee (made after Healy’s scuffle with the Bakersfield police), 1978.
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He first encountered the Dead when he caught them opening for his friends’ band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, arriving at the Fillmore during an “Is there a doctor in the house?” moment. One of the Dead’s amps had died, and Quicksilver guitarist John Cipollina volunteered his buddy to help. A lifelong sound geek who’d built a pirate radio station with friends in middle school in Humboldt County, Healy had lately been living on a houseboat docked a few berths from Quicksilver’s and had earned a reputation for being able to troubleshoot sound systems on the fly. Healy fixed the recalcitrant amplifier but was still bothered by what he heard. “The P.A. sound was just so horrendous,” he recalls. “The balance was horrible. Whenever anybody was singing, the words were just completely garbled.” After the show, he politely challenged the Dead’s Jerry Garcia over the state of the concert’s sound, and Garcia politely challenged him to do better. Doing that required renting some new speakers, and to raise the necessary funds, Healy invoked what might be called hip economics. “I sold pot and acid,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t even really smoke yet, and I hadn’t taken LSD yet, 12
either. But my goal was to do the sound system, and I was pretty much willing to do almost anything short of horrible treachery to get it to happen. I don’t really advocate that form of moneymaking, but it was a means to an end.” Healy became obsessed with the Dead’s sound. The LSD soon followed. Like the band, he had been seriously dedicated to his craft long before trying psychedelics, but the psychedelics pushed him further. “I guess you would call it a hallucination or a dream or a bolt of lighting that hit me between the eyes or wherever,” he says. “But there was a moment when I flashed on what it was all supposed to sound like. And then it became a lifelong pursuit. I saw the whole,
7. The front of the tee for the New Year’s at Winterland show, 1977–1978. 8. An early official Grateful Dead shirt, likely by Hells Angel Allan “Gut” Terk, 1967.
9. A classic Dead shirt with the Ice Cream Kid, by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, from the Europe ’72 tour. 10. A bootleg replacing Dirty Harry’s weapon with the classic Deadhead taper mic setup, 1980s.
11. The shirt from Cal Expo Amphitheater, Sacramento, 1986. 12. A Deadhead bootleg parodying Maxell tapes’ “blown-away guy” ad campaign, 1980s.
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“The dream was there, the model of sitting in your living room in front of the world’s greatest stereo, smoking the fattest, biggest jay you can and listening to the most fabulous music over an incredible sound system, for each and every person at a concert.”
complete picture, the entire scope of exactly what it
know: The Lyceum shows would yield half the music
needed, what was missing. And so it was probably
on the triple live LP.
because of the psychedelics. Maybe LSD, maybe
Two different shirts represent the Watkins Glen
peyote, maybe mushrooms. It transformed it from a
Summer Jam, the July 1973 mega-concert with the
bunch of monkeys on typewriters to educated people
Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band; an esti-
making music.
mated 600,000 fans; and an on-site pirate radio
“The dream was there, the model of sitting in your
station—the largest festival of the original festival era.
living room in front of the world’s greatest stereo,
One shirt is the official model; the other, an early Dead
smoking the fattest, biggest jay you can and listening
bootleg shirt, features a homemade hippie approxima-
to the most fabulous music over an incredible sound
tion of the band’s already legendary P.A. “They were
system, for each and every person at a concert. That
probably drawing the Hard Truckers [speaker cabi-
was the model.”
nets],” Healy says fondly. For Healy and his wife, Patti, the Watkins Glen loaded with sartorial
International racetrack—the site of one of this year’s
souvenirs from moments that can be tough to remem-
competing “Woodstock 50th-anniversary” festivals—
ber. One unusually worn-out piece was imported from
was a serious battlefield. Healy mixed sound for all
London and commemorates the conclusion of the
three bands, a rare pleasure, in addition to presiding
arduous two-month-long trek across the Continent
over the public sound check the day before. “But we
that would be featured on the Europe ’72 live album.
were stuck at the soundboard for basically 36 hours,”
I H E A R D T H E G R AT E F U L D E A D AT T H E LYC E U M ’72 ,
the
Healy says. “There was nowhere to go. I stayed awake.
shirt reads, though Healy recalls nothing about the
It was such a screaming-meemies scene that I had to
shows. “We were so stoned on acid at the Lyceum,”
stay on top of it. There’s another reality in that the ulti-
he says. Perhaps celebrating the tour’s end, perhaps
mate responsibility for the audience rests on the sound
draining their acid vials over the four nights before
system. If 600,000 people are there and help is needed
heading home. “The duty at that point was probably
and the sound system goes off, the whole thing can run
trying to stay upright,” he says. One would hardly
amok and people can die. It’s very, very serious.”
HEALY’S C OLLECTION IS
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In the early ’70s, when bands their size were buy-
top of Deadhead favorites lists and was added to the
ing private jets, palatial estates, or fancy yachts, the
Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry—
Dead poured their earnings into their sound system.
it finally received an official release in 2017. Healy
Engineers like Healy (as well as roadies and others)
remembers Cornell for the “computer freaks” that
were voting members at all-band meetings. With
flocked to the soundboard.
original Dead sound guru Owsley Stanley’s mantra of
“In the mid-’70s, we were in the absolute throes
“as above, so below,” they yearned to make literally
of pure research and development,” he says. “The
equal sonic experiences for the band and the most
ideas were just flowing like water over Niagara Falls.
distant audience member. The so-called Wall of Sound
It was a wonderful time for innovation.” Just as
they developed was unsustainable. The era peaked with
music fans could use the Dead to dive into the roots
the band announcing its retirement from the road at
of American music or the vocabulary of improvisa-
the end of 1974. Of the stash in the boxes, Healy’s lone
tion, audio-heads could use the band as a gateway
surviving shirt from the year is utilitarian gray with no
into sound. In much the way the Dead almost never
artwork at all, reading simply 1974 TOUR .
repeated their set list, their sound system changed almost as frequently.
backstage passes, in star-
Many of the bootleg shirts in his collection reference
tlingly unfaded shape, represent the Dead’s appear-
another Healy-abetted innovation that continues to
ance at Cornell University’s Barton Hall in May 1977.
transform the live-music world. One such shirt features
A recording from that show routinely appears at the
a long-haired skeleton in sunglasses and sneakers
SEVERAL SHIRTS AND
holding a stereo pair of microphones, wearing a T-shirt that reads MAKE TAPES NOT WAR . Another features Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, aiming his weapon, the gun replaced, again, by stereo microphones. G O
AHEAD
JERRY , it’s captioned, MAKE MY DAY . Dan Healy’s collection of shirts and other Dead ephemera was unceremoniously stored in cardboard boxes in the crawl space under his Marin County house.
Healy didn’t invent Grateful Dead–concert taping, which Dead freaks began doing on their own in the late ’60s. But he was sympathetic to the tapers’ cause. He recalls his own pre-hippie affinity for hauling his Crown 700 reel-to-reel to Marin County jazz clubs. By the late ’70s, though, Dead tapers’ microphones had become ubiquitous, sometimes blocking even Healy’s view at the board. He remembers distraught first-time concertgoers showing up at the sound booth, complaining to him that tapers had overtaken their seats. “I was eternally caught between the non-tapers and the tapers,” Healy says, a distinction that was noted not only by the audience but also by the band, which struggled to come up with an official policy. Always friendly with fans, Healy lobbied for the recordists. A compromise was reached, and the tapers were given their own section, positioned behind the soundboard, starting in late 1984. “So I got stuck with the tapers,” he says, laughing. In creating such a policy, the Grateful Dead cemented their profoundly forward-thinking business
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model, powered by crowd-sourced recordings circulated via fan-mediated social networks. Going against long-held common sense—that “giving away” music inherently cripples record sales—the Dead proved the music business wildly wrong, piercing the Top 10 less than three years later with “Touch of Gray,” already a half-decade old on the Deadheads’ invisible hit parade. By 1995, Metallica had copied the Dead’s taping policy virtually word for word, and tapers’ sections spread everywhere. THE RO CK MILESTONES
keep pouring out of the
boxes. There’s Englishtown ’77, where over 100,000 saw the Dead on a New Jersey racetrack and a new generation of fans was minted. “Ah, yes, the Polish railway…,” Healy says, remembering the shipping containers that promoter John Scher used to line the site in order to prevent gate-crashers. And there’s Egypt ’78, where the Dead played at the foot of the Sphinx, and Healy wired up the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza for sound. It was a long, strange working relationship. For
Added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, the Cornell ’77 show even has its own widespread truther conspiracy, like the one surrounding the moon landing.
Healy, the band’s live sound achieved consistent just-exactly-perfection over the course of the 1980s, with his Ultra-Matrix tapes reaching studio levels. Acting like a producer, he’d spin the band’s voices around a venue’s speakers at peak moments, often to
He’d started collecting them in the Haight era and
a dizzying three-dimensional effect.
continued, a relaxing parallel obsession that ren-
“Certain members of the band didn’t always like
dered him an ambassador to forgotten knowledge
that,” he admits. Healy’s treatments, though, remain
rather than someone perpetually on the hunt for the
some of the more far-out moments from less and less
next cool thing.
trippy times for the band, especially as Jerry Garcia bat-
When some maintenance needed to be done else-
tled heroin addiction. When the guitarist relapsed in the
where in the basement, part of the house’s side
early ’90s, Healy says, “I lost my friend. He went away.”
was removed, exposing the crawl space—and the
As the band struggled with Garcia’s decline, Healy
long-forgotten boxes—to the sunlight.
himself—faulted at times for mixing the band too much
He marvels at the changes in the industry since
to his own taste—came into the cross fire, and he was
he parted ways with the Dead 25 years ago and at
dismissed in the spring of 1994. The last T-shirts were
the magnitude of control possessed by modern live
added to the boxes in the basement. A year and a half
engineers. “When I started, live sound was completely
later, at a rehab facility in Marin County—not far from
random,” he says. “And I spent my life moving it away
Healy’s house—Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack.
from the randomness and towards the specifics. If
Though band members have continued to tour with
you heard the psychedelic dream version, then it was
one another, they retired the name Grateful Dead.
a lifelong trek.”
In recent years, fixing vintage radios in his basement workshop has taken over as Healy’s profession.
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JESSE JARNOW IS THE AUTHOR OF ‘HEADS: A BIOGRAPHY OF PSYCHEDELIC AMERICA’ AND HOSTS ‘ THE FROW SHOW’ ON WFMU.
Healy’s shirt and backstage passes from the Grateful Dead’s legendary May 8, 1977, show at Cornell University. The recording, a fan favorite for years, finally received an official release in 2017.
Within the shimmering sixfloor town house in Shoreditch, you’ll find a fashion archive, a restaurant, a perfumery, and far more.
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Temple s of Adva nced Sty le
At Blue Mountain School in London, fashion, food, and design combine to achieve a new, esoteric extreme in high-end retail. By L ou S top par d
P h o t o grap hs b y Ni c k Bal l on
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Temple s of Advanced Style
on
tenderly place a single tiny ceramic on an otherwise
the corner of Chance and Redchurch Streets
empty marble coffee table. It is the mother ship of
in London’s Shoreditch, a neighborhood
those who have Marie Kondo–ed their wardrobes to
that was once gritty but now boasts apartment devel-
feature just seven carefully hung gray handwoven
opments with breathy taglines promising “luxury-
tunics. Spend too much time there and you may never
living in an exciting and vibrant urban landscape” and
want to encounter bright color again.
THERE’S A SILVER TOWN HO USE
Though Blue Mountain School feels like a museum, everything inside is indeed for sale. “Sometimes it’s nice to slow things down,” says G.M. Alex Wysman.
Spri ng 2019
pop-up shops where you can get vitamin IV drips. Amid
It’s faintly nostalgic as a proposition but oddly
all this is the metallic novelty that is Blue Mountain
seductive in its sincerity. It lacks the aggressive pace
School. Arranged across six floors, it is a retail space
and knowing irony of most of London’s other retail
meets art gallery meets fashion archive meets restau-
spaces, which sell pun-emblazoned bags and—the
rant meets perfumery meets listening studio.
great oxymoron of our time—luxury hoodies. There
The brainchild of James Brown and Christie Fels
are no logos at Blue Mountain School, no slogans, no
of Hostem, Blue Mountain School is one of London’s
sequins, no streetwear collabs. Nothing that seems
more experimental fashion stores and has achieved
like, well, fashion as we know it today.
a cult status for highly cultivated bohemia and an
It’s a chilly Wednesday in London, and Blue
obsessiveness around craft. It is the apex of this
Mountain School’s general manager, Alex Wysman,
preoccupation—a mecca for those who like to, say,
is giving me a tour. Before this, Wysman worked at Dover Street Market, the high-fashion boutique that once drew frequent comparisons to Hostem. That was before Hostem swung even more toward all things esoteric, un-commercial, and whimsical with its new incarnation as Blue Mountain School. Now Dover Street seems vaguely conservative, with its many racks and seasonal discounts and regular stock drops. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting a Celine bag, nothing wrong with wanting a Raf [Simons] jacket,” says Wysman. “But sometimes it’s nice just to slow things down. Luxury is a slow build, a slow process.” It takes us an hour and 20 minutes to tour Blue Mountain School, which, he explains, is about how long it takes to guide a client, albeit longer if they stop to make a purchase or try something on. There are no racks. No visible registers. The clothes—all dating from a range of seasons and by brilliant but largely unknown designers like John Alexander Skelton and Geoffrey B. Small—are sometimes stored in archive bags and hung so high they can be retrieved only if an assistant climbs up a cumbersome set of stairs that is wheeled, at great physical effort, to your shelf of choice. The museum vibe distracts from the fact that everything is for sale. Even the restaurant, called Mãos and positioned about halfway up the building, doesn’t feel like a restaurant—there are no private booths or neatly arranged tables. Instead you find 16 chairs around a single large wooden table in the center of the room,
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where diners can make their way through a 17-dish set meal. At Mãos, there are no courses, just “moments.” Co-founder James Brown is adamant about doing
The steps, at right, by German furniture designer Valentin Loellmann, appear to hang from the ceiling by copper rope.
Valentin Loellmann, that runs along the edge. “It’s a three-stage process—beeswax and charred wood,” he says reverently. Often those attending Mãos’s
things differently. The moniker Blue Mountain School
seasonal matinée dinners will find themselves up
is a tribute to Black Mountain College, the experimen-
here for a couple of final drinks. “It gives you time
tal North Carolina institution that was founded in 1933
to cogitate and ease your way back into the world.”
to offer a new kind of arts education. It’s “not an ode,”
At Blue Mountain School you can, he explains, “max
says Brown, “but a nod to something that was pio-
out on experience.”
neering and challenged the boundaries between, art,
Fortuitously, Loellmann’s terrace, and the cor-
making, food, music, and learning. Something new. A
responding table and benches that sit within the
cross-discipline of practices all working in harmony.”
interior space from which the roof can be accessed,
On the building’s roof is a terrace. Wysman ges-
opened when the spark for Blue Mountain School had
tures toward a weathered wooden bench, by designer
just occurred to Brown. They’d been commissioned
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Temple s of Adva nced Sty le
nearly four years before, when the building was still
Another area was taken over by Tyler Hays, of New
the site of Hostem (for those who prefer a more typ-
York City–based design outfit BDDW, who adorned
ical shopping experience, the Hostem store is now
the walls with his own twist on the typical blue Dutch
just a short walk away). Loellmann was tasked with
delft tiles to complement the rustic mood of his fur-
creating what was meant to be a private space—for
niture and clothing. The space feels like something
meetings or one-on-one discussions with clients. It
from Alice in Wonderland—it’s taller than it is wide,
was his first commission as a spatial designer, rather
as if accidentally squashed. Downstairs, BDDW’s take
than as a furniture designer. He wanted it to feel
on a grandfather clock is handcrafted from wood, but
discombobulating—which perhaps is a good way of
the numbers appear as digital Nixie tubes. Facing it,
encapsulating Blue Mountain School. “You could be
hanging solemnly from the wall, are 16 spoons that
in London, but you could be somewhere else entirely,”
have traveled all the way from Portugal. They’re a nod
he says. “It’s a bit Mediterranean. We also wanted it
to the restaurant, explains Wysman. (Mãos means
Blue Mountain School is a peak curated experience, where traditional lines between art, commerce, and hospitality are blurred.
to have a bit of a boat-like atmosphere.” Brown had Loellmann craft an intricate staircase to access this secret top space. Loellmann likens it to a jungle stair or a hanging bridge. Though actually solid and made of copper and charred oak, each step is designed to suggest it’s hung by rope from the ceiling. You climb cautiously, prepared for a wobble. “I like to do pieces that are like toys are for children,” he says. “You want to use it or touch it, but you’re not sure if you can.” A similar mood runs through the whole building—you’re constantly confused by the remits of the place. Are these ceramics ornaments or stock? Is this an artwork or something to sit on? Can I try on that coat, or is it actually a decorative wall hanging? Brown knew that Loellmann’s spaces were too good to stay hidden from visitors, and work began to upgrade the whole building and create a new kind of shop with the help of a range of collaborators and makers, each of whom could contribute installations and objects. The broader task of conceptualizing and reworking the building fell to celebrated London practice 6a Architects. Loellmann turned his attention to an additional installation one floor below his terrace, creating furniture to house the ceramics and jewelry on display. “They have quite a risky way of working. They are led by feelings,” says Loellmann of Brown and Fels. “It’s a family—an ongoing set of collaborations between people who are trying to do something new,” he continues. “The only way to do what we do is to stick together and believe in something—we don’t even know what it is. It’s for people who want something different than just building big companies.”
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Te m p l es o f Ad vanc e d Sty le
“hands” in Portuguese.) In one of the “viewing rooms,”
club he used to run in his apartment. Brown suggested
Loellmann’s walnut-and-brass ladders are available
bringing The Loft Club back, in a new form, at Blue
for purchase (they cost 16,000 pounds, Wysman
Mountain School—hence the single table and small
says nonchalantly). Nearby are scents by master
number of diners. “It’s been taken to another level
perfumer Lyn Harris, who left her first brand, Miller
now,” says Pellicano, “though it still feels like a dinner
Harris, because she felt it was expanding too quickly.
party.” There is just a handful of other staff—if some-
There’s no risk of that at Blue Mountain School.
one wants to go on vacation, the whole restaurant
Sometimes people have to wait three weeks for an
has to close, which is why they try to coordinate their
order of candles—“It’s handblown glass!” Wysman
holidays. Each service can become something of a
says. He produces a bunch of vetiver—a relatively ugly
social experiment: “How are these 16 people going to
dried grass—from a plastic tub and waves it under my nose. “People should understand where their perfumes come from,” he says. He advises clients to choose their favorite two scents, then reflect for half an hour on which settles best against their skin before purchasing. “Sometimes people are confused by the wait,” he says with a shrug. All six floors are scented with sticks of palo santo. Staff, shrouded in draped layers of inky fabric, go around the space two or three times a day, waving the sticks, letting the scent permeate the building. “Burning the wood is known as ritual smudging that
will welcome creativity, love, and good fortune into your space and can help brighten energy and promote feelings of positivity and joy,” says Brown. “Even if it doesn’t work, it’s a nice sentiment,” he adds. ON FRIDAY MORNING,
the tattooed chef at Mãos,
Edoardo Pellicano, begins preparations at ten. He’s set to receive a fresh delivery from Calixta Killander, a willowy farmer who’s set up camp in Cambridge growing unexpected produce that she’s found on her travels—Jerusalem artichokes, Chinese Red Meat radishes, Brazilian pumpkins. Much of Mãos’s menu is determined by what she manages to grow in the chilly U.K. soil. Today, Pellicano will be preparing “maitake, smoked eel, and milk yuba” and “onions, old and new.” Later, he’ll be entertaining guests as he creates their meals. This dual role is very Blue Mountain School—as a concept, it eschews single titles or fixed definitions. Art is fashion. Fashion is art. Hell, food is art—and entertainment. Nuno Mendes, executive chef at London’s revered Chiltern Firehouse, who hired Pellicano, conceived of Mãos with Brown while reminiscing about a supper
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Yes, the walnut-andbrass ladder by Valentin Loellmann is for sale.
react to each other and get on?” explains Pellicano. Usually it’s riotous—“people are all united by a love
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for the joy of food.” Mãos is an extreme example of broader changes in restaurant culture, he argues. “That old idea of chefs stuck in a basement all shouting at each other is dying out,” he says. “And diners don’t want to sit around in a stuffy environment, stiff. They don’t want to feel like just another cover.” Unlike with a typical chef’s table setup, you’re not tied to your chair. Guests are invited to have their first few dishes while standing around in the kitchen. “People can come into the kitchen at any time they want during the evening—they can feel free to ask questions,” says Pellicano. “At first, it can be a bit of a shock. I have to reassure them—‘You can have a glass of wine, everything is going to be fine.’ Sometimes as chefs, without an audience, we take for granted how interesting it is to watch this amazing produce be cooked.” When Brown approached 6a Architects about transforming the Shoreditch town house into Blue Mountain School, Mãos was a distant, unrealized dream. Initial plans included no restaurant at all. It was changing tacks such as this that delayed construction over two years. As 6a co-founder Tom Emerson explains, “New ideas kept on coming in. The more James brought in different people, the
Guests at the 16-seat restaurant are invited to join chef Edoardo Pellicano, at right, in the kitchen for a few dishes before adjourning to the dining room.
Brown’s idea of blurred barriers between culture and commerce. Windows and gaps allow you to look up,
through, down. You’re in the archive but can see the perfumery, for example. Or you can glance into the kitchen from the staircase.
more the whole thing took on different forms. There
We are living in the age of the slasher—of models-
was never the usual pre-project brief, then design
slash-DJs and writers-slash-influencers. Blue
phase, then a construction phase, and then an open-
Mountain School is the mother ship of this versatile,
ing. It was more of a laboratory—a test bed. It was all
boundary-less generation. It is an ode to the explo-
about new ways of doing things.” Often Brown would
sion of “curating”—of curated wardrobes and curated
call the practice with a new question or idea. Once,
bookshelves and curated Instagram feeds. None of the
Emerson says, he rang 6a and announced, “I’ve got
makers involved are bogged down by the realities and
lots of oak.” That led to the giant central staircase,
banalities of definitions, timelines, or titles. All they
rendered in rough-sawed timber.
want is beauty. Blue Mountain School is a strange sort
The architects at 6a are used to unconventional
of luxury utopia, where consuming seems embedded
retail spaces. Their first-ever public project was Oki-ni,
with a moral compass. “It’s a very special project. That
on Savile Row, which opened in 2001 and offered noth-
freedom. That commitment to experiment and qual-
ing for sale. Visitors could instead browse items and
ity,” says 6a’s Emerson. “You can’t run a practice on
try things on and then leave and order them online. It
these projects, but it’s important that someone makes
was way ahead of its time in terms of e-commerce but
them happen because they keep certain aspects of
maintains its cult status as a truly innovative space.
culture going.” But who does it serve? I ask. “Does that
“It was quite a radical departure in fashion retail as
matter?” he retorts. “It’s not necessarily a model for
something more closely associated with leisure and
imitation. It’s not necessarily the way the world will
culture rather than just more product,” says Emerson.
work. But here it is, and you can visit.”
The design at Blue Mountain School creates fluidity between different zones within the space, reflecting
L O U S T O P PA R D I S A W R I T E R A N D C U R AT O R B A S E D IN LOND ON.
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HOW
THREE DEBUT COLLECTIONS
A Paradigm Shift in Paris Por tf olio b y P ari Duk ovic
BY
AT
CREATED THE
THREE RED-HOT DESIGNERS
THREE LEGENDARY FASHION HOUSES
MOST EXCITING MOMENT IN MENSWEAR HISTORY.
VIRGIL ABLOH at Louis Vuitton
KIM JONES at Dior
HEDI SLIMANE at Celine
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Th e C oll e ctio ns
Louis Vuitton
When Travis Scott took his front-row seat at Abloh’s first show, he was already decked out in the debut collection.
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GQ Style Spri | P o rtf ng 201 olio 9
Celine
Hedi Slimane muse Grace Hartzel, who composed the soundtrack for the show with the band La Femme.
Dior
A model at the Dior show. Kim Jones’s debut collection contained a multitude of homages to Christian Dior.
REGIME CHANGE that Hedi Slimane was headed to Celine, where he’d be introducing a men’s line for the highly coveted French luxury brand. Then it was announced that Kim Jones was leaving his post as men’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton to oversee the men’s collection at Dior. Finally, the proverbial bomb dropped when Virgil Abloh was tapped to fill the vacancy left by Jones at LV. If all that is a little hard to follow, just know this: Within the course of a couple of months in early 2018, the relatively low-key, reliably stable men’s-fashion universe was reconfigured entirely and three white-hot new energy centers emerged. Abloh, the first African-American designer to lead a European luxury house, did not squander the opportunity. For his debut collection at Paris Fashion Week, he rolled a seemingly endless rainbow runway through the gardens at the Palais
FIRST CAME THE NEWS
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Royal, stocked it with stars from the music world (Dev Hynes, Kid Cudi, Steve Lacy, Playboi Carti), and cracked the code on how to make suits cool again. At the end, an unforgettable, emotional embrace with his friend Kanye West. If Abloh’s task was to prove that he has the chops worthy of the 165-year-old luggage-maker (reader, he does), then Jones’s was to apply his keen sensibility for what’s hot in the streets to the couture ateliers of Dior. To that end, he assembled a murderers’ row of collaborators: Ambush’s Yoon Ahn on jewelry, Alyx’s Matthew Williams on heavy-duty hardware, and the artist Kaws on the house’s new bee motif and the towering liveflower sculpture at the center of the show. Community-building is an ongoing theme here, but remember that Hedi Slimane single-handedly changed the mood of menswear back in 2000,
when, in creating Dior Homme, he started a frenzy for skinny jeans and trim suits that lasted, well, until now. Then he staged a spectacular (and spectacularly lucrative) overhaul of Saint Laurent as its creative director from 2012 to 2016. That’s all to say, if anyone has the vision (and the ability to mobilize the fashionable masses) needed to make the new Celine soar sky-high, it’s Slimane. In his debut, he demonstrated that while sneakers and streetwear have been dominating the fashion feeds, the allure of his sharp tailoring, narrow ties, and irresistible leather jackets and pants has never been stronger. What exactly this changing of the guard means for what we buy and how we dress remains to be seen (we’ll keep you posted on that). Regardless, it was an astonishing thing to behold—and all the clothes are hitting stores now. — N O A H J O H N S O N
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Dior
The centerpiece of the Dior runway at the Garde RĂŠpublicaine was a 30-something-foottall sculpture by the artist Kaws. Made with 70,000 flowers, it took four days to assemble.
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The C ollect ions
Louis Vuitton
Keepalls backstage at the Louis Vuitton show. Opposite, clockwise from top left: Kid Cudi, Kim Kardashian West, A$AP Rocky, and Kanye West, whose tearful hug with Abloh afterward made headlines around the world.
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Th e C oll e ctio ns
Celine
Lady Gaga was the front-row guest of honor for Hedi Slimane’s return to fashion.
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Celine
A crew of Slimane’s muses party at the show.
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Dior
Jones tapped his friend, Alyx designer Matthew Williams, to design the “CD� buckles featured in the show.
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Louis Vuitton
A model gets ready backstage.
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S p r i n g 20 19
The Collect ions
Dior
Bella Hadid after the show. Opposite: Also present were (clockwise from top left) Dior Men jewelry designer Yoon Ahn, Michèle Lamy, Lenny Kravitz, and Oliver Sim.
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Th e C oll e ctio ns
Celine
The new Celine attitude.
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Dior
Kate Moss, who closed Jones’s final show for Louis Vuitton, at the Dior show.
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Louis Vuitton
The Louis Vuitton afterparty featured DJ sets by Benji B, No Vacancy Inn, and, of course, Abloh himself.
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Celine
Slimane takes his bow.
Group Chat:
Oral History THE
OF
Virgil Abloh’s story is almost legend by now: worked with Kanye, started Off-White, ascended to Louis Vuitton. But to really know the guy, you need to get inside his iPhone, where a blizzard of designs, photos, songs, and ideas collide, creating something never before seen in fashion. So we got as close as we could. This is Virgil Abloh, in his own words—and in those of 39 of his friends, collaborators, and mentors. By T h om B ettr idge
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ABLOH
Co v e r St o ry
during Paris Men’s Fashion Week, Fonzworth Bentley paid a visit to Louis Vuitton’s headquarters. It had been nine years since he had set foot in the place as a member of Kanye West’s squad, but this time there “was a completely different vibe.” Trap music was playing, “kids with face tattoos” were wandering the corridors, and the fashion intelligentsia were preparing to watch Playboi Carti walk down a quarter-mile rainbow runway. The man behind the festivities had been a member of that same 2009 entourage: Virgil Abloh, the newly appointed men’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton. The story of Abloh’s ascent to the apex of one of fashion’s pre-eminent houses is also the story of the industry’s collisions with celebrity, streetwear, and social media. The Chicago-born creative director was one of the architects (literally: he studied architecture) working on Kanye West’s endeavor to merge rap, contemporary art, and high fashion. With his own brand, Off-White, he bulldozed the brick wall between graphic tees and “designer” apparel and partnered on one of the hottest Nike collaborations ever. He has designed furniture for Ikea and taught classes at the prestigious Architectural Association School in London. And then his appointment at Louis Vuitton marked the arrival of an entirely new era in fashion. He has become an extremely public figure, but he’s remained genuinely mysterious. He moonlights as a DJ and constantly references his background as an engineering and architecture student. He is omnipresent on social media, hopping instantaneously from country to country, seemingly opening for Travis Scott in Houston one moment and rendezvousing with Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam the next. Even the résumé line for what he does—“creative director”—is as impossible to define as it is alluring. So to better understand who Virgil Abloh is, what he does, and how he does it, we spoke to him—and to 39 of his closest friends, colleagues, admirers, and mentors.
IN JUNE OF L AST YEAR,
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CHAPTER 1:
ASPIRING ARCHITECT Abloh grew up outside Chicago, where his earliest glimpses into culture came from skateboarding, his father’s soul records, and the graffiti books he special-ordered via the local Barnes & Noble. During his time studying architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he began making shopping trips to New York City and eventually started blogging about a wave of brands selling skate clothing without the skateboarding. It was around this time that he went from designing buildings to designing T-shirts. Virgil Abloh: I often reference the 17-yearold version of myself, because I’m doing in large part the same thing today. Back then, I used to DJ and get my hands on my dad’s records— Fela [Kuti] to James Brown to Miles Davis. I was only into the fashion that intersected with the niche cultures I was into—my favorite “fashion” brands were [skateboard companies like] Alien Workshop, Santa Cruz, and Droors. Then there were Nikes. My friend Chris Eaton and I used to be so obsessed with Jordan that we were drawing Nike shoes and sending them to Nike. And Nike would be like, “Oh, we don’t accept designs.” Christopher Eaton (artist and childhood friend): As soon as we found out about graffiti, maybe in sixth grade, all we wanted to do was draw. Virgil’s tag was CEAS1. There wasn’t any Internet, so anything we saw in magazines, we would cut out and stick in a manila envelope. Then we started with books—Spraycan Art, Bomb the Suburbs. Back in the day, we special-ordered them from Barnes & Noble. Abloh: I went to a shop in New York called Alife, on Orchard Street, back when it was the real window into this culture that was an extension of skateboarding. There was this message board for the downtown scene at the time called Splay, and if you weren’t involved with it, you couldn’t message on it, you could only view it. But everyone was on it— A-Ron, Roxy Cottontail, Leah from Married to the Mob—the whole Orchard Street retail mafia. Leah McSweeney (designer, Married to the Mob): Virgil always talks about the early days of streetwear and how he was in Chicago watching us do our thing on this message board called Splay. It was run by
Contributors
Leah McSweeney
Benjamin Edgar
Rem Koolhaas
Don C
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The Mies van der Rohe– designed Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Virgil Abloh’s alma mater.
Abloh’s VERG graffiti tag, circa 1996, from his notebook.
The squad photo seen round the world: Kanye West and crew (Abloh at far right) at Paris Men’s Fashion Week in 2009.
Sam Spitzer, who is the guy who does Supreme’s e-commerce and their website, and you had to get approved to get on it. Abloh: I came back to Chicago, and me and Chris Eaton started this thing called FortHome. I made a business card using the laser cutter at architecture school and made my first T-shirt. It had Edwardian script, which was the only script that was in Adobe at the time, that said FORTHOME , and on the back it had a big X. I’m just realizing it now: It looked a lot like the back of an Off-White T-shirt. Benjamin Edgar (co-founder, thebrilliance.com): Chuck Anderson and I had a blog, and Virgil reached out to us as a reader, probably in 2006, and was like, “Hey, I’d love to write for your site.” At the time, we got a decent amount of those e-mails, and we were like, “No.” But I kept in touch. One of the first times Virgil and I hung out in person was at the [Manhattan] Louis Vuitton store. Louis Vuitton had the Wapiti: It’s a little, tiny trunk. We were still very much on a budget, but it was iconic, so I bought the traditional monogrammed one, and Virgil bought the white one. Abloh: When I was studying architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, the student center was just getting finished by OMA, the firm run by [architect] Rem Koolhaas. One of the mentors that was giving lectures on campus was a man named Michael Rock. Rem and Michael together made up two-thirds of the think tank surrounding Prada. That’s how I first made the bridge between architecture and fashion.
Rem Koolhaas (architect): We worked with Prada. We were asked to work with ideas related to branding. We wrote a book on shopping [Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping]. But it was beyond fashion—we’ve worked on projects about politics. I think what made Virgil interested in our work was this idea that architecture was not limited to its own field—that it could answer other questions. Abloh: At the time, I had this professor named Thomas Kearns. He was younger, and he put me under his wing. I remember him telling me, “Learn these programs and don’t use these programs just to make architecture.” So that was how I learned 3-D programs and Adobe Suite, and it was during that class that I started making T-shirts instead of just making architecture. Thomas Kearns (architect; Abloh’s professor at IIT): The class I taught Virgil in was called Network Technologies, and it was about things that were happening in the world that we needed to understand and have a hand in as architects. The advent of social media. The implications of living in a connected world. We watched films in the class. We watched music videos. By the mid-2000s, Abloh’s interest in design led him to another Chicagoan: Kanye West.
perfect format that they literally just hit “print.” Since he formatted the files perfectly, the screen-printing store offered him a job. A couple weeks later, Don C went into the store and asked if they had any designers. The store said, “Actually, this young man, Virgil, came in here, and he’s probably somebody you might want to get in touch with.” So then Don C commissioned Virgil to do some stuff. Virgil knew who Don was, so he came up with half a dozen design ideas for Don by the next day—he worked just as hard on that as he did anything else, but there was a little more excitement, as Kanye was a potential client. Don C (designer): It was my cousin Monop [music manager John Monopoly] who first met Virgil through Custom Kings. And then Monop introduced me to Virgil. When I first met him, we vibed right away because we could talk about ideas. And at the time, you could only bring people around Ye who he’d vibe with. Abloh: Kanye wasn’t going to put his art form in the hands of the art department at the record label. So he was like, “I am going to hire you, and let’s literally work on this 24-7, laptop in hand, nonstop.” So more than any title, I was just his assistant creatively. I believed that this was going to be another chapter in hip-hop.
Eaton: There was this screen-printing store in Chicago called Custom Kings, and Virgil had submitted some work there. Virgil gave the screenprinting store the art files in such
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CHAPTER 2:
THE KANYE WEST YEARS In 2007, West hired Abloh to help the rapper realize his growing ambitions beyond music. In 2009, West’s sneaker collaboration with Louis Vuitton led him and his team to Paris, where they wound up in a squad photo that was parodied mercilessly—first online and then on ‘South Park.’ For Abloh, the ridicule was worth the opportunity. He and West could tell that the party they were crashing was missing something— and that they could provide it. Taz Arnold (musician and West associate): In June 2008, Kanye and I went to Fashion Week in Paris, just the two of us. We took a lot of pictures with Karl Lagerfeld, and there was such a great response that Kanye was like, “I have to bring more people.” So January 2009 was our second time going. The agenda was really to let our clothes speak for us. Fonzworth Bentley (West associate): Kanye’s perspective was “I’ve got this Louis Vuitton collection. I’m going over to work on that and go to these shows. Let’s treat Paris Fashion Week like the Olympics and we’re representing the United States of America.” And we were just bum-rushing all of the shows, daring anybody to ask us to leave. Don C: I remember Kanye saying, “We’re going to look back on this and it’s going to be similar to the civil rights movement, because we’re standing up to have a voice.” At the time, I was like, “Dude, I can’t compare this to Rosa Parks.” But in hindsight, it is comparable, because we’ve encouraged new people to participate. Tommy Ton (photographer): We were the only photographers sitting at the Comme des Garçons men’s show, and this van arrives, and they all come out. If you look at that image, you can see the amount of thought that these guys put into their look. Abloh: When Kanye and I were first going to fashion shows, there was no one outside the shows. Streetwear wasn’t on anyone’s radar, but the sort of chatter at dinners after shows was like “Fashion needs something new. It’s stagnant. What’s the new thing going to be?” That was the timeline on which I was crafting my ideas. Bentley: We had a meeting at Le Meurice after all the shows were done, and we talked about our favorite
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Years before they ran their own brands, Abloh, Heron Preston, and Matthew Williams raged as Been Trill.
In 2011, West and Abloh—in a hat from Don C—were front row for a Christopher Kane show in London.
designers. The summary of the meeting was “Hey, guys, we need to make this happen. Our voices mean something.” It didn’t matter that it felt like the community was not fully embracing who we were or our point of view. We knew that we had put a dent into the armor of that ironclad idea that is fashion. Abloh: There was a professor by the name of Louise Wilson, who was the head of the [master’s program] at Central Saint Martins in London, and she was the teacher for some of the greatest designers of our time. Kanye and I sat with her, and we were like, “Hey, we want to learn the right way.” And she basically said, “You guys are idiots. You know more than my students. Why on earth would you want to go to fashion school?” But that process was sort of how we ended up interning at Fendi. And when we were there, we did all the meetings. We were off the radar in Rome, getting to work at 9 a.m. on a Monday. We did all the intern shit, and this was in the midst of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. We went to Hawaii after this period. Pusha T (rapper): I met Virgil at the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions in Hawaii. And here’s this guy always in the studio, and he’s pulling every reference under the sun from his computer—architecture, fashion. His laptop was like a library of everything that was aesthetically beautiful and relevant. As West’s aspirations grew, Abloh would become a collaborator in DONDA, a company named after West’s mother.
For years, what DONDA actually was remained mysterious, and Virgil Abloh, the laptop-wielding body man seen with West everywhere, became a human stand-in for West’s ambitious project. Arnold: Anyone who collaborated with Kanye worked with Virgil—Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Daft Punk. Anybody. Michael Rock (founding partner, 2x4 agency; West collaborator): Virgil’s role at DONDA was to figure out how aspiration could be turned into actual projects. It was about going from minute details to the broadest possible reach: You create music for a show, then you create a stage for the show, then you create the media for the show, then you create the effects for the show, and then you create merchandise for the whole thing, then maybe you create a pavilion that travels with an art project by Vanessa Beecroft. Pusha T: Ultimately the DONDA project was a mission to raise the taste level of the world. It was about showing the youth that it’s possible for them, and I felt it gave inspiration to the kids of this Internet generation— those who learn beat-making on the computer as opposed to in band class. Don C: In the early days, Virgil was just designing, designing, designing. We would go places, and Virgil would stay in the hotel and design. Es Devlin (stage designer): I have a very clear image of my first meeting with Virgil. He was crouching low in the corner of Kanye’s studio with a laptop on his knees, composing photographic collages at a furious pace, barely looking up.
Taz Arnold
Fonzworth Bentley
Es Devlin
Cali Thornhill Dewitt
“I didn’t make a conscious decision one day that I wanted to be a designer.” —V I R G I L A B L O H
Pusha T: They were changing the aesthetic, right in front of my eyes. Devlin: It was August 2011, [Watch the Throne] was about to come out, tickets for the shows needed to go on sale, and the design had to be finalized. We had abandoned the Giant Stone Angel Head version and the Roman Forum version and were on version 28 and hadn’t found the visual language yet, so we agreed to meet at my studio in Peckham and not leave the room until we had reached a conclusion. It was the week of the London riots, shops in Brixton were on fire, and Virgil and Kanye managed to get to the studio late in the evening. They played the album. We worked all night, iterating cardboard sculptures. Kanye and Virgil were cutting and gluing with my studio team, replaying the album until we reached the design. It was the sound of “No Church in the Wild” blaring over Peckham. Don C: Watch the Throne was when we really saw it moving. That’s when Virgil came up with the concept of gravitating towards the youth. The Kanye camp was very close-knit, but Virgil encouraged us to welcome kids that wanted to hang with us. And that’s what built the community more and more. The most tangible legacy of DONDA— which may or may not still be active today—was the generation of designers it incubated. Abloh, Matthew Williams (Alyx), and Justin Saunders (JJJJound) all did stints with the company. In 2012, the three teamed up with a Nike employee named Heron Preston and soccer player
Abloh’s early Pyrex Vision designs referenced Caravaggio and Michael Jordan— and exploded old notions of high-low.
Florencia Galarza to form Been Trill, a DJ and party-night collective that would go on to open for A$AP Rocky and eventually West himself. Cali Thornhill Dewitt (artist): Virgil once told me that music is his source code. I really liked that way of putting it. Matthew Williams (designer, Alyx): We were living between London and Paris [working for Ye], and we’d go out after work, and we weren’t hearing the music we wanted to hear in the clubs. So we contacted some friends and just started playing music off our computers and iPhones. Abloh: When you have creative people all working on laptops, you listen to music. So Been Trill was more like a group chat that turned into something for the public sphere. Arthur Kar (car dealer and friend): The day Virgil and I met, we listened to Waka Flocka together. It was in Paris around ten years ago, and no club in Paris was playing any hiphop like Waka Flocka back then. Heron Preston (designer): One day Matt Williams, Justin Saunders, and Virgil came up to me and were like, “Yo, do you wanna start throwing parties with us?” At the time, I thought they were playing with Osama bin Laden’s name. So I was like, “Oh, you guys are crazy.” But it turned out to be Been Trill, spelled B-E-E-N. Florencia Galarza (former Been Trill DJ; soccer player): I get a call from Virgil, not ever having met him or really knowing who he is, and he was like, “You sound dope. Heron says you’re dope. People think you’re dope.
You’re in.” Two thousand twelve was really awesome. Don C: Been Trill was when Virgil—I won’t say came out of his shell, but it was how he became a public figure. A$AP Rocky (rapper): Standard Hotel. I was like 20 or 21, and all my friends were like 17, 16, and shit. The door was fronting on us, and then we see Virgil and we were like, “Yo!” He helped us get in and started hanging with us on the regular. We’d be at A$AP Lou’s house, and we’d be smoking and talking about clothes, and Virgil would be on the Serato, just spinning. I remember Virgil used to pull up wearing Red Octobers with holes from skateboarding all day in fucking Yeezys. Everyone was like, “What are you doing?” But it was fly. Justin Saunders (founder, JJJJound): I’ve never heard Virgil say a negative thing in my whole life. What I knew about creativity was saying no to things, but he’s on the opposite flip. It’s like when Virgil convinced me to be a DJ—I still don’t know how to use a mixer. I said to Virgil, “I don’t know how to DJ,” and he said, “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go have some fun.” And then eventually we were DJ’ing at Coachella.
Matthew Williams
Heron Preston
Florencia Galarza
A$AP Rocky
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CHAPTER 3:
THE FUTURE IS FASHION In 2012, Abloh started his first clothing label, Pyrex Vision. Although it was met with underground acclaim, he thought of it as more art project than fashion brand—so a year later, he decided to try something else. Abloh: I didn’t make a conscious decision one day that I wanted to be a designer. I made Pyrex, which in my mind was more like an art piece. It was a ten-minute film that I wanted to make, and I needed clothing to support this idea of a team with no sport. I was very intent on stopping it before it really got started. Marcelo Burlon (fashion designer and DJ): Virgil and I met backstage at Givenchy, back in the days when Riccardo [Tisci] used to be the creative director. I asked what happened to [Pyrex Vision], and he said, “You know what, the glass company Pyrex wants to sue me. But I have a project in mind, and I am looking for someone to produce my new idea.” And I was like, “You should come over to Milan and meet with my business partners.” That happened on a Friday, and the next Monday we were already meeting Virgil and his lawyers. Davide De Giglio (co-partner, Off-White): After six months, we had a company. When we were opening the first OffWhite store, in Hong Kong, Andrea Grilli and I were in Milan; our artist was in New York; our contractor was in China; our partner was in Hong Kong; our graphic designer, Samuel [Ross] from A-Cold-Wall*, was in London; and Virgil was traveling the world 24-7. We made that Hong Kong store with one group chat and all met for the first time at dinner the day of the opening. With simple gestures like setting phrases in its signature “double quotes,” Off-White was designed to test the boundaries of how little you need to change an object before it becomes fashion. But from the beginning, Abloh insisted on premiering Off-White’s collections at Paris Men’s Fashion Week and working with worldclass colleagues. Pyrex, this was not. Abloh: I was adamant: “This isn’t a streetwear brand. This isn’t a contemporary brand. This is designer, just the same way that X, Y, Z are designer, where you say their name and it carries this
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With Off-White, Abloh is still selling T-shirts like hotcakes—but he’s also turning out advanced tailoring.
whole esteem and emotion to it.” And a lot of people asked, “Why do you do women’s? And why are you selling things on this floor and not that floor?” I remember meeting with the stylist Stevie Dance at Café Select in New York, and I was like, “Hey, I’m going to do a show. Are you able to come on board?” And from there it went from three people working for Off-White to like 40. Stevie Dance (stylist): The way Virgil operates is very in the moment, like his reflections on Instagram. It’s not this long, logistical written-out thing. His brain works with so much fluidity, and after years working with him, you learn all the Virgspeak and how to translate those innuendos into an actual thought. Piotr Niepsuj (photographer): There’s all these unwritten rules of fashion photography, but for Virgil, he feels like things should be more democratic. We’ll shoot something without a makeup person or sometimes even a stylist. The campaign we did that I like the most, we shot on the street in 20 minutes. Abloh: When I started, I couldn’t beg a fashion writer to write about my project. But with Instagram, I took an open-source tool and made it my magazine. I once said to Kevin [Systrom, Instagram co-founder], “You made it possible for me to have a fashion brand without using the traditional system.” Michael Darling (chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago): Virgil really designs on the cloud. He and his teams will be posting all kinds of different reference pictures. Then certain narratives or strong sets of
imagery will emerge from that. I think you can trace that back to his work at DONDA, with Kanye and the team he had there. They would look at 50 different examples of a particular type of jacket, or shoe, or pant, or shirt, and then refine from there. Jarrett Reynolds (senior design director, Nike): Let me open up my WhatsApp and read [our] most recent conversation. I sent a 21-page PDF. He replies with photos of his drawings. He’s taken screen grabs of the PDF and has drawn over them, too. “I love this arm direction.” “I want the puffer like this.” “Can you add this thing in?” “Make the pocket squared off.” And then there’s a screenshot of a T-shirt pocket that he found online. Samuel Ross (creative director, A-ColdWall*; former Abloh assistant): I was working with him primarily on iMessage back then, because you could send heavier files and I didn’t have WhatsApp for desktop yet. The first thing that hit me working for Virgil is that 90-to-95-hour weeks need to be normalized. We were ideating everything together. Like the Rimowa suitcase, or the Chrome Hearts bench from this year, these are ideas we were working on four or five years ago. He was using foresight to align those projects, so that when the opportunity came along and he was situated in the right place or hierarchy, he could get it done. Alexandre Arnault (CEO, Rimowa): He reached out to Rimowa back when it was owned by the German owner who sold it to us, and he asked him
Marcelo Burlon
Stevie Dance
Alexandre Arnault
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“I couldn’t beg a fashion writer to write about my project. But with Instagram, I made it my magazine.”
Off-White’s stores, like this one in Hong Kong, borrow from art galleries and traditional boutiques.
The brand’s signature construction-site diagonal is meant to pop in person—but also on Instagram.
Abloh’s Off-White x Rimowa see-through suitcases are one part grail, one part conceptual-art prank.
—V I R G I L A B L O H
to collaborate with them. They said no, and then the day we announced the acquisition, which was in October 2016, he reached out to me. Peter Saville (graphic designer): [Before I met] Virgil, I was a little taken aback by how evident it was that my own history had been an influence to him. He had an interview I did as the voice-over for one of his shows, and then obviously the graphic elements of Off-White were also very familiar to me, associated with [Saville’s design for the Manchester nightclub] Haçienda. But I was fascinated more than I was upset. I knew from the get-go that he was speaking to people that I never would. As Off-White grew as a commercial force, anything touched by Abloh’s signature paint markers became an extension of its creator, whose well-documented travels made it seem as though he lived in and worked out of airports. His work spread from Ikea products to university lectures to Nike’s ten most iconic shoes. Quickly, Off-White began to seem like what Kanye West had imagined for DONDA. But unlike West’s hyper-secretive endeavors, OffWhite was painstakingly transparent. When Off-White released see-through luggage with Rimowa, you could peek inside Abloh’s suitcase. Fraser Cooke (senior director, Nike): We had our eyes on Virgil for a little while, but if you do things too early, it’s actually just as bad as doing them too late. I had been running into Virgil in various places around the world, and when I was living in Los Angeles in 2012, he was DJ’ing there with the Been Trill crew. But we
didn’t start seriously talking about doing something until about 2016. Abloh: As a full-time employee for Kanye, I was working on Yeezy for Nike, and then Kanye went to Adidas, so I was in a no-man’s-land where no brand would contact me to do a shoe, and I was fine with that. Then one season I did this slight edit of an Umbro shoe, and I put that on the runway. Fraser Cooke from Nike and [my friend] Arthur [Kar] were sitting next to each other at my show, and Fraser saw these Umbros and he was like, “What the fuck?” And Arthur was like, “No one has ever called him to do a shoe.” That was when Fraser first began the dialogue. [Nike disputes this version of events.] Cooke: The Ten actually came up from the Nike side and was instigated by our CEO, Mark Parker. We knew we wanted to re-interpret and re-imagine iconic silhouettes from across Nike, Jordan, and also Converse. [Virgil] and the footwear-design team went into a design area for a couple days and thrashed through each one of those silhouettes. Reynolds: We were working on a running collection, and we had picked a graphic pattern—camouflage. Then I went to visit Virgil in Chicago wearing a tie-dye shirt I made, and he said, “That’s the print we’re going to use this season.” And that changed the course of the collection. He was laughing afterwards like, “Watch what you wear to our meetings.” Dewitt: Sometimes I’ll see something I think he’ll like, not even for a
graphic, and I’ll just text it to him. And he does the same with me, and sometimes that turns into something wearable or printable, but often it’s just about sharing stuff. Arthur Jafa (artist): Virgil is a such a positive person, but he’s affirmative in conjunction with being super discerning. The person he reminds me the most of in this respect is Andy Warhol, who adopted a default manner of just being positive, and people obviously underestimated him because of that. But it’s impossible for a Warhol or a Virgil to operate the way they do without being discerning.
Peter Saville
Arthur Jafa
In 2018, news came that surprised everyone but Abloh: He was the new men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton. The appointment felt like the triumph of his boldest idea—that the young people who push fashion forward should also be the ones designing it. When the time came for the actual show, everyone from Rihanna to Takashi Murakami to multiple Kardashians gathered around a quarter-mile rainbow runway inspired by Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and the Yellow Brick Road. At the end of it all, Abloh made a beeline for his mentor, Kanye West, for a tearful embrace. Abloh: When I was in college, Marc Jacobs was the American designer that went to Europe and injected life into Louis Vuitton by bringing Takashi Murakami or Stephen Sprouse. When I stepped into the role, my office is his exact same office. I’m coming in at a time to re-interpret or channel this brand into the modern
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Co v e r St o ry
Three Virgil-ified sneakers from The Ten, Abloh’s re-imagining of some of Nike’s most iconic silhouettes.
era. And I’m very much following in the steps of someone who I admire and put a great deal of belief into. I was carrying on a tradition that I believed in. Takashi Murakami (artist): In 2017, Virgil and I were on a panel together with Yoon [Ahn, jewelry designer] and Don C. And Virgil mentioned my collaborations with Louis Vuitton sort of in a historical context and talked about fashion and art bridging cultures. To be honest, people don’t ever mention my collaboration with Louis Vuitton. I really thought it was important, but no one really took note of it, and I was kind of disappointed. But then Virgil mentioned it in that panel years later, and I realized that there were people who were actually paying attention to that collaboration. Benji B (DJ, BBC Radio 1; music director, Louis Vuitton): I was in Miami, and Virgil said, “I need to meet you.” He said, “You’re musical director.” And that was the length of the conversation. Arnold: Virgil is the most qualified person to run a fashion house today. He has a global perspective, and when it comes to hip-hop and American fashion, he’s the team captain. Jean Touitou (founder, A.P.C.): I was not surprised at all that he got this job. Virgil is a new version of Karl Lagerfeld: a very talented and strategic director, as well as a very, very good master of propaganda. Luka Sabbat (model and actor): Louis Vuitton felt like a team win. It was a milestone that was bigger than the clothes, or anything else. It was, like, the biggest linkup ever.
Playboi Carti (rapper): Walking the Louis Vuitton show was monumental. It was pure happiness, and it was historical for both me and Virgil. As I walked down the runway, it wasn’t that hard for me, because it’s a lifestyle that I live every day, and people like Virgil know exactly what we’re doing. Sabbat: I fucking cried, bro. Virgil is doing Louis Vuitton. Travis Scott is the face of Saint Laurent. The tables have fucking turned. Bentley: When you’re a pioneer, it’s very harsh. You’ve got to go through the barbed wire. That’s why the emotions hit when he and Ye saw each other. Tremaine Emory (co-founder, No Vacancy Inn): Do you know what the Yellow Brick Road is? It’s that picture from Paris with Virgil, Don C, Ye, Chris Julian, Taz Arnold, and Fonzworth Bentley that people made fun of: “Why are they there? Why are they dressed like that?” The Yellow Brick Road was the journey to where Virgil’s at now, and where our tribe is at now, and where we’re gonna go. Jafa: Virgil and Kanye are two guys—two black men, in particular—who just don’t see what they do in terms of external limitations. That Louis Vuitton show, for me, [is] an iconic moment equivalent to the athletes raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Because that’s the thing that was so iconic: They were getting gold medals and at the same time being critical of American society. I don’t think people have taken full measure of that Louis Vuitton moment yet.
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— P E T E R S AV I L L E
Abloh: This is going to sound weird, but I made sure that moment wasn’t a big deal. I was doing something that most people on planet Earth would say is not possible, so that’s where the emotion came from. But now I have more work to do, and I’m more interested in the work than everything else. Abloh prides himself on keeping his work “open source”: teaching screen printing to the kids who lined up around corners to buy his Nikes and instructing architecture students at the Architectural Association School in London (where his hero Rem Koolhaas went to school). This summer, Abloh will return to Chicago for a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, an honor almost unheard of for a fashion designer. In a city plagued by youth gun violence, he is hyper-aware of the pull he has as “Playboi Carti’s friend” or “the Kanye guy” to bring kids into museums. His stated aim is for the exhibition to produce five new Virgils.
Takashi Murakami
Benji B
Luka Sabbat
Hans Ulrich Obrist (curator): Running a public art gallery, even when there is free admission, people don’t go because they think museums are not for them. Virgil creates these kinds of access points—for a teenager who is not into art who suddenly encounters Jenny Holzer or Rem Koolhaas. And encountering these types of things as a teenager can change someone’s world. Saville: When Virgil says something like “Duchamp is my lawyer,” a thousand kids go home and find out who the artist Marcel Duchamp is. Cooke: Virgil really wanted to bring people into the conversation, beyond just
Playboi Carti
T H ES E PAG ES, S E E A D D I T I O N A L C R E D I TS.
Sure, one of Abloh’s Ikea rugs can go on your floor—but then you can’t hang it on your wall.
“When Virgil says, ‘Duchamp is my lawyer,’ kids find out who Marcel Duchamp is.”
Spri ng 2019
In January, Abloh took over the exterior of LV’s New York flagship, giving it a holographic makeover.
During the 2018–19 movie-awards season, the “beaded mid-layer” became a frequent red-carpet accessory.
Even while refining the looks for his first Louis Vuitton show, Abloh tends to his group chat.
creating a product and having people line up to buy it. Sabbat: Virgil surrounds himself with very youthful and relevant energy. A lot of this industry is so elitist, and they kind of just wanna use kids. They’ll steal from skate culture but not want to pay homage. But Virgil fucks with anybody at any age—he’s the only person who can have George Condo and Tom Sachs at a dinner with me and Bloody Osiris. He’s tapped into so many different demographics. Dev Hynes (musician and Abloh collaborator): Music has a big role in what Virgil does. With him, everything pulls from everything, and he’s somewhat normalized the idea that you can be influenced by things outside of the specific field you’re working in. Playboi Carti: Virgil is just a big inspiration to everything, and it’s got nothing do with music. We just talk about the future. He’s going to be the creative director of my next album. Pusha T: Maybe even unbeknownst to him, Virgil was part of my tutoring session, and it allowed me to spread my wings into a whole nother world of art and fashion. I always looked at fashion and rap as one, but [he] showed me it was beyond just the outfit on the corner. It was not only respected in the streets, but in big corporate fashion houses. Dance: In the last Off-White womenswear show, Virgil was really able to bring together all these elements of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a professional, what it means to be a mother. Having a champion runner standing next to
Kendall Jenner, and having everyone feel like friends—it felt like a momentous and ultimate event. Eva Franch i Gilabert (director, Architectural Association School): In Virgil’s unit, he actually takes the projects he’s doing and brings them to the students. They’ll be working on problems from OffWhite, or Ikea, or Evian, or Louis Vuitton, and then will engage with them on the basis of project design all the way into the future. Benji B: What is very important about Virgil’s work is that the whole time he’s doing it—whether you’re a young budding designer, musician, or architect—he is “giving you the cheat codes,” as he likes to say. He and I are both of a generation that grew up with gatekeepers. In London, DJs used to steam the labels off their records, so you couldn’t see what they were playing. But Virgil is not leaving anyone outside looking in. Arnault: In luxury today, people that are in my age group are not the customers shopping for luxury goods, but it’s become very important for brands to stay relevant to these people, because they will one day be the ones buying. Virgil is very inclusive, and that’s what resonates with young customers who can feel when things are not organic. He’s always collaborating with the right people in the right way at the right moment. Rock: What exactly does a designer make? As an architect, you have a site, a program, a budget, and you have to create architecture that engages those different forces. [But] when you think about what Virgil does
in the role of creative director, it’s about the music he listens to, the parties he orchestrates, the brands he’s associated with, the life he lives. So Virgil really becomes a personification of a world that people find really attractive and want to patch into. And you can do that by the very expensive method of buying an Off-White coat, but you can also do it for free by following him on Instagram. Either way, you feel like you’re part of it. Abloh: I feel like I’m figuring things out, but I don’t feel accomplished yet. I still feel like I’m an intern. THOM BET TRIDGE IS A WRITER,
Tremaine Emory
Dev Hynes
A C O N S U LTA N T, A N D T H E E X E C U T I V E E D I TO R O F I N T E RV I E W M AG A Z I N E . A D D I T I O N A L R E P O RT I N G BY KEVIN PIRES.
Eva Franch i Gilabert
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When Tom Sachs and his team send his latest works to Tokyo for the Tea Ceremony exhibition, they’ll also send this mobile workstation.
MOST ARTISTS LUXURIATE
in lawless-
ness. Not Tom Sachs. His “greatest work of art”—his words and ours—is the studio he’s created. But he’s not talking about the sculptures in his studio—objects that look like the genius renderings from a child’s imagination. And technically he’s not talking about the people, either: a small assortment of misfits, most of whom are one part welder, one part stylish SoHo inhabitant. Sachs’s prestige, so to speak, is the studio itself—the rules and guidelines and code and language and expectations that exist before anyone even clocks in. In one of his films, Ten Bullets, he outlines the code for his workshop. The film is a quirky instruction guide, anchored by ten bullet points, shot with Tom’s rough edges and trademark DIY look. The rules are strict. (One example of a rule is “Always Be Knolling”; another is “Sacred Space.”) Everyone must watch Ten Bullets before entering the studio, team members as well as guests. Ten Bullets is polarizing. If you read the comments below the video, people seem to think it’s bonkers. (“Weaponized autism” is my personal favorite.) But there are thousands of people—from art-world snobs in their 60s to kids who camped out for his highly coveted Nike collaboration—who would kill to work in Tom’s infamous studio. Most people think it’s crazy to go to the moon, too. Walking from one end of the studio to the other was trippy. Parts of it looked like NASA’s workshop on a tight budget. (Tom has done three massive inter-
High fashion plus low-brow beer cooler equals high art. Karl Lagerfeld, take note.
galactic exhibitions in which he re-creates elements of space; so far, he’s been to Mars, the moon, and Jupiter.) Other parts of the studio looked like a chop shop for random objects like basketballs and lobsters. The more in progress something looked, the closer it was to being done. When all the works, tools, and people are together, everything looks like art. When I finally got to Tom at the rear of the studio, he was shirtless. (He’d just gotten a haircut.) At 52, Tom Sachs is pretty ripped. He has those type of non-gym muscles that look like he earned them while at work. Like a farmer. So I figured that seemed like a safe place to start.
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If the producers of the new Space Jam haven’t called Sachs yet, they should.
You’re pretty ripped, Tom. What’s your workout regimen? TOM SACHS: Space Camp! Space Camp is a three-day-a-week ritual. It’s something that Pat Manocchia of La Palestra developed. We do five essential exercises. And follow it religiously. It’s a dead lift, a chin-up, a lunge, an ab exercise, and pushups. We follow the health triangle, which is diet, exercise, and rest. And sleep is key. Without sleep, it doesn’t matter how well you eat and how much you work out. You need to do all three. How many hours a night do you sleep? Eight. It’s a priority. That’s also why I don’t get sick. When was the last time you had a cold? I think it was the day before I made that deal with Satan, when he said, “Bubeleh, it was such a pleasure doing business with you. So in addition to the ‘Sell Your Soul for Success’ deal, I’m going to throw in the ‘No Sick’ clause for free.” You reference Satan a lot in your work. But you’re also influenced by and love a lot of musicians and artists who are very spiritual. Are you a spiritual person? Well, of course I’m spiritual. I’m a scientist. We don’t know. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. What do you believe happens when you die? I mean, just the science stuff, like, worms. But that’s just your body. What do you think happens to Tom Sachs, the artist-scientist? The same thing that happens to my cat who died in October. Just, like, it’s gone. I don’t know about all the fake news that religion pumps into us to help us behave and work better in a consumerist society, like the afterlife, or nirvana, or heaven, or 72 virgins, or whatever. I think it’s important to accept truth over certainty and not just choose certainty, which is like faith and belief that you’ll have a second life or heaven or whatever, because you can’t deal with GQ S T YLE:
“I play the game best when I’m happy. I don’t believe in the myth of the tortured artist. It’s not for me. I think it’s a crutch.”
the truth. The truth is that we don’t know and there’s a real possibility that there is absolutely nothing after death. Death is a tragedy that happens once and it’s over. If you start to really look into that, you might find that it’s so maddening a concept to comprehend that it might make it difficult for people to do simple things like love one another and get up out of bed. I think that the contemplation of death is something that separates us from the other animals and is probably an unrecognized or undiagnosed source for madness among many men. James Baldwin was an atheist. I think that’s part of the reason he worked so hard. This is it, ya know? Do you feel an added pressure, considering that any day you could be turned into worm food? I think more agnostic than atheist because I don’t know. I believe in magic. I believe in superstition. I believe in different things that I don’t understand and things I just don’t know. But, for sure, if there is something after this, it’s not this. I tend to make the most of every day because it’s gone in a second. The short amount of years between birth and death, compared to geology or the life of a tree or something, it’s so short that it does make me want to make the most of every minute. It’s so complicated, because you’re weighing that against the length of life. The sonata’s long, you must take care of the bow. Before a big show or project, do you find it difficult now to feel that same kind of excitement you felt when you were trying to make a name for yourself? Jay-Z’s “My 1st Song” is my theme song. I write my first song like it’s my last, and my last like it’s my first, or something like that. I think that’s how I make work. Now, no one is immune to death and to the curve, and Werner Herzog said that great filmmakers only have a 15-year life span. The great films. The best.
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Sp r i n g 2 0 19 Tom Sachs’s latest Nike collab, the Mars Yard Overshoe, is truly one step for man and one giant leap for sneakerheads.
“I’m an athlete, and my sport is sculpture and putting up bathroom shelves.”
Satan Ceramics, some of Sachs’s more elegant work, has a market all its own.
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He’s said he’s looked at all of them. And I said, “Including you?” With artists, it’s different lengths. With rock musicians, it’s the shortest one; architects, it’s the longest. But no one is immune to that. If you acknowledge that, you can fight a little harder. But the other side of that is that there’s an established language within which we can work and develop, so it’s easier. Everything has its cycle. Just like everyone else. I’m inspired by the same exact things, so it’s mostly just the needs of the body. The sensuality. It is always work, and the reward for good work is more work. So every time it’s hard, and it’s just hard in different ways. As you keep raising the bar, it gets harder and harder to innovate. But never innovate for its own sake. Just sometimes it’s best to sit back and do the same thing again and just incrementally build. Is it true that all of this—your art, studio, and career—is the result of a broken heart? Here’s the story. She was a senior and I was a freshman in college. She selected me to be her lover. The school that I went to, Bennington College, was pretty progressive. Some of the students, including her, were really, really brilliant. It was a kind of community, where you could learn more from another student than the professor, and she was one of those students. I took
a sculpture class. And of course she was four years older than me, so she had been doing it for a while, so there was a lot to learn. She taught me to weld, and then took me to the Museum of Modern Art, and taught me the Kama Sutra, and then dumped my ass. All in, like, really, in a month or in a very few amount of weeks. She left me with the skills to work in a welding studio. I had nothing to live for because I was so devastated. But I was pretty inspired by her and the experience to make sculpture. I just poured all of my broken-heart energy into this one pretty terrible steel sculpture, but it was a lot of physical work. I found through the physical pain of labor, you can find solace through physical work by sweat. Some athletes play the game better when everyone is booing. Some need the love from a home crowd. Does sadness or turmoil help you play better? I play the game best when I’m happy, and in love, and well fed, and well fucked, and rested. Healthy. I don’t believe in the myth of the tortured artist. It’s not for me. I think it’s a crutch. Was it always the plan to build out an entire world for yourself to live in? No. When I moved to New York, I didn’t know I’d have a successful career as an artist. I thought I’d be invited to interesting dinner parties. I’ve been to
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three dinner parties. I go to one a decade that’s memorable, and they’re always at Jon Kessler’s house, who’s an artist and a friend of mine. It was never a plan. The ritual of the studio has developed organically over the past 30 years. When I first started in this space, I was an elevator repairman and I repaired all the elevators in this block because this block is all owned by one landlord. That was your job? That was my job. It was something I told people I could do and then figured it out. It seemed dangerous, and I could bill a lot of money, because no matter how much I billed, it was less than the union repair guy or the union welder. Because I learned from my college girlfriend how to weld. [laughs] Thanks, college girlfriend! What were the early days of the ritual like? The ritual started with waking up early, going to the coffee shop on the corner for a $1.50 coffee, 50 cents for a pork bao—which is a jelly doughnut with pork meat inside. It’s delicious. But the point is, it was a dollar and it’d get you going. I’d work all day into darkness and have my ritual of working with my team, because I always hired my friends from school to help me. Those are the same people that are here today in the studio. It’s friends. We’re a family. James Brown is a hero of yours. And in Ten Bullets, you reference James charging band members for mistakes. He was a genius. But also a tyrant. And most people hated working for him. Are you as difficult to work for? I’m better than James Brown. I’m a better team leader because I’ve learned from his mistakes. I also had a huge advantage over him. I mean, talk about white entitlement. James Brown came from a very, very fucked-up place. It’s a miracle that he survived. But how do you push people to such a successful place, create a family without people feeling like you’ve pushed them too hard? Where’s the limit? It’s complicated, but it comes to three words: selection, development, and retention. You gotta choose wisely, and you have to get rid of people when they don’t work out quickly, but also give them long enough time to work out. I can tell you, some of the people that are the best on my teams are the ones I really wanted to fire. What’s the origin of the boom boxes you make? They’re homemade sound systems assembled from existing components, like audio components, but put together to create an environment for a party. It comes from my first boom box, which my sister’s high school boyfriend stole. I traded my Physical Graffiti double-LP record for it and took my 1976 Plymouth Volare wagon, which was
In Sachs’s studio, it’s unclear what’s art and what’re tools.
originally my mom’s car but became mine at 17. It had an AM radio, and I cut it out and installed this thing myself. I just did it. I went to the hi-fi store and bought speakers to put in the doors. It was so loud and good. It was incredible. It was like a party in my car. That was the first sound system that I made. So it’s like Pimp My Ride: Tom Sachs Edition. It didn’t have any physical ambitions; I just wanted it to sound good. Did you try to hide your work so it looked natural? Or were you, at 17, into the homemade aesthetic? I tried to make it as good and as clean as I could. I got the little kit with the speaker grilles and cut the doors out. I tried to make it nice. I was in high school, and I spent years trying to do it the right way before I realized there was a virtue in doing it the wrong way. Would you consider that—doing it the wrong way—your breakthrough? Yeah. I was making this one model—this
is 1998—for my second art show at MorrisHealy Gallery. I made a full-scale model of the Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki a couple days after Hiroshima. But mine, instead of having a bomb, had a little capsule hotel with a sofa, a TV, a toilet, and it was functional. But I made all this effort to make it really slick and perfect, the way an atomic bomb would be. Smooth. I had assembled all the parts, but it was the first time I used a fabricator. I hired someone to do it because it was all fiberglass, so I used a boat fabricator to build it. I walked in his shop, and I was watching him paint it. He had done all these different colors of fiberglass and patching underneath, and it was so beautiful. I was watching him spray-paint over it and make it unified, which is what I asked him to do. I was like, “Dammit, I wish I had made it myself.” Because if I had made it myself, I would’ve seen that (text continued on page 138)
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Each Tea Ceremony bowl is hand-pressed by Sachs himself. His fingerprints are all over each one—literally.
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Sp r i n g 2 0 19 The crew, hard at work preparing for the Tea Ceremony show in Tokyo.
the patchwork had virtue. It was unpretentious. He just did it to make it quick, and it looked great, but I was like, “Shit!” Any artist could’ve done that. Looking at the Nike collaborations, how do you feel right now about it all? I feel good about the fact that so many people were able to get them. I hate the pretension of the art world. Also, the studio is a sponsored team. I’m an athlete, and my sport is sculpture and putting up bathroom shelves. Whenever you collaborate with somebody, are you ever reluctant to give their project some of the magic you’ve been building for over 30 years? I don’t like collaborations. I don’t do them very often. With brands, I only work with Nike. It seems like there might be others, and I’ve flirted with it, but I’m only really interested in one thing. I don’t really like working with other artists—it’s a lot of time spent with power dynamics and stuff. What is it about Frank Ocean that made you want to work with him? I think what he’s doing is important, and I want to do what I can to help. His art helps people to value intuition and sensuality. And help people think about their emotional landscape with more intention. There isn’t a lot of support for that. So of course I want to be of assistance. You don’t seem like the type of person to binge-watch TV, let alone cartoons like Family Guy and The Simpsons, but you riff on them a lot in your work. Are you really a fan? From 1989 to September 11, 2001, I had a TV there, in that corner, and I’d watch The Simpsons every night. I’d work here at my welding station, and I had the rest of the antennas out of the window. But when they blew up the Twin Towers, I lost reception. I’d sit here and watch The Simpsons.
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Most of us haven’t used a hot-glue gun since art class in grade school. But at Sachs’s studio, it’s the weapon of choice.
Every day? Yeah. The reruns. I’d watch it every night, and I’d always work here, and that was part of my ritual. Who’s your favorite Simpsons character? Lisa. She’s the artist. She’s the one. Bart is pure Dionysian, whereas Lisa is this mix. She’s emotional and spiritual, but she’s also a straight-A student. She’s a scientist. She’s conflicted. Do you consider this place—the studio and the culture that you’ve built around it—a cult? This place is a cult, and I mean that in the scariest, most Mansonfamily kind of way, in that we’re totally
committed to this way of life. Anyone is free to leave whenever they want. There is zero pressure. We’re very, very, very committed to it being a safe work environment. The whole #MeToo, sexualharassment thing doesn’t even come close to what we’re trying to do here. Like, everyone in the studio was bullied in high school or participated in some part of that. We were all subject to that. We’re very careful to make this a supportive work environment for everyone.... We’re always trying to make it safe and deal with all of these difficult topics. Another difficult topic that’s in the news a lot is cultural appropriation. How have you navigated that? Who is this white middle-aged non-Asian male to do something about the Japanese tea ceremony? Or boom boxes, for that matter. Because that’s something that’s black and Latino, uptown culturally. And I always say the same thing: If you do it for a couple years, it’s an interest; for five years, it’s a hobby. But when you do something for 20 years, it becomes a part of your life and you become a part of it. And I become an amplifier. And I am the best boom-box maker that’s ever lived. And I can back it up. I’ve been inspired by people, and I try to elevate. I would actually say the guys who do the sound systems in Jamaica or in the Caribbean parades, even here in New York, they’re way better at soundsystem making for those parties. But it’s a different kind of thing. I’m looking into more discreet, more compact objects for
GROOMING: LISA-RAQUEL USING R+CO
S tudio V isit
“This place is a cult, and I mean that in the scariest, most Manson-family kind of way, in that we’re totally committed to this way of life.”
a room. And same with the tea ceremony. The people that get pissed off at me about me appropriating the tea ceremony aren’t Japanese tea masters. Japanese tea masters fucking love what I’m doing. I’m bringing attention to their craft, I’m studying, I’m elevating, I’m respecting it. I’m turning it inside out. I’m taking a shit on it, then gilding it, and putting it on a pedestal. People that get mad are other white middle-aged non-Asian people who are like, “I can show you!” The art of America is the art of the African diaspora. And I’m not black. I’m white. When people ask me what art I’m into, I say James Brown and Bob Marley and Fela Kuti, even. Though he’s not part of America, you hear American influences in his music. And that’s the art that inspires me. It’s not necessarily my territory to work with. I just think you have to do it with sensitivity.
Sachs’s uniform is 50 percent NASA employee, 50 percent SoHo welder. And copied by kids all over.
Maybe your biggest inspiration would appear to be NASA and space. Would you ever go to Mars, if given the opportunity? Maybe. Not definitely. I’d need a lot more information. I definitely wouldn’t go on the one-way trip. No way. Probably not. I probably wouldn’t go. The most hospitable place on Mars is a billion times more dangerous than the bottom of the ocean and the top of Everest, which I’m not really interested in going into. Earth is like a big warm wet kiss and I want to explore every inch of her. MARK ANTHONY GREEN IS GQ’S S P E C I A L P R OJ E CTS E D I TO R .
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Fa s h i on
(previous page) ARMAND O OLIVENCIA AGE 34 OCCUPATION Tattoo artist blazer (price upon request) Dolce & Gabbana necklace, stylist’s own
RE’CHARD APPLEWHITE AGE 28 OCCUPATION Model jacket, socks, hat, and necklace, his own tank top $148 Boss swim trunks $180 Kenzo his own sneakers, Nike
KSENIA PILUKITA AGE 31 OCCUPATION
Bartender, Coyo Taco swimsuit Dolce & Gabbana shoes Clergerie bracelets Alexis Bittar ring Dinosaur Designs
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DANIEL PEREZ AGE 23 OCCUPATION Artist sweater $1,750 Balenciaga sunglasses $230 Retrosuperfuture
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Fa s h i on
ON KSENIA top Zimmermann sunglasses Retrosuperfuture earrings Sonia Rykiel
OPPOSITE PAGE, ON ARMANDO OLIVENCIA jacket $2,995 Missoni sweater $690 pants $1,190 Salvatore Ferragamo belt $125 Maximum Henry shoes $1,450 Jimmy Choo sunglasses $410 Moscot jewelry, his own
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Spri ng 2019
home to Gianni Versace—and the winter nesting place for plenty of New York City designers over the years—Miami never became a fashion capital the way L.A. has. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have style. “Miami is flashy, and we like that about it,” says GQ fashion director Mobolaji Dawodu. “The idea is to show off.” The beach, trap music, Scarface. “Miami is America’s guilty pleasure. And the thing is, in Miami you can always have a good time.” With that in mind, Dawodu and photographer Lou Escobar flew to Miami Beach and hit the streets and clubs in search of subjects for our shoot. “I was looking for people who seemed comfortable with themselves,” Dawodu explains. “It wasn’t about style, it was more about their aura.” Some of the people he found are bartenders, some work at the Design District skate shop Andrew; all were down to wear the kind of fashion you want to be seen in. The resulting portfolio tells the story of a single day—and a long, vibrant night—in one of America’s most electric cities. —SAMUEL HINE THOUGH IT WAS FAMOUSLY
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Fa s h i on
ARMAND O PADRON AGE 36 OCCUPATION
Small-business owner turtleneck $690 shorts $980 sneakers (price upon request) Prada socks $29 Pantherella necklace, his own
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CENTHIA SNEED AGE 22 OCCUPATION
LO C AT I O N : T H E D R E A M H OT E L
College student bikini top Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses Pierre Hardy watch and ring Cartier necklace, stylist’s own bracelet Erickson Beamon
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SERENA RUBIN AGE 22 OCCUPATION
Art director and illustrator cardigan The Elder Statesman bikini top Ashish pants Browns necklace Carolee earrings Dinosaur Designs
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T H I S PA G E A N D O P P O S I T E PA G E , LO C AT I O N : N E W S C A F E
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HAY WARD MARTINEZ AGE 15 OCCUPATION
Student shirt $990 Saint Laurent jewelry, his own
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(from left) FELL AHBOY AGE 29 OCCUPATION Partner, Andrew skate shop coat $1,095 Boss shirt $2,275 Missoni sunglasses $310 Moscot
QUIK AGE 33 OCCUPATION
Recording artist shirt $745 Dolce & Gabbana kufi, his own watch $7,900 Zenith
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KHARI M C INTOSH AGE 25 OCCUPATION Creative assistant, Andrew skate shop jacket $2,850 pants $1,040 loafers $560 Balmain tank top $148 Boss necklace, his own
ODESSA LEWIS AGE 23 OCCUPATION Dancer,
student, and bartender dress Dolce & Gabbana shoes Manolo Blahnik ring Cartier
OPPOSITE PAGE jewelry, her own
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(far right) VERONICA PEREZ AGE 22 OCCUPATION
Fashion student FROM LEFT, ON ODESSA dress Dolce & Gabbana ON SERENA shirt and pants Acne Studios bikini top Ashish necklace Carolee earrings Dinosaur Designs ON VERONICA bathing suit Jade Swim pants Kenzo shoes Salvatore Ferragamo watch Cartier necklaces, her own
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KENNETH BR ALEY AGE 29 OCCUPATION Rapper and live streamer sweater $830 Issey Miyake Men pants $795 Prabal Gurung loafers $550 Church’s beanie, his own sunglasses $460 Cutler and Gross necklace, his own
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(far right) ELIJAH OD OM AGE 22 OCCUPATION
Employee, Andrew skate shop FROM LEFT, ON FELLAHBOY coat $1,095 Boss shirt $2,275 Missoni pants $450 E. Tautz belt $248 Boss loafers $775 Jimmy Choo sunglasses $310 Moscot watch $23,500 Hublot ON QUIK shirt $745 Dolce & Gabbana kufi, his own ON ELIJAH shirt $1,490 Salvatore Ferragamo pants $554 Kolor sandals $500 Church’s sunglasses, his own watch $7,900 Zenith bracelet, stylist’s own
hair and makeup by taryll atkins using make up for ever. produced by jeremy badian for ge miami.
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Skate
Important
Things Are
Happening
First he created a new way for skaters to look, act, and party—until it sent him into a tailspin. Now, from a hideout in the middle of nowhere, Jason Dill is rebuilding one of the coolest skate brands on the planet, one hand-cut collage at a time. By Noah Jo hnso n
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Pho to graph s by M ichael Schme lling
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to
Jason Dill
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Sk a t e
JASON DILL D OESN’T DRIVE.
He walks. So on Christmas
morning in Ventura, California, last year, he woke up at the usual time—around 7 a.m.—stepped out his door and hoofed it the mile to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. On the way back, his coffee was getting cold, so he stopped at the Circle K to warm it back up. He added a splash of joe to his cup, saw a long line at the register, and decided that it wasn’t worth the wait. When he got outside, he heard someone behind him say, “Hey, buddy. You gonna pay for that?” Dill turned and saw that the guy was not alone. There was a kid with him, about 16, wearing a Thrasher hoodie and Vans, worn through with skate holes. Dill stopped, flummoxed. “I’ve been on the cover of that magazine,” he said, pointing to the logo on the kid’s sweatshirt. “Twice.” And then Dill walked away. A Thrasher cover is just about the apex of a professional skate career. He was also on the Vans pro team and has had numerous sneakers made with his name on them. But those aren’t Jason Dill’s only accolades. He is a titan of influence in skateboarding. Every trick he’s done, every outfit he’s worn, and all of the crazy stories that make up the Jason Dill mythology are crucial entries in the skate canon. That influence began when he was just a kid in Huntington Beach, California, and extends soundly, unwaveringly into 2019. Dill’s style—his tricks, his attitude, his clothes, hell, his visage—is foundational to what skateboarding is today.
The problem—and, in fact, the primary boon—of Fucking Awesome is that Dill does it all himself. Just
Now, as he settles into his role as a wizened elder—
about every graphic, every board design, every piece
complete with a raucous and sometimes dangerous
of clothing, starts with Dill. That’s one of the reasons
history behind him—for the first time in his life and
the brand resonates so powerfully with people around
career, he has a job and real responsibility. The
the world—not just skaters—and why it’s stocked at
streetwear brand he started with his friend Mike
top-tier shops like Supreme, Dover Street Market,
Piscitelli back in the early 2000s, Fucking Awesome,
and Opening Ceremony. Dill’s twisted worldview, his
has grown into a fully realized, globally recognized
dark wit, his keen and easy sense of style—all of those
skate and clothing company. This year, Fucking
things go into pieces like a T-shirt with a handwrit-
Awesome is planning to open its first shop, in West
ten graphic that reads YEAH
Hollywood. The company remains fully independent,
ANOTHER BULL SHIT FA T - SHIRT BL AH BL AH
owned entirely by Dill, Piscitelli, and a third partner,
down with an all-over, full-color print of stamps
pro skater and longtime friend Anthony Van Engelen
collected off eBay. He also develops innovative board
(also known as AVE).
designs using hologram overlays, wood embossing,
YEAH HERE WE GO AGAIN …
or a button-
“I tell you what, I didn’t want to do this shit,” Dill tells
glossy paint “dips,” and other techniques that most
me. We’re hanging in one of the three apartments he
companies would never have thought of (but many
rents in a building in Ventura. “I never wanted to make
now try to replicate).
a fucking board company. It just seemed like a pain
He’s doing all of that here in Ventura. The apartment
in the ass. And it is. It is a huge, huge pain in the ass.”
we’re sitting in, where Dill puffs on a spliff and sips tea
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Jason Dill, hanging out a window at his home in Ventura, California.
S pring 2019
from a large plastic cup, functions as an art studio and
various motels, trailer parks, and dingy apartments. “It
general creative space. In another lives his mother,
turned me into this fucking gypsy, half-hobo, collector
whom he’s been able to help support financially with
weirdo,” he says. When Dill was 8, he says, his father
the money he’s made skating since he was 17, and her
went to jail for possession of and intent to distribute
husband. The third is where he sleeps. There’s a pile
cocaine, and his mother and half brother raised him
of collages he’s made with scissors and glue on the
from there. “It kind of made me, me,” he says. “But I
table in front of us. Many of them will be scanned and
could have dealt with a little less violence, a little less
applied to T-shirts, hoodies, and skate decks. He has
cocaine psychosis.”
people who help with that part.
Dill has always been an eccentric character. He has
“I don’t even know how to scan,” he says. “I don’t
a magnetic personality. People often commented to
know how to Photoshop. I don’t even know how to
me that he looks famous, and he does. Today he still
Dropbox. It doesn’t work for me—all the fucking
rattles with the energy of a young skate rat, endlessly
passwords.
smoking, talking so fast he hardly finishes a thought
“I’m just not good at normal shit. I don’t sleep in
before he’s on to the next one, inevitably veering off
a regular bed. I sleep on my mat. I’m not trying to
into unpredictable tangents. But now, in his early 40s,
be non-conventionalist, none of that. I never did
he’s developed an appealingly louche, legs-crossed
all the shit you’re supposed to do. Take care of
nonchalance. Hip and sleazy, like a sturdier John
your teeth. Do your taxes. All that shit. I’m outside
Waters. He’s intense and opinionated but weirdly
living my weird little life, and that helps me make my
personable and prone to sudden quasi-intellectual
thing go.”
outbursts. He reads a lot, frequently name-dropping
Many of Dill’s unusual habits are the result of his
James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and
turbulent upbringing. From the time he was born till he
countless other literary giants, incorporating nods to
reached 17, his family moved 22 times, into and out of
their work into Fucking Awesome’s graphic designs.
Dill has recently been working on paintings. Unlike the collages he makes, these will likely never become T-shirt or board graphics for his skate brand, Fucking Awesome.
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At one point he asks if I’ve read Infinite Jest. I have
how old you are, is to channel whatever inner youth-
not. “Did you try?” I did. “Anyone who says they under-
ful energy you have left. And for Dill, whose memory
stand Infinite Jest is totally full of shit, unless they
is so powerful it seems to haunt him at every turn,
think, ‘Oh, it’s just a representation of the information
adolescent nostalgia is uncommonly potent. Every
age and how at one point we will just be shitting our
skater who rides for the Fucking Awesome team gets
pants and looking at the same thing on a screen over
a board with one of their old class photos turned
and over again.’ Coming to machines. Which is—from
into the graphic—Dill’s and AVE’s were the first ones.
a long view, if you’re an alien looking down—exactly
In the image of Dill, he’s got a mane of wavy hair, pro-
what we’re doing.”
truding ears, and a barely perceptible shit-eating
He hasn’t finished it either, but he does have a
smirk. He’s 13.
favorite David Foster Wallace short story. It’s called
The same year his father went to jail, Dill wound up
“Forever Overhead,” a more manageable ten-pager
living down the street from pro skater Ed Templeton
about youth and nostalgia. It begins like this:
(who would go on to found the skate brand Toy Machine). “He changed my life,” Dill says. He started
Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your
skating around then, at 8, and was 12 when he picked
first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for
up his first sponsor, A1 Meats. By 1993, he had been
people to recognize that important things are happening
recruited by street-skate pioneer Natas Kaupas to
to you.
ride for 101 Skateboards, a scrappy offshoot of World Industries, which was indisputably the coolest thing
Skateboarding is inherently about youth. Even
on four wheels at the time. In 1998, his star on the rise,
learning how to skate in the first place usually
Dill made his way to Alien Workshop, where he would
involves a level of carelessness with your body that
spend 15 years on the pro team, establishing himself
only the young possess. To skateboard, no matter
as a truly original and gifted talent on a board.
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Members of the Fucking Awesome skate team (with Dill, center) at the legendary Dan Tana’s Italian restaurant in West Hollywood.
S p r i n g 20 19
S kate
Dill’s years riding for Alien Workshop were trans-
But what stands out is his unique ability to imagine
formative for him personally and for skateboarding at
new possibilities, to see and do things that other
large. He moved to New York full-time in 1998, where
skaters don’t. In one famous instance, he picks up his
a scene was crystallizing around the convergence
board in the middle of a line, runs down a set of stairs,
of skateboarding, art, and fashion, and spent as
and then does another trick to end the clip. It was a
much time hanging out with photographers, models,
small but significant break from convention, one that
and graffiti writers as he did with skaters. By then,
skaters still speak of with reverence today.
skateboarding was becoming a little less insular and
We take for granted now that fashion and art and
a little more a part of the downtown culture that pro-
skateboarding overlap, but Dill brought it all together
pelled the careers of artists like Ryan McGinley, Dan
like no one before him. In Photosynthesis he’s skat-
Colen, and Dash Snow. (A picture of Snow hangs in
ing through Lower Manhattan with a fluidity and ease
Dill’s Ventura sleeping apartment.) When he works
that’s alarming for anyone who’s ever walked around
on designs for Fucking Awesome, Dill says, he’s “like
south of 14th Street. He’s wearing Helmut Lang and
a fucking hamster,” an allusion, perhaps, to Colen
A.P.C., pointing a handheld Super 8 camera out the
and Snow’s famous “hamster nest” installations,
window of a moving van. And, Dill says, much of it
where they would lock themselves in a room for days,
was done on no sleep after drug-fueled nights of hard
remove their clothes, ingest copious amounts of
partying. The years spent making Photosynthesis may
drugs, shred phone books, and roll around until they
have been the greatest time of his life, he has said, but
felt like hamsters. (Dill’s art is featured prominently
they were quickly followed by intense darkness and an
on the walls of the official Nest gallery installation
eye-opening health scare.
that took place at Deitch Projects in 2007.) In 2000, Alien Workshop released the seminal video Photosynthesis, a defining moment of Dill’s career. He
THE ORIGINAL SEED
for Fucking Awesome was
planted back in 2001.
had the “last part,” meaning, simply, that the final min-
“Mikey [Piscitelli] said, ‘Look at [streetwear pioneer
utes of the video belong to him. But what “last part”
Shawn] Stussy. That guy made a bunch of money. Just
really means is that the most important section of the
do ‘Dill’ and it will make you money,’ ” Dill recalls. So
most important skate video of the 2000s is his. Bill
they started making Dill-brand shirts, which sold
Strobeck, the skate filmmaker who made Supreme’s
at Supreme stores in New York and Japan. But soon
“Cherry” and “Blessed” videos, filmed the section. “He
they changed the name to Fucking Awesome, and
sees the world differently,” Strobeck tells me. “[Dill’s]
Piscitelli sketched the logo—a little Misfits, a lit-
magnetic. He’s like a rock star to me as far as skating
tle Hulkamania—on a napkin. “When I named this
goes, especially after Photosynthesis.” In that video,
company, I was 21,” Dill says. “I was out of my gourd.
Dill displays all the hallmarks of a top-tier skater—he
Fucking Awesome? That’s the dumbest name. I think
pops high, goes fast, flips the board with masterful
that’s why I really strive to make this smart. Make it
control, and moves his body with commanding grace.
educated.” The early-aughts streetwear boom thrust Fucking Awesome into the hype blogosphere, and soon Kanye West was spotted wearing an all-over logo-print Fucking Awesome hoodie. “All of a sud-
“I was out of my gourd. Fucking Awesome? That’s the dumbest name. I think that’s why I really strive to make this smart.”
den, our orders tripled,” Piscitelli says. “We didn’t have the infrastructure. We had two dudes helping us that weren’t even employees, just friends. I remember getting a shipment in, and they’re like, ‘Where’s the forklift?’ I was like, ‘What? I don’t have a forklift.’ ” For years, Dill explains, Fucking Awesome would go in and out of dormancy. “I saw at one point that
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Sk a t e
if I even kept this up meagerly through the years, it could stick around. Because I’d be up and down on various drugs being the fun version of myself I thought I could be.” And the feedback was always intensely positive. Once, he recalls, he was stopped while walking down the Bowery by Supreme founder James Jebbia. “I had one of those really bad hangovers, and it was the last person I wanted to see, but he pulled up in his car. And he’s like, ‘Your stuff looks great. It’s a breath of fresh air in the store. Thank you.’ And I was so fucking astounded, I think I went around the corner and threw up.” Piscitelli moved to Los Angeles to work on films while Dill remained in New York, enjoying the lifestyle and steady paychecks he’d earned by establishing himself as a marquee skateboarder. “He’s still skating, but falling into the dark days,” Piscitelli recalls. “The party became darker.” In 2009, Dash Snow died of a reported heroin overdose, and Dill seemed dangerously close to a similar fate. That same year, a steady diet of Jameson with Percocet and Vicodin eventually caught up to him. “There were these times where it’s just what you were supposed to do. You’re young, you have some dough, you have no cares in the world,” says Piscitelli. “Things escalated until all of a sudden Dill was like, ‘Wow, I’m vomiting blood. My esophagus is not connected to my stomach anymore. Wonder how that happened?’ ” Dill managed to pick himself up to call 911. He was hospitalized with a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. “That was a huge wake-up call for him,” Piscitelli says, “which led to him coming to L.A.” In sunny Los Angeles, a new Dill began to take shape. He moved in with AVE, who was a few steps ahead of Dill on the road to recovery, having hit rock bottom with drug addiction himself. They traded in their crack pipes for protein shakes and started on a comeback that would ultimately lead to Dill landing a second Thrasher cover in 2011 and AVE winning a coveted Skater of the Year award in 2015. When Dill quit Alien Workshop and took AVE with him in 2013, it was big news in the skate world, and that was the second beginning of Fucking Awesome. “I didn’t want to rust,” Dill says. “So how do you avoid rusting? You keep moving. So I had to leave.
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Style is an essential element in skateboarding and a crucial factor when assembling a skate team. “That’s what each and every one of the kids on FA have,” Dill says. “They have that shit in fucking spades, man.”
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Sk a t e
1 Fucking Awesome team riders: 1. Elijah Berle 2. Anthony Van Engelen 3. Na-Kel Smith 4. Aidan Mackey 5. Kevin Bradley 6. Sean Pablo (left) and Sage Elsesser
3 2
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5
“So how do you avoid rusting? You keep moving.”
4
6
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Sk a t e
The owner of Alien Workshop, he was like my dad. So
out on Xanax and being a fucking nut.” At the same
it felt like I had to move out of my dad’s house. It was
time, Dylan Rieder, a James Dean–like figure who was
emotional. It was gnarly.”
adored by the skate world and beyond for his good
In Los Angeles, I meet up with AVE and a crew of
looks, smooth style, and uncanny skills on a board,
other FA skaters at Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood for
became fatally ill with leukemia. AVE and Piscitelli saw
a team lunch. He’s not built like your typical wiry pro
Dill spiraling, so they planned an intervention with 25
skater. He’s stocky and chiseled, with the demeanor
of his friends.
of a construction foreman. Nothing like Dill.
“He was really overwhelmed and not doing well,”
“We can be like oil and water,” he tells me of their
Piscitelli recalls. “I was just thinking, ‘He lost the fuck-
long friendship. But more often than not, they are as
ing plot.’ Basically, 25 people told him he needed to get
close as can be. “We both came from Orange County.
help. I think it woke him up.”
We both have fucked-up, kinda funny backgrounds.
“That was tough,” Dill says. “No one should have an
There’s a lot of similar experiences and ideas about
intervention. It’s not fun. Everybody’s sad. And crying.
the world.” AVE says that with skating he “always felt
And telling you that they’re afraid you’re going to die.
like it was going to end tomorrow, and I was gonna have
And you’re like, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
to go get a job.” Owning and running a brand wasn’t
In 2018, Dill moved, along with his mother and her
part of the plan. But when Dill called and told him he
husband, to Ventura. City life just wasn’t appealing
wanted to turn Fucking Awesome into a proper skate
anymore: “I’m not chasing pussy. I’m not trying to
company with boards and all, he says, “I was like,
smoke crack and all that fun stuff. I have too much
‘Fuck, that’s a great idea. Let’s do it.’ ”
responsibility.” So he found this sleepy town on the
The beginning was rocky. Then things got real bad. “Almost everything that I was afraid of happened,” says Dill. The Fucking Awesome skate team grew
coast, an hour’s drive or so from Hollywood. “Ventura,” he calls it, “the place where nothing happens all the time.”
rapidly—Alien Workshop teammates Kevin Terpening
We drive to dinner at one of his favorite local
and Dylan Rieder joined. That was on top of an already
restaurants, a “Gastro-Bar” called Rumfish y Vino.
explosive ensemble of young phenoms—including
Not exactly the vibe I was expecting, but this is
Tyshawn Jones, Na-Kel Smith, Sage Elsesser, Sean
Dill now. The intervention seems to have worked.
Pablo, Kevin Bradley, and Aidan Mackey—many of
“There were certain glass doors I had to walk
whom were on the Supreme skate team along with
through,” he says. “There was glass everywhere. I
Dill. There was now a tremendous amount of talent on
was so under the gun, and I was so afraid of failure.
the roster, and a tremendous amount of responsibil-
And I was so worried that anybody could ever tell me
ity for Dill, who had, essentially, never had a job. His
I didn’t fucking do it.”
drug habit, which was dormant but never fully kicked, started to creep back into his life.
With that in mind, the name of the brand can be read two ways: There’s “fucking awesome,” said sarcasti-
“I totally focused on doing FA,” he says. “I got super
cally and cynically when, say, your quiet Christmas-
fucked-up on drugs while I was doing it. I was looped
morning coffee run is interrupted by some do-gooder with a point to prove. Then there’s “fucking awesome,” said with earnest and enthusiastic the-world-is-yours tenacity, because life is an unpredictable sequence
“I’m not trying to smoke crack and all that fun stuff. I have too much responsibility.” 168
of events with boundless potential, and even those who risk everything, gastrointestinal system and all, can do it. “I’m so much better,” he tells me. “Jesus Christ. I’m like a full-blown fucking adult nowadays.” N OA H J O H N S O N I S G Q ’ S ST Y L E E D I TO R .
S pring 2019
169
An emotional Virgil Abloh goes to embrace his mentor Kanye West after the finale of Abloh’s debut runway show for Louis Vuitton.
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Pho tog raph by P ari Du kovic
Spri ng 2019
Additional Credits Page 42. 1) Prop stylist: Stella Rey at Mark Edward Inc. 2) Prop stylist: Trina Ong at Halley Resources. Page 44. Prop stylist: Trina Ong at Halley Resources Page 47. 8) Prop stylist: Stella Rey at Mark Edward Inc. 9) Prop stylist: Trina Ong at Halley Resources. Page 48. Prop stylist: Trina Ong at Halley Resources Pages 51, 53, 56, 59, 60, 63, and 66. Prop stylist: Stella Rey at Mark Edward Inc. Page 55. 18) Prop stylist: Stella Rey at Mark Edward Inc. 19) Prop stylist: Trina Ong at Halley Resources. Page 64. 31) Prop stylist: Trina Ong at Halley Resources. 32) Prop stylist: Stella Rey at Mark Edward Inc. Page 71. From top: courtesy of NBC Universal; Suzanne Tenner/ © Showtime/Everett Collection; Merrick Morton/Fox Searchlight Pictures/Everett Collection Pages 72–73. From left: courtesy of Marni; courtesy of Martine Rose; courtesy of Cav Empt Pages 74–75. Courtesy of Marni (6)
Pages 76–77. 2) Courtesy of Nike. All other photographs: courtesy of Martine Rose (5). Page 78. Clockwise from left: courtesy of Cav Empt (2); Julien Boudet Page 79. From left: Matthew Martin; Julien Boudet Pages 120–121. Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos Page 122. From top: John Sciulli/Getty Images; courtesy of Benjamin Edgar; Michael Kovac/ Getty Images; Jerritt Clark/ Getty Images Page 123. From left: B. O’Kane/Alamy Stock Photo; courtesy of Christopher Eaton; Tommy Ton Page 124. Clockwise from top left: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images; David X Prutting/BFA; Donato Sardella/Getty Images; Prince Williams/ WireImage/Getty Images; David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images; Laurent Benhamou/Sipa/ Shutterstock/REX Page 125. Clockwise from top left: courtesy of Pyrex (3); David M. Benett/Dave Benett/ Getty Images; Stephane Cardinale/Corbis/
Getty Images; Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images; Frazer Harrison/ AMA2014/Getty Images Page 126. Clockwise from top left: firstView (2); Andrew H. Walker/ Getty Images; courtesy of Stevie Dance; Victor Boyko/Getty Images Page 127. Clockwise from top left: Kenneth Deng; Matt Martin; courtesy of Off-White x Rimowa; Dominic Lipinski/PA Images/Getty Images; Cindy Ord/Getty Images Page 128. Clockwise from top left: courtesy of IKEA x Virgil Abloh; Nils Ericson; Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/ Getty Images; Jeff Spicer/ BFC/Getty Images; Theo Wargo/Getty Images; Bennett Raglin/ Getty Images Page 129. Clockwise from top left: Alex Majoli/ Magnum Photos; Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images; Frederick M. Brown/ Getty Images; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images; Steven Ferdman/ WireImage/Getty Images; Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
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