Highsnobiety Magazine 13 - Winter 2016

13 FAL L / W I NT E R

HAIDER ACKERMANN YOUNG THUG ERIK BRUNETTI Z AY N M A L I K VLONE OFF-WHITE

EDISON CHEN

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Defining new approaches to Danish sportswear, HUMMEL HIVE is created to explore the intersection between past and future, sport and style culture.

Made by a collective of multi-disciplinary artists and designers, we meet in celebration of active life, function over form, diversity and equality.

Founded in 2016, we are based in a creative studio at Hummel, the legendary sportswear brand with more than 90 years of history. We honor our legacy while looking beyond boundaries to be a constant inspiration.

Rooted in our passion for sports, sub-cultures and underdogs, HUMMEL HIVE offers collections, relaunches from Hummel’s vast archive and projects made with likeminded souls.

HUMMEL_HIVE

4 4 T H P R E S I D E N T O F T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN TO HOLD THE OFFICE T I R E L E S S C H A M P I O N O F H E A LT H C A R E NICE DAD JEANS

Available at www.komono.com and select retailers worldwide.

The Walther

Preface Editor-in-Chief

Pete Williams We’re entering Fall/Winter 2016 with over 10 solid years now firmly behind Highsnobiety. Through these years, we’ve experienced massive growth and change first hand, and are still consistently in awe of the speed at which our world continues to change. With mobile technology and social media becoming more deeply entrenched in our daily lives, at times it can feel as though our collective affinity for “likes” and followers has displaced deep, meaningful communication, and is, in some ways, homogenizing culture. Yet as easy as it is to get lost in the scroll, the internet has also allowed us to hyper-focus our interests, however niche they may be, in turn allowing the cream to rise to the top infinitely quicker.

From an upstart brand creating a cult following through nothing more than a well curated Instagram account, or an unknown artist uploading a track and seeing it turn into a number one hit, as per 19-year-old Brooklyn wordsmith Desiigner (featured in this issue on page 238), global connectivity has seemingly bolstered entrepreneurship, enabling individuals to create their own audiences and scenes outside the boundaries or confines of any traditional “industry” structure. And, to be honest, that makes for an incredibly inspiring time to be alive.

The theme of Highsnobiety Magazine Issue 13 is independence. With the state of the world today, independence can construe many things, but at its core, it’s about self-reliance, individualism and thinking for oneself. As this idea of being independent embodies so many facets of our culture, we chose four distinct cover subjects for the issue - a rapper, a pop star, a fashion designer and an actor turned streetwear entrepreneur all of whom exemplify the theme in their own way.

Boldly standing as a beacon of independence, in so many ways, is 25-year-old Atlanta-based rapper Jeffery Lamar Williams, known professionally as Young Thug. From his eccentric persona and androgynous dress to his unhinged flow and sometimes incomprehensible lyrics, Thug’s entire approach has been unconventional. Taking aim at outdated macho tenants of hiphop, Young Thug has, in many ways, completely changed the landscape of what rap music looks, feels and sounds like in 2016, all while being entirely and unapologetically true to himself (at the time of press, he’s even been floating the new moniker No My Name is Jeffery!)

On the other hand, we have 23-year-old British singer and songwriter Zayn Malik. While Malik may seem outside the scope of Highsnobiety’s usual framework, we were intrigued by his abrupt

decision to outright quit the massively popular UK boy band One Direction and go it alone. Reinventing himself and shaping his own identity, Zayn has evolved in sound and style ever since, and has seen solo success at a record-breaking level. And, though it hasn’t been without tribulation, as a mainstream pop star who is also Muslim, Zayn stands as a true icon of multiculturalism today.

Then there is fashion designer Haider Ackermann, the selfproclaimed “eternal stranger.” Though thrust into the spotlight in part by a Kanye West co-sign, Ackermann is a true independent in every sense of the word. From his business structure to his design philosophy and everything in-between, Haider is a man who embodies the freedom of being everywhere and nowhere at once; a borderless visionary.

We also showcase the infamous Chinese superstar and founder of CLOT, Edison Chen. A man of many talents, Chen is currently working behind-the-scenes with a number of independent streetwear labels in LA, staying out of the limelight of Asia. As such, he appears masked on our cover, in a piece from Matthew Williams’ incredible new womenswear label, ALYX. Beyond our four cover features (Young Thug, Zayn Malik, Haider Ackermann and Edison Chen) this issue of Highsnobiety Magazine also explores many other stories of self-reliance and freedom, including the journey of legendary FUCT founder Erik Brunetti, the slow and steady rise of Sean Brown’s NEEDS&WANTS and the nuanced work of London-based creative Andrew Bunney.

Furthermore, we spoke with Samuel Ross of street style darling A-COLD-WALL*, caught up with A$AP Rocky and A$AP Bari to discuss their bubbling VLONE venture, liaised with Vancouver “fetish” rapper Tommy Genesis in addition to many others to learn about the ways these global creators are embracing self-directed approaches to lifestyle, art and business, challenging the status quo, shifting culture and opening doors for future generations.

If there’s one resounding message, it’s quite simply that anything goes today. The world has never been more open to exploration, and the tools to share your work have never been more plentiful. So whatever it is that you are into, go all in. Be your own boss, find your own crowd and boldly own whatever it is that you do.

Enjoy this latest issue. Thanks as always for reading and being a part of our journey.

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Contents 14 Preface

134

Raf Simons Archive

18 Selections

142

Christian Dada

37 Onepiece

150

Haider Ackermann

38

158 The Beautiful Ones

Carhartt WIP

40 Element

166

42

Cheap Monday

178 VLONE

50

Andrew Bunney

Edison Chen

186

Young Thug

58 COMME des GARÇONS Shirt

196

Nordic Invasion

64 NEEDS&WANTS

204

Zayn Malik

70

A-COLD-WALL*

212

Opening Ceremony

78

Helen Kirkum

218

Umit Benan

84

OFF-WHITE C/O VIRGIL ABLOH

224 Gucci

92

Martine Rose

232 Travel

100 DARKDRON

238 Desiigner

106

Midnight Studios

244

Tommy Genesis

112

TAKAHIROMIYASHITA The SoloIst.

250

Deck the Walls

118

Matthew Miller

256

Tino Sehgal

126

Erik Brunetti

Covers

Zayn Malik

Young Thug

Haider Ackermann

Edison Chen

Photography by Robert Wunsch

Photography by Thomas Welch

Photography by Robert Wunsch

Photography by Kenneth Cappello

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CREATIVE DIRECTION BY JASON WU

©2016 General Motors. All Rights Reserved. Cadillac ®

Selections Photography Nick Glackin

THEOBALDS CAP CO. CAP

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THE CARHARTT WIP ARCHIVES THE FIRST EXTENSIVE LOOK INTO THE CARHARTT WIP UNIVERSE. TO BE RELEASED ON NOVEMBER 4TH IN ALL CARHARTT WIP STORES. MORE INFORMATION AT CARHARTT-WIP.COM

Selections

FILLING PIECES ASTRONAUT SNEAKER

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Selections

MARSHALL ‘STOCKWELL’ WIRELESS SPEAKER

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THE FUTURE OF

PERFORMANCE FABRICS IS NOW

WWW.THEDYNEEMAPROJECT.COM

Selections

PUMA ‘CLYDE’ SNEAKER

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Selections

NANAMICA WINDSTOPPER BUCKET HAT

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Selections

Photography Benjamin Robinson Styling Atip W

SAINT LAURENT ‘CALIFORNIA’ GUITAR CASE

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WINTER REDEFINED Boots Danner Light Khaki

Featuring Mark Bollman Founder of Ball and Buck

Details 100% waterproof, Made in USA

Location Brooklyn, New York

Explore Danner Portland Select at danner.com

Selections

METALLICA ʻMETAL UP YOUR ASS’ T-SHIRT

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You’re Better Than This

Listening Fail #02 “DIY Docking Station”

31

Listen Better at sonos.com

Selections

BUSCEMI ‘PHD’ BACKPACK

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You’re Better Than This

Listening Fail #09 “Extreme Pairing Fail”

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Listen Better at sonos.com

Selections

SAINT LAURENT ‘CALIFORNIA’ SNEAKER

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Listen Better at sonos.com 35

Selections

PROHUNTER ROLEX EXPLORER

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Fashion Misfits Onepiece Words Aaron Howes

Photography Ruben Jacob Fees

Hair & Make-Up Francesa Maffi

Styling & Production Dogukan Nesanir

Photography Assistant Julia Bach

Confidence — arguably the main ingredient in effortless cool — is desired by most but possessed by few. While it cannot be bought, comfort most certainly can, and according to Norwegian leisurewear brand Onepiece, “Comfort Brings Confidence.”

They should know, they sell comfort by the truckload.

on a lazy Sunday — like so many great ideas — and created in an attempt to stay warm on an unusually cold Oslo day back in 2007. The first Onepiece jumpsuits were simply hoodies sewn to sweatpants, the front cut open to get in and out.

From day one Onepiece has focused extensively on designing comfortable products and its Fall/Winter 2016 season is no different. “Night Crawlers,” the brand’s forthcoming collection, celebrates the desire to escape daily routines, inspired by those who come alive under the shadows of night and refuse to live by society’s schedule. Going against the grain and challenging societal norms has always been important to the brand, who proudly describe themselves as “the slackers, the standouts and the fashion misfits” online. “Our ethos has always been the same,” explained co-founder and creative director Thomas Adams.

“At Onepiece, we do things differently.”

At a glance, the speed of the brand’s success may seem surprising, and yet they sit comfortably within the contemporary fashion landscape. Like most workwear that is defined by its functionality, boilersuits and jumpsuits were recently appropriated by the fashion industry and given a stylized spin. Onepiece, a unique apparel category, snuggled up alongside the two garments and made an immediate impact. The brand, combining leisure and streetwear aesthetics, burgeoned as traditional sartorial style fell from grace, replaced by less constrictive clothing. Recently culminating with the extra-long sleeve fad, slouchy and oversized silhouettes began dominating many collections — a look already inherent to Onepiece’s style, putting their clothing instantly on trend.

Far from being a one-dimensional brand, the label continues to diversify, this upcoming season adding new styles that promise to be as agile, practical and comfortable as ever. “My favorite piece in the new collection is the rain jacket,” Adams told us.

“It’s made of transparent PVC and comes in colorless and black.”

Updating fits and improving fabrics across the entire collection, Onepiece continues to avoid complicated designs while remaining unique, having done so since its origin. Conceived

So, where do they go from here? “We are still a young brand in the scheme of things,” explained Adams. “We are still learning what works for us and what does not.” He doesn’t give much away, but one thing is for certain: Onepiece will continue to be a fashion misfit, forever doing things differently. Plus, Adams made his ultimate goal clear: “World domination!”

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How Carhartt WIP Predicted the Future Words Jack Drummond

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The Carhartt WIP Archives, a new book that charts and celebrates the first 25 years of the streetwear staple also sees the release of a prophetic fax communication between Carhartt WIP’s Netherlands rep, Willem Kampert, and Edwin Faeh, co-founder with his wife, Salomee Faeh, of the WIP imprint.

Picture the scene: it’s late fall in 1995, Penny Hardaway of the Orlando Magic is named the NBA’s player of the month, Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” is still number one after knocking Coolio’s seminal “Gangsta’s Paradise” off the top of the charts, and Bill Clinton just met Monica Lewinsky.

Several thousand miles away from the White House, and Carhartt’s head offices in Detroit, Willem Kampert receives an answer fax in his Amsterdam office from Edwin Faeh, who’s currently in Hong Kong. Despite the label’s history of making rugged work- and outerwear – and one that stretches back to 1889 when Hamilton Carhartt decided to create workwear overalls for American railroad workers – the fax’s contents make hardly any mention of ʻworkwear’ at all. Instead, Faeh outlines the strategic vision for what would become one of the staple brands of the streetwear movement, Carhartt WIP, touching on music, sport, and the bourgeoning power of the internet. And, looking back on the way the brand has developed since then, with that fax Faeh managed to chart a course for the future with near pinpoint accuracy.

This correspondence is being published for the first time in a new book that charts the first 25 years of Carhartt WIP. What makes the fax from Faeh all the more remarkable is not only his prophetic vision for the way the brand would develop, but his incredibly perceptive assessment of the main tenants of ’90s ʻyouth culture,’ and how and why they would go on to define our world now.

“I forecast a steady growth until the year 2015,” begins Faeh.

“That means until the year 2000 we shall make only ‘underground’ marketing activities which will lead the Carhartt brand to much stronger roots, because our goal has to be to build up a brand which is appreciated by the ‘underground’ and ‘avant-garde.’”

You could argue of course that trend forecasting in the fashion industry is nothing new. And it isn’t: the cyclical industry feeds off of it. What’s surprising is when a clothing label that’s not tied to the whims and changeable nature of the fashion game – which the workwear Carhartt brand back in 1995 certainly wasn’t – then enters the fray. It not only does well, but does so having checked off nearly every one of the predictions it made before it rolled the dice.

But Carhartt WIP has kept this ‘no frills’ mentality and made it a hallmark of the brand, and probably a guarantee of its success.

It doesn’t do statement pieces, cynical collaborations or OTT unnecessaries, but focuses first and foremost on wardrobe staples. The result is that Carhartt WIP is a brand with a sense of having always been there, and one that will continue to be so. But its streetwear pedigree reaches far deeper than that. Industrial workwear was the garb of choice on inner-city streets and was reflected in early-’90s hip-hop aesthetic: Nas wore Carharttt jackets and Biggie was spotted in the imprint.

And yet Carhartt WIP is anything but static. With its outlook defined by what the kids are doing, its exploratory, reactive ethos is almost contained within its name: WIP standing for ‘Work In Progress,’ as we all know, but which, in itself, reflects the fluid nature of the project as well as the people it has aimed to serve from the outset. From sponsoring skaters, artists and musicians to allegedly paying the broadcasting fees for London’s underground internet radio station, NTS, Carhartt WIP is embedded, supportive and completely influenced by the culture of what we do. Because, at the end of the day, we’re all works in progress as well, right?

– carhartt-wip.com

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In Their Element Element – Griffin Studio “Black Sky Project” Words Jack Drummond

The first collection Element’s new Creative Director, Reynald Gautier, has worked on from start to finish is a premium outerwear collaboration with the experimental British design workshop, Griffin Studio. Highly technical in build, functional in purpose and urban in outlook, the Element - Griffin Studio “Black Sky Project” is some of the best stuff we’ve seen from Element in recent years.

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Nestled in the south-west corner of England in the heart of the Devonshire countryside lies Loveland Farm, a camp site, in one respect, but also a place that doubles as the home and design studio of Jeff Griffin, the British fashion designer and the head of Griffin Studio. Images of the farm, with its bulbous camping pods and leafy rural setting, lend easily to thinking a collaboration between the studio here and one of the world’s most successful American skate and streetwear companies would be a bit of a stretch.

But, under the creative direction of Reynald Gautier, this is exactly what Element has done. The Element - Griffin Studio “Black Sky Project” is set to drop in time for the Fall/Winter 2016 season at elementbrand.com and spans two backpacks, a pair of rugged outdoor shoes, and four jackets (one doubles as the top half of a sleeping bag, in an innovative move). It is the first collection the former skater-turned-fashion designer Gautier has worked fully on from start to finish since he was appointed Element’s Creative Director at the beginning of 2015. While collaborations have become a fashion industry norm, this particular collaborative capsule is one of the strongest from Element in recent seasons and completely ties in with its increasingly compelling outerwear offering.

However it is, in another respect, a deeply personal collaboration. Having developed an embryonic interest in fabrics and cut through working in Paul Smith’s fabric warehouse at a young age, designer Jeff Griffin was the man who really took

Gautier under his wing as a young understudy at his eponymous fashion studio. “He is the one who truly inspired me [and who] taught me so much as my first real job as a jack-of-all-trades,” Gautier tells me via email last year. “It’s one of the reasons it felt so right to collaborate with Jeff Griffin on the ‘Black Sky Project’.”

Strengthening the bond is Element’s own growing reputation for developing rugged, high-quality outerwear. Indeed, the very brand itself is informed by nature’s elements, as well as its social and environmental impact: the East Coast skate brand famously runs retreats in US national parks for children to experience the wild and develop their skate skills. This, combined with its undoubted history in the streetwear and skate scene, seamlessly blended with Griffin Studio’s own reputation for combining sportswear elements with high-fashion through a military aesthetic. The result is a premium collection that oozes strength, reliability, and sharp functionality – all delivered via a tailored and minimal look.

The collection looks equally at home being battered by the elements on rugged coastline and in mountain passes, as much as it’d be a wardrobe essential for a fitted look on winter city streets. Premium, technical urban outerwear never looked so good. We’re looking forward to where Gautier and Element go next.

— elementbrand.com #BlackSkyProject

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F/W

Cheap Monday

Aurora Kids Photography Drew Wheeler Styling Atip W Hair Natsumi Ebiko using Bumble and Bumble Make-Up Yae Pascoe using Laura Mercier Set Designer Josh Stovell Photography Assistant Richard Ibrahim Set Assistant Cam Brott Models Willis @ Select & Vita @ IMG Models — Footwear Axel Arigato Website cheapmonday.com #TightAlright

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Making Mixed Media Andrew Bunney Words & Photography DK Woon Editor Jack Smylie

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The name Andrew Bunney will likely be familiar to you by extension to his eponymous jewelry brand. Or maybe you’ve heard about some of his work with global mega-brands like Nike or Dr. Martens. However, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what the average reader knows about the man himself. Andrew’s been involved with an incredible array of projects over the years, but never anything that’s put him center stage; he rarely seeks the limelight. His appeal remains somewhat cult, and I suspect he rather likes it that way.

In a social media-driven world that seems to prize those that simply talk louder than others, Andrew’s approach is something of a rare exception. Nuance and understanding are at the very core of his working practice. If there’s one thing he could never be accused of, it’s not doing his research.

This interview was conducted over the course of two evenings in February – both conversations held in settings where the recording was barely audible over the din of background chatter. A multitude of topics were covered, and the conversation has been edited for brevity.

Let’s start at the beginning of your career, as it’s as good a place to start as any other. I’m correct in saying you worked in skate shops first off? How did you end up at Gimme5 from there?

I always wanted to study film and I used to do a lot of acting when I was younger. After sixth form, for some reason, I’d fallen away from it a little. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do, so I decided to take a year out. At the time, I had two main interests: skateboarding and fashion. Although, I wasn’t necessarily interested in skateboard fashion. And so I started working – really just because I needed to do something – at a skate store. This would be in the mid-late ’90s when at the time, in the UK, companies were starting to become more mainstream, and skateboarding was less insular. It was a time when skate shoe companies would be selling in shoe chains. Office, Schuh or whatever was around at that point. At some point I became more involved in the buying of products. I knew a guy called Russell Waterman who used to work for Slam City and he was involved in setting up a company called Holmes, which then became Silas. They used to distribute X-Large and Freshjive alongside a couple of others. I always liked Holmes. And they showed at the same showroom as Stüssy. It was there that Russell introduced me to Kelvin Lim and Michael [Kopelman].

So I started buying Stüssy for some of the shops. And then I moved to New York, as my friends were over there with skateboarding. I would visit these friends in summers or holidays. Anyway, I went to New York, met somebody and decided to stay and work there. I started working with a Japanese company that dealt with vintage clothing and records. I used to go around vintage places and find vintage clothing. By vintage clothing I mean clothing that has inherent value rather than used clothing. I’d hate to use the word “antique,” but it’s probably the closest word. They had a store in St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, but the vintage stuff, including records, went to Japan. So they sent me out to Tokyo. I was quite young; it was quite an eye-opening experience at the time. I wouldn’t say that’s where I first learnt about all these Japanese brands, because Michael and Fraser already had the shop in London. Prior to that, Michael always had stuff in the offices in Marylebone when Gimme5 was there. When I came back from Japan to New York, I realized that I didn’t want to be a buyer. I wanted to be involved in making things. Coming in a roundabout circle, I suppose, growing up, what I liked in skateboarding was the spirit. And, for me, it meant the same as what punk had probably meant to the people before, and I think it’s probably similar in a lot of respects. But I wasn’t really into the clothing it produced because they just never really knew how to make clothes!

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Footwear is one area where you seem to have had quite a steady output. What was the very first shoe you worked on? And do you have favorites amongst your shoes?

As a commercial release, I think the first one was the Nike Air Epic made for Footpatrol, which was with Fraser. There were very few made as I remember. As for a favorite, I try to make things which endure, so hopefully most remain relevant or interesting. Having worked across lots of kinds of brands, usually some styles can be more personal and others reach a wider audience. In that way, it’s nice to see things that you wouldn’t wear for yourself – it’s still exciting to see others wear them. It doesn’t mean that any less care or effort is put into them.

The first project of yours I really came across was the Hideout Footscape. What do you remember of that?

What I remember about that project really well is that it was really hated by a lot of people! All those people on those forums really hated it. I’m not quite sure why exactly they hated it that much. In general, the sneaker consumer had a very rigid view about what’s right and what’s wrong and what conforms and doesn’t conform.

This was probably a little bit outside of that parameter, which I think was a good thing and the right thing to do.

Is dividing opinion something you actively look to do with your projects?

Dividing opinion can be a good thing. You run the risk of it either being really good or really bad. But I’m sure loads of people think the same. If people don’t care then they won’t be into it. So sometimes those things are really successful at the time, sometimes they’re really successful later. It’s really difficult to get the timing right. You just don’t know whether you’re thinking a little bit ahead or too far ahead. You can’t quite gauge it.

It was really easy to work with Nike on that one. Afterwards a lot of products came out in pony skin but I think the Footscapes suited the material particularly well. I think what I’m interested in is finding a balance.

That design works well in that material, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that material for other things.

Running with appropriation, or appreciation even, you seem to have a running interest in punk that’s influenced your work over the years.

Yeah, absolutely, but in a weird way, less so the music. Skateboarding was my punk, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. I was always very interested to learn more about Malcolm McLaren, and there was an energy and creativity there that was really unrivalled at the time. So yeah, I was interested in punk, but perhaps not in the way that people would expect.

Punk can mean so many things! Rei Kawakubo has on occasions described what she does as punk.

It’s a funny one. It depends on what you want punk to mean to you. What it means to me is going to be very different to what it means to someone else. My idea of punk is perhaps more purist, but what I do probably doesn’t look very punk to a lot of people. It’s nice to have certain values for the things you do. It’s much harder for a big company to be punk; some of their actions could be considered punk depending on what they’re doing. For me it’s more of a spirit.

There’s quite a sensitivity to the way you look at the past. When you’re working on a project the research process is quite intensive. Do you think there’s a lot to be gained from that sensitivity?

Definitely. It’s incredibly important to look at what’s happened before, if only so you don’t make the same mistakes that other people do. You mentioned punk and I mentioned Mods. I believe there’s a way to look at things where they don’t change, because I believe that people as a whole don’t change all that much. I’m sure there’re characteristics you could recognize in yourself that you could have found in somebody in the ’60s. Granted, the context would have been different, but their behavior, outlook and feelings would have been the same. So when people talk about punk, I believe it’s a certain spirit or outlook. You can find people that had the punk spirit before that time, and you can find it today. Same with Mods. If you have people that are obsessively looking for something new or some little code within something they’re buying or wearing or making, then they have quite a Modernist approach. I don’t think that dressing like Paul Weller in 2016 is particularly Mod – I’d call that retro.

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How did you start working with Derek Ridgers?

I’m not sure when I first saw his work. I would presumably have been a teenager. I always recognized, even if I didn’t know it at that age, that there was a certain purity and authenticity to what he does. Derek was always a photographer for the NME. I don’t know if I would have recognized his name at the time, but I would have seen his photos as I used to buy the NME. When I really became aware of him was when there was a Morrissey record, and I’m not sure if it was on the record sleeve or not but it was a backdrop for the tour.

He also used it on a press pass.

If I recall correctly Morrissey wrote in to the NME! I’m fairly sure he didn’t pay for the image rights!

He didn’t pay for the rights! I’ve always found The Smiths interesting, as Morrissey put a lot of work and care into the art direction. Very, very thorough about the whole feel of the band. I’m not really interested in what it became, but I liked it for a period of time. He’s an important character. From what I remember, he had been reading into this fanzine, possibly called Skins or something like that, and Derek had a photo in that from the very early ’80s and he had sent Derek a note on a postcard asking if he could have a copy of it. Derek said yes, as he was a fan of Morrissey, and he liked the music. Then, lo and behold, it was the backdrop for his tour and all the press passes. Possibly on T-shirt merchandise as well! And Derek told me that all he wanted was a ticket to see him, which he didn’t get! I think he got one-off a roadie or something in the end.

Anyway, I would have been really aware of Derek at that point. I did actually try and do something with Derek for Dr. Martens, but it didn’t work for various reasons. Then I got in touch with him again to do something for Bunney, which was the first Selected Works newspaper. It just made sense at that point. There had been a book with a very limited release, but of course it hadn’t been recognized in the way it should have been.

Then as soon as 78-87 [published in collaboration with Roundel] came out, the recognition was instant!

It was really nice to be able to put that out. It was my first book, and we also worked with Rupert [Smyth] who I’ve known for a long time. So that was really good!

That moves me onto Roundel quite nicely. Roundel simultaneously manages to be rather pop at the same time as being able to reference people like Derek. Do you want your audience to be more aware of people like Derek?

If I were younger, I would say I’d love it if they all found out. But now I don’t mind if they don’t. There are a lot of things in the world, and we don’t really need to be putting out more things into the world. So if we do put something out, then you might as well make it worthwhile. There just needs to be something to it. When I was younger, and I am still the same, I was quite inquisitive. Probably like yourself. If you enjoy consuming it or wearing it, you still want to find out more. Not everybody does. Some people just appreciate things as a nice color, picture, pattern or whatever that thing is. And that’s fine, too. Not everyone is wired like that.

If there’s a small percentage that do find out more, then that’s enough for me.

Recently you’ve done a bit of work with Carhartt. Tell me about your approach to that project.

I really liked it, it was great. My approach was the same as for everything else. What can I say, I’m a one trick pony! I want to find the essence of what that company or brand is. Carhartt has some very identifiable pieces and it was finding a way to revisit them or produce them in a new way. I don’t want to extrapolate it into something that’s not Carhartt. It’s the same thing as not having Vans shoes in canvas. That’s the beauty point, if you make for Carhartt as if you were making for Bottega Venetta, it wouldn’t have the same appeal.

So a lot of it is about finding the essence of the product. Would it be fair to say that Bunney is a pure reflection of your own personal outlook?

Well, Bunney is different, because if you work with an existing brand then they have a preexisting set of assets, whether that’s the fabrics, the logos, the shapes, or the weird little design cues. Then it’s about applying perspective. If you can see it. But for what I do, I try and make something honest. For Bunney it’s different, because I don’t have a set of assets. I knew I wanted to make something for myself. I didn’t have any particular desire to use my name other than, if I think about a lot of traditional companies, that seems to be the correct and normal solution.

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Did the iconography that naturally comes with a name that sounds like bunny come into it?

It’s a name that’s fairly unusual, so it doesn’t take a lot for you to distance yourself from your own name.

So when I hear it, I don’t think of it as my name. And I was always called Andrew rather than Bunney. I didn’t create Bunney completely by myself. There were some other people that I’ve always worked with that also work on Bunney. I wanted to make something. I’m based in the UK, so it makes geographical sense to do something with jewelry even though I’d never particularly bought a lot. Men’s jewelry has a lot of clichés that aren’t good. I really don’t like skulls! They’re not very scary, and they’re even less scary as cufflinks with red stones in their eyes. I wanted to do jewelry, but I wanted to avoid any stereotype. Not only that, I actually wanted it to be quite unisex. There’s obvious differences between the men’s and women’s market. I wanted it to be something a lot of people could access. With Bunney, whilst I’m not making cheap things, different kinds of people can access it. It’s quite democratic in that sense. What I like about Dr. Martens is that you can have a product which has a fairly strong look, but different people can access it and wear it in their own way.

You might have a policeman wearing Dr. Martens, as well as the person the policeman is arresting. That’s kind of ironic. Same thing with a brand like Dickies, where you could have a stereotypical punk or stereotypical skater wearing it, and it means something to them and their own outlook. This broad appeal is something I wanted to do with Bunney. Jewelry is something you can produce to the highest quality in the UK, which, being very blunt, I don’t think is largely the case with clothing. One of the things I really like is the idea of adornment in youth culture. There’s two things that are really funny: One is where you have youths who are at an age where they want to look kind of tough and assert themselves through stance, yet they decorate their clothes in a very fastidious way. And it verges on something else. It’s quite a curious thing. If you think about rockers in the ’50s and how they would carefully decorate the leather jackets in studs or chains or bits of fur or rabbit’s feet, there’s this weird sense of them trying to craft a very tough edge, but being ever so precious about how they do that. I mention this because, with the Vespa recently, of course the idea in that era was that all the Mods wanted to create the most beautiful Vespa, but also to decorate it in a way that was peculiar to themselves. That’s something I wanted to do and it lends itself to jewelry as well. It’s good, as it exists in so many different styles. A punk would have deeply cared about their appearance, even though there’s a certain nonchalance in it. I suppose it’s not different to someone trying to get the perfect quiff, but what you’re trying to do is look really rebellious. The idea of someone ripping their jeans is not willy-nilly. There’s a rip that’s correct, and a rip that’s not. Theoretically every rip is right if it’s nonchalant, yet if you rip in the wrong place, you’re a poser.

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I remember you being involved with the distribution of UNDERCOVER’s book on Jun and Hiroshi’s punk collection. Am I correct in that?

Basically Hiroshi had made a book with two of his friends. The book was formed from the collections of Hiroshi, Jonio and Kobayashi who does research. They produced this book about the clothes of McLaren and Westwood, and no stores wanted to buy it!

Funny, as it seems to be worth enormous sums of money now!

Nobody wanted to buy it. I remember meeting people from Magma, the people at Tate and Claire de Rouen, who’s since sadly passed away. And Claire was the only one with enough gumption to buy it! And David Bennett, who was working there as well. They were the only ones! It was probably expensive for people, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but the prices people were willing to pay for things was very different.

There wasn’t really a market for the world of secondhand books or books talking about contemporary culture at that time.

I think Instagram might have a lot to do with how big that market is now.

Absolutely. Even back then, you had people like Conor Donlon doing Donlon books, but I’m sure that was much more difficult without Instagram. And as you can see with David and IDEA books, the popularity through Instagram is incredible. They’ve built a monster!

When’s obscure too obscure?

I don’t know! I guess when it doesn’t sell! But, then again, that can be largely about timing. I guess things are too obscure when things don’t resonate.

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Burlington • P.O. Box 1109 • D-57376 Schmallenberg/Germany

F/W

COMME des GARÇONS SHIRT

Nowhere

Photography Koers von Cremer @ EE Agency Styling Kusi Kubi @ EE Agency Hair & Make-Up Vanessa Chan @ House of Orange Styling Assistant Willem Tjalma Model Noah

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NEED FULFILLMENT NEEDS &WANTS

Words Jian DeLeon Photography Othello Grey & Michael Rousseau

“Slow and steady” is a pace most young brands don’t want to operate at these days, when overseas manufacturing and digital e-commerce platforms have made it easier than ever to scale products at a breakneck speed. But Toronto label NEEDS&WANTS, and its founder Sean Brown, are taking a more calculated approach; building a universe tied together by an all-encompassing narrative that stretches beyond clothing.

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There’s something about Sean Brown that makes you want him to succeed. Soft-spoken and articulate, he has a preternaturally charismatic composition tempered with a studied, cool calmness. Tall with a lanky build and pronounced facial features, complemented by a child-like diastema in his upper two front teeth, the Toronto designer embodies the sort of aspirational coolness that carefully-curated Instagrams aspire to—the kind that seems as if he woke up this way, and decided to just roll with it.

In many ways, Brown’s appeal is due to the fact that he looks like the type of low-key cool guy that looks so good in what he wears it makes you feel like you could pull it off. His natural affability, combined with an approachably impeccable sense of style, exudes a unique energy that compels you to sit at his table.

It’s familiar, but elevated. That same energy pervades his threeyear old clothing label, NEEDS&WANTS. The Canadian-manufactured label started out in 2013, with minimal wool-bodied baseball jackets with lone leather sleeves and an elongated version with an open-bottom hem inspired by pea coats. The subtly stylish jackets first caught on with Future the Prince, a Toronto DJ and producer who has served as Drake’s manager. Thanks to well-executed lookbooks and a few key placements in the menswear blogosphere, Brown’s label was thrust into an international spotlight, which, paradoxically, is what got locals to pay more attention to NEEDS&WANTS. As a child, Sean Brown wanted to be a Disney animator. That dream evolved into fashion design in his teens, when he began to make airbrushed tees inspired by Dipset and custom sneakers.

He dropped out of high school in his sophomore year to pursue what he felt was his true calling. After a year-long stint at the Toronto campus of the International Academy of Design and Technology, he started a line called Bamboo in 2007, a casual sportswear label mostly informed by items such as beloved vintage Lacoste shirts.

“Working there was a really big thing for me,” says the 30-year-old designer. “It was kind of like our SoHo,” he says, referencing the similarly influential New York City shopping hub.

At the same time Brown worked in the complex—which has since been torn down to make room for luxury condos— Drake associate Oliver El-Khatib was a manager at Ransom, Filipino-Canadian model Juan Paolo Roldan was a merchandiser at Nomad, and an up-and-coming artist Abel Tesfaye was a frequent denizen, though now he’s more popularly known under his Grammy-winning moniker, The Weeknd.

Brown also credits Vancouver’s Raif Adelberg as one of his big inspirations. The hyphenated creative opened Richard Kidd in 2004, and took future Nomad founders Zeb Munir and Jesar Gambino under his wing. Though Richard Kidd shuttered in 2008, Adelberg went on to design for Stüssy and helped launch wings + horns, another cult Canadian label and perennial menswear favorite. “It was a very important time in my artistic development when it comes to fashion,” remembers Brown. He knows that particular moment in Toronto’s retail history embodied something truly special, an energy that still surges through its scene but isn’t quite the same.

The next phase of Brown’s career started in 2010, when he co-founded The Art of Reuse with Courtney Eastman, a former coworker at Urban Outfitters and fellow Torontonian. Since 2006, Brown has been an avid thrifter, and ironically couldn’t afford many of the clothes he helped sell at Nomad, but honed a distinct aesthetic and taste level that saw him finding similar vintage pieces on the low that mirrored the high-priced offerings from labels like A.P.C.

The line shuttered quickly, and paved the way for Sean Brown’s most pivotal learning experience. The way Brown tells it, his most important education occurred at ground zero for Toronto’s bustling subcultural fashion scene: 431 Richmond Street West—the subculture-tinged shopping center doubled as a cultural hub that sparked a certain sense of creativity in a young Brown.

Through The Art of Reuse, Brown made his first foray into conceptual retail. Inspired by luxury shopping experiences like the COMME des GARÇONS Guerilla store, and discerning how store policies like A Bathing Ape and Supreme’s imposed limits on how many items consumers could buy at a time, he and Eastman devised ĭn | tər | ĭm™, a series of pop-up shops that sold affordable vintage clothing in a high-end fashion. The Art of Reuse wasn’t just a vehicle by which to sell clothing, it was a means of building awareness about thrifting and the rediscovery of old classics. It was Brown’s first attempt at building a cohesive brand universe unified through a common design language that spoke beyond the clothes.

The center’s roots trace back to Nomad, established in 2005 by founders Zeb Munir, Matthew George and Jesar Gabino. After a time learning the ropes of retail at Urban Outfitters, Brown started from the bottom as an intern at Ransom and worked his way up to a key holder position at Nomad in 2009, where he gained a deeper understanding of the internationally-acclaimed brands carried by the store, including A.P.C., COMME des GARÇONS and Supreme, which sold its wares to Nomad for a time.

The Art of Reuse did several ĭn | tər | ĭm™ pop-ups in London, New York and San Francisco—even partnering with cult menswear shop The Brooklyn Circus—before disbanding.

Brown felt the project had run its course, and even admitted in a Complex profile that Macklemore’s chart-topping “Thrift Shop” was the final nail in the coffin. Vintage had become mainstream, and in achieving his initial goal of raising awareness about it, he was more than ready to move onto something new.

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So in February 2013, while working a stock job by day, Brown started NEEDS&WANTS Studios with two friends, Sid Singh and Tharan Parameshwaran. Accoding to Brown, the team remains relatively small, and Singh recently departed the company to settle down with his wife and pursue other projects. Parameshwaran still handles the online sphere, while Brown is responsible for graphic design and creative direction. Sarah Vonditsianou styles the brand’s editorials and splits customer service duties with Anthony Chauhan. They also have a seamstress, Zora Penofsky, who works on everything from patterns to samples.

In addition, NEEDS&WANTS employs the services of two Brooklyn-based creatives, writer Frankie Caracciolo and graphic designer August Foreman. Most meetings are held via FaceTime and work is discussed primarily via email and text. Despite working together for three years, Brown says the current workflow is so efficient he has never seen Foreman’s face.

“It’s just like, you find people, there’s this lightning rod between you guys, and you just click and make things happen,” says Brown.

While Canada has a rich heritage of clothing manufacturing, ranging from outerwear like Canada Goose to knitwear factories like CYC and Roopa—who still produce knits for brands like Supreme—NEEDS&WANTS chose to make clothing in Canada out of a desire for quality control, rather than a sense of patriotic obligation.

“I always believe in quality over quantity. That’s a mantra I’ve held onto ever since I worked retail. I believe in that strongly,” says Brown. “Especially when you work in retail and you get to see things, touch things, and you start to realize the quality from different countries.”

Smaller production runs of items with a certain integrity to them appeal to Brown more than the idea of outsourced manufacturing with higher profit margins. While he’s entertained a few conversations about moving production overseas, the rise of globalization still bothers him.

“For me, integrity is being completely honest with yourself about your output,” clarifies Brown. “And just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.”

The brand trajectory of NEEDS&WANTS is characterized by a long journey with a traceable series of steps. Its first foray from outerwear was a flannel shirt with an elongated fishtail hem.

It followed up with a series of textured fleece wrap coats and lighter-weight varsity jackets and bombers made from materials like pigskin suede and military-inspired olive nylon. The clothes move the needle enough to feel relevant, but also look like a natural progression from the past.

Last year, during a performance with Justin Bieber on the TODAY Show, Big Sean wore a NEEDS&WANTS Pilot Varsity jacket. Consisting of an olive body with contrasting wool and suede sleeves, it was a result of Brown’s relationship with Big Sean’s creative director, Mike Carson. The G.O.O.D. Music artist quickly made the jacket one of his go-to pieces.

“ For me, integrity is being completely honest with yourself about your output... And just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.”

“Someone sent me a pic of [Big Sean] wearing it at a party,” says Brown. “I was like: ‘Cool, he probably won’t wear it again,’ but he just kept wearing it.”

NEEDS&WANTS seamstress Zora Penofsky was so proud of that moment she had a screenshot framed, amazed at how far her work had come. However, the Pilot Varsity’s appearance on the TODAY Show wasn’t a shameless plug. It represents just why Sean Brown absolutely hates modern “influencer marketing.”

“I’ll often get those emails like ‘Hey, we’re a PR company that really focuses on bridging brands with influencers,’ and normally I don’t respond to them,” says Brown. “Because, to me, it’s more effective if I build a relationship with someone like Big Sean and have him wear a jacket just based off that.”

As he sees it, influencer marketing is a flawed numbers game that’s fast becoming obsolete. Brown understands the difference between follower count and engagement, and would rather have someone represent the brand that understands its ideals and aligns with his vision.

“I’ve seen people with 10,000 followers get me great business, and people with 100,000 do nothing. That’s because it’s just based off how real and how sound the communication is between the audience and the person sharing,” he continues.

“I think that cycle is going to break soon, because what’s happening is now everyone thinks they’re an influencer. And if everyone thinks they’re an influencer, then who’s the consumer?”

That’s precisely the reason NEEDS&WANTS is more than just a label that makes clothing. It’s a brand platform with a multifaceted message and a consistent identity in all its projects. In 2014, the NEEDS&WANTS Paper debuted. A biannual publication featuring contributors from all over the world, it further helps flesh out the world Sean Brown wants to build.

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“Most people are just buying into what you’re selling as a whole,” says Brown. “They’re like, ’I bought into this brand because of everything else it represents.’ It’s everything else around the product that you’re selling.”

He cites visvim, Filson and Ralph Lauren as brands who have done this really well, expanding into areas like bedding, interior design and even coffee in a way that feels organic.

In addition to the NEEDS&WANTS Paper, there are also a series of downloadable mixtapes that form an aural component of the brand.

“If you can communicate with people in other ways, it actually enhances their understanding of your product,” says Brown. “So, you can usher in things that they otherwise may not even have been interested in, just because they realize you have the same musical tastes.”

To him, the ideal NEEDS&WANTS consumer is a type who is so discerning that he or she cares about everything from the design of the website to how a retail store smells. This level of attention to detail ensures that the overall message is reinforced in a way that puts the creator and consumer on the same page. That’s really what Brown has mastered: the art of crafting a cohesive cross-platform narrative, in a time where controlling your story has never been more important.

In creating the story for NEEDS&WANTS’s first retail location, Brown thought about how to translate the brand’s small-scale, high-taste ethos in a way that was environmentally sound, sustainable from a business perspective and visually compelling.

He also wanted to create a space that could start a conversation outside of the menswear and street culture spheres, with his eyes on architecture and interior design-minded publications.

“ To me all worlds should just be meshed together now... Everyone’s looking at the same thing; barriers are being broken and lines are being blurred.”

The result is a repurposed 8×20 foot shipping container that doubles as a showroom and retail space. Since the storage is limited, its primary function is to give customers a chance to see the clothes in real life, and drive them to the website if a particular product or color is unavailable in the space. Engineered wood paneling on the walls and ceiling is meant to adapt to different climates, and Belgian furniture drives home the modern, minimal feel of the clothes.

Interestingly, Brown erected the conceptual structure in the middle of an unspecified Toronto park, its whereabouts revealed to customers via an email newsletter. In this way, the container doubles as a hunt, sort of like how people are currently going to great lengths to catch Pokémon in the wild. The mobile concept is moving around different locations in Toronto, with plans to bring it to the United States.

The NEEDS&WANTS retail store caught the attention of Dwell magazine, bringing awareness of the label and its unique story to a similar design-minded audience that may not follow the typical media paradigm discussing the brand. It’s an ingenious way of tapping into a parallel conversation, and as shared values and tastes continue to unify consumers across cultures, Brown thinks it’s an area that needs to be mined.

“To me all worlds should just be meshed together now,” he says. “Everyone’s looking at the same thing; barriers are being broken and lines are being blurred. Now we’re having an architecture conversation and a brand environmentalism conversation.”

Indeed, the lines between high fashion, streetwear and tailored menswear are getting murkier. Even fashion collections are beginning to group men’s and women’s looks together, and the runway is more and more influenced by what’s happening at street level than what’s going on in designers’ heads. In Brown’s head, there’s room for all these different perspectives.

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“There’s room for the Gosha [Rubchinskiy] kids, there’s room for kids who still appreciate heavy streetwear, there’s room for the high-end street and there’s room for the A.P.C. dudes. There’s room for everybody,” he says.

Maybe it’s the eminent wearability of NEEDS&WANTS clothing that makes it so culturally malleable. A satin varsity looks great over a Gosha Rubchinskiy Cyrillic-logo hoodie, the fishtail flannels pair well with tailored jackets by A.P.C., and the elongated pea coats could live within the directional universe of designers like Rick Owens. The pieces are timeless and trendproof, adaptable to a variety of styles and allow the wearer a degree of self-expression, instead of defining a clear aesthetic on his or her behalf.

“I’ve got my little beef with the super trends that happen, like Vetements,” says Brown. “Things that just take over people’s minds; people just hop onto stuff. I feel that’s always going to happen in fashion, but as long as there’s this authenticity to it, then there’s room for multiple perspectives.”

Ideally, what A.P.C. has built is akin to Brown’s vision for NEEDS&WANTS: the kind of minimal, utilitarian line with a pronounced design language that could fit into a variety of lifestyles. More importantly, though, he wants a business legacy built on fierce independence. It’s more important for Brown to have freedom and control than the highest profit margins. In fact, most of the people who work for the brand have side hustles to support themselves and the brand.

Sean Brown is also the editorial director at ripe, a recently launched, Toronto-based media company, while Tharan Parameshwaran does interactive design for the Art Gallery of Ontario. Conceptualizing NEEDS&WANTS as a long-term vision keeps its founders’ eyes on the prize, and allows them the freedom to move and grow at their own pace, while still maintaining the necessary creative drive to truly push the brand forward.

Brown alludes to rappers like 50 Cent and The Game, and mentions that, at a certain point in their careers, the voracity each was once known for faded, and it showed in their work. Success is great, but it breeds complacency.

That’s a place Brown never wants to be. “I never want not to be so hungry that we go and do things as crazy as funding our own container and decking it out. I always want to maintain that spirit.”

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NO PLACE LIKE HOME A-COLD-WALL* Words & Styling Vincent Levy Photography Piczo Hair Maki Tanaka using Bumble and Bumble Make-Up Nobuko Maekawa using MAC Cosmetics Photography Assistant Ai Nakai Styling Assistant Samantha Lockwood Models Omi Wing @ IMG & Montell @ Select — Jewelry Slim Barrett Footwear Manolo Blahnik

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Samuel Ross is a modern Renaissance man, working across a diverse range of mediums, including product design, graphic design, art direction and audio-visual experiences. All of these elements have combined in the last 19 months to launch his most important project to date: A-COLD-WALL*.

Samuel Ross has crammed more into his CV than most 25 year olds. After graduating from De Montford University in Leicester with a degree in graphic design and illustration, he began building a strong freelance portfolio with companies throughout the UK. Simultaneously, a small streetwear line named 2wnt4 was established with friend and continuing collaborator Andrew Harper. Keen to push the parameters of his interest in fashion, Ross then set about contacting a range of companies across Britain that might aid this, but became disenchanted by the lack of response. Widening his search to the U.S. proved more fruitful, and after making contact online, he spent the next two and a half years working as the creative assistant to Virgil Abloh — a role that took him not only to the U.S., but across the globe to work for a range of Abloh’s clients.

While working across a diverse cross-section of projects during this period, Ross became especially inspired

by Abloh’s own fashion line, OFF-WHITE. In particular, its place amongst a new wave of brands, including Fear of God and Hood By Air, that have helped refresh the depiction of American youth culture in high-fashion.

Leaving the UK for this period armed Ross with the skill set necessary to begin creating a British counterpart to these labels. Having this distance may have also afforded him some perspective on what makes the British youth experience so unique. Above all, A-COLD-WALL* depicts the interwoven and often directly clashing nature of the country’s class system, as seen in the clothing and environments its population inhabits. While modern American cities are arranged in a logical lattice, London is a chaotic mass of lines that all seem to spider-web into one another. In London, city planning often has a randomized quality — council estates are placed next to luxury apartments, detached houses are nestled within rows of little red-brick houses.

Essentially, different classes are constantly crossing paths.

The story of Britain’s class system is intrinsic to the fashion it produces, but an update on this, particularly where the working classes are concerned, has been long overdue. Rectifying this somewhat, A-COLDWALL* tackles its contemporary complexities, juxtaposing elements of tailoring with a solid representation of tracksuit culture — a look which happens to fit neatly into the current menswear trend for mixing casual and formalwear codes.

On this foundation, a more artistic approach is taken to fabric choices and finishings. In literal terms, they manage to evoke the colors and textures of British architectural environments, from the swathes of concrete in a brutalist high-rise, to the twitching net curtains of suburbia. Most indicative of the level of thought that’s gone into the garments are the slight flourishes of spray-paint, markings which seem to recall the often unnoticed lexicon of lines and symbols contractors leave on British pavements to indicate what lies beneath.

Despite what the brand’s name might initially suggest, outfits also carry a human warmth through handfinished details, such as artfully frayed seams, achieved with the serrated edge of a house key. Less physically tangible but equally present is the meditative quality the clothes are imbued with: an indescribable element that manages to capture the strange lull that hangs in much of the UK’s atmosphere once you venture beyond its busiest gathering points.

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More than a project, Ross’s conceptual streetwear label feels like the culmination of a lifetime of creative thinking. Described by the designer as “the curated product of British street culture,” it’s an often melancholic ode to his home-soil surroundings. A vision that’s quickly struck a chord with critics, and perhaps more importantly in this day and age, a loyal legion of social media fans. Now counting upwards of 50k on Instagram, these fans have already translated into a solid customer base, snapping up collection drops from the brand’s e-store and a select list of international stockists.

Clearly a deep thinker, Ross is a consummate salesman who articulates the conceptual aspects of his brand in a naturally evangelizing manner — one that’s perfectly suited to the geekish levels of fandom brands like A-COLD-WALL* tend to attract. Here he discusses his motivations in founding the label, the space it occupies within the wider fashion industry, and his plans for its future.

What gets you out of bed in the morning doing what you do? What gives you the drive to create on a daily basis?

Feeling as if there’s a purpose to the work that I create. That can range from pushing and breaking down boundaries within the creative industry, to simply showing peers and the younger generation that circumstance and class do not need to form an unscalable wall.

You don’t come from a traditional fashion background. Has this been a benefit to you in some ways?

How have you come to grips with the technicalities of founding a fashion label?

Yes, my education and professional background is in graphic design and product design.

I live by the mantra of Massimo Vignelli, who once said “design is one.” Although each field of design has a specific blueprint and set of rules that are applied to the article that’s being created, understanding the fundamentals of design and taste I believe are universal. It’s taken me a bit of time to come to grips with the more specialist side of garment construction. I’m now at a place where I can confidently read and edit patterns, although I do not cut patterns myself. I work closely with a tailor and pattern cutter; both I consider mentors.

In terms of young British designers, you seem to operate outside the established system somewhat.

Was this a deliberate move?

Partially, yes. I think this has to do with the fact that my background doesn’t lie in the traditional route that most fashion designers develop though, i.e. I didn’t start off as a runner at a fashion house. My entrance into fashion came from working at multidisciplinary design houses, ad agencies and product-design briefings; I had a knack for curating and building brand identities. A lot of that whittles down to the fact that my entrance also began overseas working underneath American designers, whether that be in the form of graphics, stage design or garments. My focus has solely been on creating good product with a new, strong narrative that represents a portion of the British youth, as opposed to being accepted into establishments. Also I’m in no rush to present a [fashion] show. I feel there’s still a few things I’d like to improve and structure before presenting ACW* through a walk.

How do you feel about the system that’s in place in general? Do you think seasonal collection releases and fashion weeks as a format are still effective, or is online exposure more important nowadays?

The system that’s in place I believe is still necessary, especially when considering the buying habits of retailers.

I also believe fashion weeks are still essential. You know, connecting online is an insanely important tool and can truly accelerate the reach and growth of any idea, but it’s still crucial that face-to-face connection, relationships and stories are built in person.

There seems to be a certain melancholy to the concept of A-COLD-WALL*, where does that stem from?

The melancholic aura of ACW* is both something you can find throughout the dire mood of Britain. It’s harder to find that tone in Zone 1 and 2 of London, but as soon as you’re out of those areas, or anywhere else across the entire country, it’s impossible to ignore. It’s as if this cloud is looming upon you. Articulating this through ACW* felt like the correct way to present the brand, especially when placed into context further. It’s an energy, mood, tone and environment that’s impossible to ignore.

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How did you first experience dress as a representation of class and how do you continue to experience it?

It was most likely formed at the age of 10 or 11. Nike tracksuits were part of an aspirational uniform that represented both a sense of belonging and a signifier of involvement within that social infrastructure in which I spent the first 18 years of my life. Now I feel that clothing is a vessel to express a mood rather than an absolute way of doing things. Nike tracksuits are still essential, that will never leave. This is another reason why I tend to go between certain areas and communities, from Croydon and Tottenham to Wellingborough.

To me it’s key that I don’t alienate myself from the people, communities, and areas that raised me and influenced the entire narrative behind ACW* In the UK music is intrinsically linked to fashion, especially in terms of class representation. What music has influenced you creatively?

Growing up, the main influence creatively came from rap and grime. Some of my earliest notable memories in relation to music are Hype Williams videos, and artists such as Pharrell, N.E.R.D., Andre 3000, Kanye West and Star Trak. Aside from influences in the rap world, grime was the actual day-to-day soundtrack of my life. Rap was an interjection into America, which appeared so ideal but so far from reality. Now my taste has expanded beyond the defaults and go-tos I was raised on. Musical influences can range from Ryuchi Sakamoto, tracks such as Maggot Brain, Roy Ayers, Brian Bennet, Thundercat and Abra Cadabra.

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Are there any recording artists you’d especially like to see in your clothes? If so, what is it about them that’s brand appropriate?

Whoever understands or appreciates the ideas and concepts. I’m into a more organic route of growing the brand, you know?

From a press perspective, the U.S. seems to have been especially receptive of the brand. As the concept of A-COLD-WALL* is so specifically British, do you feel it’s more easily received by those that are living outside the UK? I feel that the core of ACW*, a narrative that hasn’t been told before on such a wide scale, probably has a sense of new energy to it.

How do you feel about Brexit and how it’s affecting the perception of Britain internationally?

Brexit is definitely a negative word that’s been paired with the UK. Personally I’m against the move. In terms of wider perception, I assume it looks like a move backwards rather than forward, especially as the world is so interconnected. I know Brexit will affect my work. For me, it’s really just an unveiling of what so many people have already experienced in some way, whether that be passive or confrontational.

Branded fashion is a stereotypical part of British working-class culture. Your designs are also boldly branded. Is this a deliberate attempt to play with the original connotations of this look?

The main idea behind the heavy branding of ACW* has been to pull references and merge those references with information found on a day-to-day basis. I think the development has been one that is pretty natural, not overtly intentional but also something that has been thought through, most likely due to past work and experiences within design.

To carry A-COLD-WALL*, your stockists have to provide you with an installation space. Why do you feel this is important?

It’s key to reinterpreting retail experiences and starting the next wave of point of sale. It’s also about creating art through design.

Do you plan to expand on this in some way in the future? Would you consider debuting your collections through an installation environment, show or perhaps establishing your own retail environment?

Yes, shows and presentations in the form of installations are definitely on my mind, as well as being a natural progression.

How else do you envisage scaling up the brand and at what speed?

I want the growth to stabilize and for the brand to continue to build its cult following through consistency and good product. This year I’m aiming to do much, much more product in the accessories market specifically.

Who is the ideal A-COLD-WALL* customer? Do you consider them in terms of certain demographics?

The ideal customer understands and appreciates a high and developed aesthetic and taste level, someone who includes themselves as part of this zeitgeist generation.

What are your biggest hopes for the future of the brand?

Some of the goals in place are to mature the brand, launch projects that run parallel to ACW* that cater to new demographics, to move into products such has chairs, furniture, tables, and to offer audio content as a stable means of experiencing the brand.

To mirror my first question, what keeps you up at night?

Emails and ideas; talking to myself on Twitter about the future.

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Vision of Newness Helen Kirkum

Words Jason Dike Photography Asia Typek

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You need to know Helen Kirkum. The recent Royal College of Art (RCA) graduate and International Talent Support 2016 accessories award winner has caught all the right eyes with her footwear made from pieces of recycled sneakers.

Her decidedly non-reverential collection stood out in a world where everyone’s racing to make a slightly cheaper white sneaker.

We’re sure you know a thing or three about sneakers; you wouldn’t be reading this magazine if you didn’t. The world of sneakers is a jumbled-up place, full of dad shoes, hiking sneakers and Hender Scheme/Common Projects ripoffs. While everyone is trying to add the tiniest of spins on existing silhouettes, Kirkum went the other way, creating what appeared to be patchwork sneakers for her RCA Masters collection. At first, Kirkum was trying to bridge the shoe world with the trainer world.

“Someone will look at a Church’s shoe or Jeffrey West and be like ‘they’re so beautifully made,’ and they’ll spend lots of money on it,” says Kirkum. “But with trainers you don’t understand the process of making them and they have this otherworldliness to them, where they appear out of these factories all white and shiny. You just can’t really relate the two [stages] and that was something I wanted to try and change.”

Helen Kirkum’s interest in footwear started as a 17-year-old.

“When I was doing my A-Levels I went to graduate fashion week and I saw the footwear course by University of Northampton, and I said ‘oh my god, I’ve never even thought that you can design shoes.’” She soon settled on a course in Northampton and the collection she created as part of her BA was a prototype of her RCA Masters collection that’s garnered so much attention. Mixing her growing sportswear sensibilities with the traditional methods of Northampton shoemaking, she created a collection, entitled “the mess collector.” The collection was “a mix of shoes and bags that grew from the idea of accidentally on purpose making a mess. The shoes and accessories became a hybrid between sportswear and formalwear, using mesh and neoprene fabrics alongside hand-painted and embossed leathers. From here, I was interested in doing trainers because we’d never done them in Northampton before.”

So when Kirkum came to the Royal College of Art, she studied MA Footwear, Accessories and Millinery. The collection she created was born from wanting to look at the planned obsolesce of sneakers. So, she decided to make the entire collection from trainers that had been sent to recycling centers. “It’s the idea that we buy trainers to just wear for two years until they’re completely worn out, then we just throw them away and get a new pair,” she says. Her collection aimed to “create a different vision of newness. You still see these shoes and go ‘oh, they’re quite cool,’ but they’re not bright white and shiny off the shelf – that’s something I was really interested in.”

To create this different vision of newness she collected trainers from recycling centers in London. “The first place I went into, I just asked for a bag of trainers and wasn’t really specific about it. And they literally just gave me a massive bag of old running trainers, just loads of different things. I also asked for all the odd trainers. When people recycle their shoes, if they become separated in the sorting process, then the odd shoes become totally useless for recycling centers. So I decided to keep the odd ones because I thought ‘they can’t use them so I might as well have them.’ That’s where the starting point [for the collection] came from.”

The shoes she created weren’t based on any one existing trainer, but rather, in her own words “created like a collage.” “All the pieces I unpicked into component parts. So I tried not to tear anything, break anything. I really wanted it to be the exact shape of the pieces before [I took them apart].” These component parts are then wrapped around a trainer last, piece by piece.

The end result was the collage effect Kirkum referred to, “But the pattern was really organic so, because everything is built from underneath, I ended up with all these weird shapes and top-lines.”

While the end result may look slightly reminiscent of a twisted take on a running sneaker, this was entirely unplanned. “It didn’t come from that starting point,” Kirkum says. “When I collected all the pieces I had no idea about color, I just collected a mass of bits. I then ended up with all these, essentially, Tesco food bags filled with blue bits, silver bits, white bits, red bits, white laces, colored laces, fabric labels, leather labels – all these different categories and that was the way I just had to sort it in the end.”

Kirkum actively avoided asking for specific types of sneakers to avoid any kind of creative restrictions. “I wanted to just see what the recycling centers had and work with that.” The knitted component of the collection was created by Jacob Patterson, a Knitwear MA at RCA. “In this sense we followed a trend, because there’s so much knitting happening in sneakers right now. But we wanted to create this idea of something [based on] another traditional craft and how we could combine the two to make something really modern.”

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For the soles, Kirkum wanted to showcase the fact that the shoes had been built from the ground up, so she created a clear rubber sole using the RCA’s facilities.

The collection she created during the MA course was done alongside a dissertation she wrote about how the trainer has now become an acceptable form of footwear in everyday life. “You can wear them to work, it’s not for purpose or sportswear anymore, it’s for something different. That’s another avenue I wanted to go down – saying that these shoes aren’t for going running.” In fact Kirkum outright calls them a ‘fashion sneaker.’ Although some brands still keep up the pretense that all their shoes are meant for performance, no one in their right mind will play ball in a pair of Jordan 3s. And you wouldn’t dare actually perform track and field in a pair of Air Max 90s. When we bring up how sportswear brands now have a lifestyle side acknowledging this, Kirkum says “all the shoes are still influenced from the performance side, but they’re made with everybody [in mind].”

“ I know my stuff was quite interesting but I was just doing it, in the studio till midnight, sewing a shoe on a sewing machine... And then I got to the show, suddenly everyone was going mad for it.”

While she had everybody in mind, she still didn’t quite anticipate the reaction she received. “I was quite shocked by the amount of interest that I had from the show,” Kirkum says. “I know my stuff was quite interesting but I was just doing it, in the studio till midnight, sewing a shoe on a sewing machine and you’re in this bubble at uni. And then I got to the show, suddenly everyone was going mad for it. I had so many emails and private messages on Instagram saying ‘I’d love to buy some shoes,’ and I was like ‘oh, I think I’ve done something quite nice that people actually like!’ So I was quite surprised.”

If you need an idea of the scope of the International Talent Support award, the jury that chose Helen Kirkum included Demna Gvasalia, Lotta Volkova, Sarah Mower, Giovanni Pungetti (the CEO of Maison Margiela) and Marie-Claire Daveu of Kering, among many, many others. To say it’s a big deal is an understatement.

But one person who wasn’t shocked was Flora McClean, Helen Kirkum’s tutor during her time at RCA. “I really enjoy Helen’s work as, in its early stages, it was playful and had many different textures,” McClean said. “I like her graphic eye. She is a very clever woman who also has a sense of fun in design.”

When we asked about what makes her work so special, McClean replied, “She has come up with an idea that is both sustainable and extremely cool. This is very hard to do. This isn’t just another eco project! She has made some very desirable objects from dismantled trainers. She’s been working like a painter or artist making assemblage pieces. She is very thoughtful and chooses the pieces carefully, so the process takes a lot of brain power.”

It’s telling that McClean referred to Kirkum’s work as “like a painter or artist” and Kirkum herself referred to her trainers as a collage. Would she see some of her work as art? “Each sneaker is a collage, completely bespoke to the next,” says Kirkum. “As I build the shoe from the component parts I have collected, they take on a new life as artifacts, with memories embedded inside them. The landscapes and juxtaposition of textures become an evaluation of process and ownership. The work reflects a structure of feeling between art and commerciality; they become as much a sculpture as they are a sneaker.”

The collection went down a storm during London Collections Men and then also at International Talent Support 2016, where Kirkum won the accessories award. When we met Kirkum, she’d just arrived back from Trieste. “The accessories category stretched across everything from millinery to bags, footwear and artifacts, so Kirkum faced a tough time. There’s 10 accessories finalists, 10 jewelry finalists, 10 artwork finalists and 10 fashion finalists from all over the world. “It was so open, you just had no idea who was gonna win. I didn’t envy the judges. I wondered, ‘How the hell are they gonna choose?’ But it was really good in the end. I won. [It was] so exciting, I couldn’t believe it.”

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So if the collection is based around confronting planned obsolesce, how does Kirkum deal with the juxtaposition of creating while not wanting to add to society’s waste? “It is important as a designer to act around a branch of sustainability,” she says. “I am interested in reuse, so looking directly at how to reuse existing materials, trying to optimize these materials and use as few new materials as possible. I don’t believe a zerowaste business is instant, it is an ongoing process, but I think once you can create a sustainable system for one part of your process, you can begin working on the next one. For me, this work was built partly to highlight issues with recycling shoes, but also to try and alter our vision of newness, in an attempt to create an alternative system.”

For young designers, especially young British designers, having any kind of eye on commerciality is seen in a dim light.

But in a world where the rent doesn’t stop because you’re artistic, we could never blame a designer for wanting to create something that might one day end up being a business. When asked, Kirkum says that “my work is formed from commerce and it rebels against it. I need hyper-commerciality to exist for my work to have meaning, yet my work invites you to think about a structure of circulation post commerciality.”

She adds that commercial awareness is vital as a young designer. “You [need to] understand the market you are hoping to place yourself within, and to know what has come before you.

But I also think naivety can fuel newness. I am quite a novice within the world of sneaker culture; yet I think this innocence drove me to play with my experiences of sneakers and in that sense, create something unique.”

And despite Kirkum’s desire to make trainers, she does still count herself as a novice in the world of sneaker culture. “I’ve never been a sneakerhead, I’ve never been super into following what everybody’s doing. And I think, in a way, my collection does reflect that. It’s a different approach to footwear and trainers.

Maybe if I followed all the brands correctly, I would’ve made something quite different.”

In this manner it’s almost the anti-Hender Scheme. Rather than be a brand which relies on slavish devotion to sneaker icons, this one (literally) rips it up and starts again. Does she think her collection would be more reverent if she’d been a deep lover of sneaker culture? “Yeah, maybe. When I first started doing trainers I was quite worried, because there’s this massive industry of sneakerheads and I thought, ‘I’m just gonna get eaten up’ and when people find out I don’t know the specific styles, they’re just gonna disregard me. But then I realized that, actually, this was a reaction to that [sneakerhead culture].”

Ironically, her collection has already garnered a reaction in the sneakerhead community, as she’s now working at adidas in the women’s footwear division of the Originals team.

As part of the International Talent Support scheme, Kirkum has to create another collection, so we asked what that’d look like. “I think it’s gonna be quite interesting to see what happens next. I’ve had a few ideas already about how I could move it forward. The key things are still to work with recycled materials, but I want to try and push into something that’s slightly more – some of the collection is quite conceptual, so maybe make something that’s bridging a little bit more. Something that people can see themselves wearing every day, rather than a statement shoe. So I’d like to try and push things that way a little bit, but still definitely using the recycled materials.”

As for the distant future, Helen Kirkum would like to open her own studio, creating bespoke shoes for people. It’s something her tutor agrees with her on. As for right now, Kirkum is dealing with a whirlwind of events. “Yeah, it’s just absolutely mad. It’s so funny because yesterday, on my FB timeline, it said that two years ago today it was my graduation for my BA in Northampton.

If anyone had told me after I’d graduated from my BA that I would’ve been accepted into RCA, finished my MA at RCA, just won the ITS, and going to work at adidas, I would just be, like, ‘What?’ I wouldn’t have believed them.”

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F/W

OFF-WHITE C/O VIRGIL ABLOH

Color Infrared

Photography Andrea Olivo Styling Atip W Hair & Make-Up Erica Peschiera using MAC Cosmetics & Bumble and Bumble Casting Director Johanna Cordioli Assistant Maria Irene Maroni Model Barbara @ MP Management Special Thanks Claudio & Anna-Clara @ Antonioli & Giuseppe Biancullo @ Battista Trasporti — Footwear UTC

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STRONG BLEND Martine Rose

Words & Styling Vincent Levy Photography Pani Paul Art Director Lola Paprocka Make-Up Ruth Brophy using Gazelli Skin Care & MAC Cosmetics Models Dennis Okwera @ AMCK & Joe Kinsella @ Models 1 — Jewelry Slim Barrett

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Returning from a two-season sabbatical for Fall/Winter 2016, London menswear designer Martine Rose is currently experiencing a significant spike in online buzz. During her absence, Instagram seemed to increase its grip on the fashion world, becoming an even more essential medium — both artistic and commercial, for any contemporary brand. Rose’s distinct vision — which artfully remixes and reappropriates the codes of retro subcultures to create something entirely new, has immediately been welcomed into this fold. An aesthetic that strikes an obvious chord with the new generation of post-subculture millennials, that seem to be the app’s most engaged community.

Rose’s work could be seen as part of a wider what’s-new-is-old wave, where a significant handful of brands seem to be offering different takes on thrift-store style eccentricity. Spearheaded by a roster of new creative directors, the uppermost echelons of fashion appear to be moving away from the monotony of uniformly-presented collections. Instead, outfits that feel more naturally thrown-together are hitting runways, looking pre-owned and character-based on an almost look-by-look basis. At Saint Laurent, Hedi Slimane may have recently departed, but the spirit of his indie rock ‘n’ roll revamp, which always felt born of a personal nostalgia, still lingers on in stores. At Gucci, Alessandro Michele seems to have raided the brand’s archives, amping up his findings to create clothing that’s eccentric, ornate and often outright kitsch. And at Balenciaga, where Rose herself recently consulted on the brand’s menswear debut, Demna Gvasalia has offered something of the post-Soviet streetwear aesthetic that helped build his name at Vetements. A look that’s inspired by the dated adoption of Western trends, the designer grew up with in ’90s Eastern Europe.

Whilst groupings of this nature are a given in the fashion industry, discussing Rose as part of this wave — or any wave, in fact — feels unnatural. Her utterly authentic vision may have gained a new kind of relevance through this changing context, but the reality of her aesthetic is that it’s long-honed, and with its truly personal approach, intrinsically independent. Her own take on the lived-in look dates back almost a decade. Referencing without ever being derivative, her designs refract rather than reflect the past. A process that often abstracts and embellishes wellremembered details; adding just the right amount of strange to what are otherwise easy to wear pieces. A just left-of-the-middle balancing act that’s especially appealing in menswear, where it seems the best brands exist on a fine line, where conventions are bent but never fully broken. Beginning her career with a simple

line of shirts back in 2007, Rose has since developed a full range of menswear with a loyal and international customer base. Her designs are shot by the most important publications, have been worn by the likes of Rihanna, Chris Brown and Drake, and yet manage to maintain a decidedly underground sensibility. Wearing one of her garments is like wearing an artefact somehow; some kind of memento of an unplaceable period. Something which, despite being brand new, is already invested with its own sense of memory.

The pre-owned quality of Rose’s work seems predestined when you consider the recording artist ring to her own name.

Written signature-style even across a simple white T-shirt, the feeling of rare concert memorabilia or other collectable keepsakes seems to occur naturally wherever her logo is applied. Just as natural is her approach to construction and fabrications. Instead of presenting collections that stringently segue from one look into the next via strictly recurring motifs (a firm convention of many brands), Rose’s approach seems much more organic. Silhouettes range from shrunken to billowing; these two extremes reiterating the sense of a prior owner, whilst materials have a found quality and often mix incongruously. The result is collections that mimic the sense of discovery that secondhand shopping brings.

Whilst many labels have run themselves ragged through increasingly exhausting calendars with tight deadlines and the following of other unspoken requirements, Rose has always managed to operate slightly outside the system. Her output has been steady and at times slower than the norm.

As well as her recent sabbatical, the scale of her collections has varied from within the normal London standards of twentyplus looks, to showing just one outfit for Spring/Summer 2015.

A setup that avoided seeming statement-based instead felt true to the ebb and flow reality of creative output.

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Discussing this with The New York Times at the time, Rose simply stated, “Sometimes that’s all you need to say.” A slower and less conventional approach to the staging of collection launches has also allowed a clearer idea of the Martine Rose man to emerge. Though initially benefitting from the platform of runway shows — showing in London with the support of British Fashion Council backed initiatives’ Fashion East and New Gen Men — Rose’s man came further into his own when he left the catwalk, and began to be placed in an almost exhibit-style presentation context. Though ultimately defined by an evasiveness that sees his character switching between different elements of fairly disparate cultures, a more static format seemed to encourage a deeper viewing and better understanding of characteristics that remain constant. This began with Fall/Winter 2013, where models took to a small runway before taking it in turns to stand on a slowly rotating platform. Somewhere between a sculptures plinth and shopping-channel set piece, it perfectly played the chord between art and commerce. Rose described the device as “perfect for a buyer, to get to see this thing rotating slowly, like a rotisserie chicken.” This rotation also helped to reiterate the recurrent, self-referential nature of Rose’s work; something that naturally appeals to menswear customers, who, in terms of shopping patterns, tend to be creatures of habit. Here, the oversized jeans, boxy shirts and consistent reimaginings of the MA1 Bomber jacket — Rose’s key signatures — gained a stronger prominence.

pot approach, which, over the years, has tackled everything from Rastafarians to crusty ravers to skinheads. The concept that “what you wore was really connected to what you listened to” is one Rose understood early on. Out partying from the beginning of her teens and knowing about “that night world” even before that, with “years spent sitting watching everyone else getting ready to go out,” her experience of this connection is deeper than most.

Whilst fashion itself is often defined by insecurity, with its constant need to herald the new, Rose’s continuous reworkings of core products feels quietly confident. In fact, there’s a knowing quality to her clothes, something that suggests the fruits of a slow and steady approach have always been known. This kind of knowingness is a common trait in that rare tribe of born-andbred Londoners the designer belongs to, who often seem naturally ahead of the curve. Hearing of Rose’s experiences growing up in the city, you immediately understand the conviction of her aesthetic. Her fascination with subculture is almost life-long, and born of direct experience. Whilst many designers are able to recall a specific moment they realized they wanted a career in fashion, Rose claims she “can’t remember a light bulb moment, actually.

I wasn’t one of those kids who was making clothes from an early age or anything.”

Given the archival quality that Rose so naturally imbues into her work, it’s little surprise she’s managed to hold onto some of her most significant scene-signifiers. Her most precious item is an original Boy London smiley face T-shirt that she clearly cherishes.

“I’ve had it since I was nine. It’s practically transparent now, so it’s like this precious fragile part of me. I love how it’s become my own little piece of couture. It was my cousin’s from 1989, and my mum tried to stop me from wearing it after it was all over the news that the smiley face was a reference to ecstasy.”

Whether remembered through actual reference pieces, hazily recalled or perhaps even logged subconsciously, equipped with these experiences, Rose has become adept in the language of subculture itself. Understanding the importance of small details especially, the coding in her own designs tends to place a significance on actual language. Sometimes this has appeared slogan style, with the most memorable examples including her tongue-in-cheek reworking of the Carling beer logo, spelling out “probably the best designer in the world” across T-shirts.

The repeated use of “90-91 Fall & Winter collection” also gave fresh-off-the-rack garments an obscure deadstock quality, further reiterating the sense that Rose’s clothes have been excavated from some impossible, imaginary archive.

Instead, her interest seems to be a byproduct of a deeper love of music. Most formative are her childhood recollections of the after-parties that once occurred on Clapham Common on Sundays. Often cropping up in interviews, they’re described as democratic gatherings that attracted a wide cross-section of characters — kids included — purely on the basis of music and a desire to dance. It’s easy to imagine the seeds of Rose’s melting

There is a long list of scenes the designer has been a part of or feels a special affinity to. During her childhood, the sounds of reggae, rare groove, soul, hip-hop and broken beat filled her home. In her teens, she explored house, techno, jungle, drum and bass, and garage, and had brief dabbling with punk and heavy metal. And into adulthood, she explored the mid-noughties renaissance of full-face-paint, club-kid culture that occurred at nights like Golf Sale and Dirty Fairy, which, as a symptom of the internet’s increasing reach, weren’t as easily defined by one sound.

“ What you wore was really connected to what you listened to... years spent sitting watching everyone else getting ready to go out.”

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More subtle and more unique, however, is her use of lettering in sewn-on patches, which appear to have been collected as an act of fandom — or perhaps boy scout-style — to mark certain achievements. For many brands today, the notion of a narrative is treated as an almost antiquated thing; something that should be ignored in favor of a wearable reality. But in the case of Rose, subtle garment additions like these are key devices in what she openly describes as “storytelling.” Most commonly used as final flourishes in her simplest garments, they prove that wearability and a certain kind of fantasy can successfully coexist. To further illustrate her stories, since Fall/Winter ‘14, Rose has collaborated on many of her patch designs with Steve Terry of Wild Life Archives. Something of a kindred spirit, Terry is a hardcore collector of club-land ephemera, whose impressive catalog of club flyers have proved a consistent source of inspiration. These are items traditionally collected by revelers and subsequently stuck to bedroom walls, in a manner not dissimilar to the badge-of-honor effect Rose now achieves with her garment embellishments.

The act of collecting — which often goes hand-in-hand with identifying yourself as part of a subculture — is something Rose and Terry riffed on further with their first collaboration. As well as circulating Fall/Winter ‘14’s lookbook via a digital inbox ping, hard copies were offered through Terry’s Wild Life Press in a vibrantly printed, saddle-stitched format — the quality of which served to emphasize the importance of tangible, physical experiences in Rose’s vision. That’s something the designer now seems keen to pass on through her sideline gig as a lecturer at Middlesex University — where she once studied herself — despite her own online popularity.

“I notice how different it is now to when I was at university,” she explains. “Trying to teach my students to research properly, basically, to go to the library and curate their own bank of images rather than using the imagery that they’re presented with on Tumblr or Instagram, which is essentially curated by someone else.” She isn’t, however, someone that’s overly nostalgic or mournful of “the way things used to be,” clearly understanding the benefits of new technologies in terms of creativity. “It’s naïve to dismiss the value of this entirely, and also expect them or myself to somehow try to ignore the developments in the availability of imagery. It’s about balance and understanding the difference between them, I guess.”

“ Trying to teach my students to research properly, basically, to go to the library and curate their own bank of images rather than using the imagery that they’re presented with on Tumblr or Instagram, which is essentially curated by someone else.”

Rose’s return to Middlesex, the site of her first formal forays into fashion, is arguably the reason behind the sense of maturity in her vision since her hiatus. It seems no coincidence that, during this period, she also became a mother. Without discussing either theory explicitly, the designer does concede that “we all grow up and change, and I guess my collections reflect that in some ways.”

Mirroring this progression, Alex Brown — a model that Rose has used since he was 14 years old — makes a return in Fall/Winter 2016’s lookbook. Now bearded, tattooed and chisel-jawed, his newly authoritative presence seems to mark the exploration of a new kind of masculinity.

While previous seasons have contained a certain adolescent awkwardness, the new Martine Rose man seems perfectly put-together in his own sort of way; somehow self-assured in his eccentricities. Her silhouette now appears bolstered by heavy leathers and hardware adornments that offer her vision a more dominant quality, whilst silk scarves and layered polo shirts portray a certain finesse. This new-found confidence is matched by the confidence Rose herself continues to display in her signature marriage of unlikely reference points; which, this season, include post-punk musician Mark E. Smith and erotic art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. This blending of unlikely references is something the designer has down to such a fine art form, you’re guaranteed to look at the final product and wonder why this unlikely blend didn’t sound perfectly complementary in the first place.

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F/W

DIOR HOMME

Down Down Down!

Photography Synchrodogs Make-Up Yulya Zalesskaya Producers Margarita Zubatova & Svetlana Bevz Photography Assistant Yarema Malashchuk Model Sophia Mohova @ Cat-B Agency

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Punk Lives On Midnight Studios Words Alec Leach Photography Alexander Bortz

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The Los Angeles streetwear scene is killing it right now. Case in point is Midnight Studios, the brainchild of 22-year-old California native Shane Gonzales. At just three years young, the label has already carved a reputation as one of the West Coast’s most promising brands, thanks to its modern interpretation of punk style. We linked with Midnight’s founder to get the low-down on his roots in streetwear, love of Japanese brands, and the brand’s “Adored” Fall/Winter 2016 collection.

Streetwear evolves constantly; the genre is forever finding new points of inspiration, new things to appropriate and make its own. Recent seasons have seen our beloved category of men’s clothing develop a bit of a taste for rock ’n’ roll; designers have discovered the joys of shredded denim, grungy styling is once again en vogue, and rappers and mega-celebs have started wearing merch from metal bands they may or may not have ever actually listened to. Seeing a Kardashian (or Jenner, it’s hard to remember who’s who sometimes) wearing a Metallica tee may make you want to destroy your copy of Master of Puppets, but streetwear’s new-found adoration for punk, metal and grunge has nevertheless been a joy to behold.

It’s against that backdrop that Shane Gonzales’s Midnight Studios label has blossomed. Midnight looks back to punk’s heyday, and drags the spirit of the subculture into the 21st century, making it relevant to the modern-day streetwear consumer via sharp slogans, lo-fi graphics, tartan patterns and edgy styling. It’s a love letter to punk and rock ’n’ roll, as seen through the eyes of UNDERCOVER and Number (N)ine — two legendary Japanese labels who Gonzales collects religiously. Midnight’s aesthetic borrows heavily from the Tokyo scene, which itself looked to punk’s originators for inspiration. It’s that game of constant appropriation that makes streetwear so fascinating.

Back when he was still in high school, Gonzales — who to date is just 22 years old — interned for Russ Karablin’s SSUR brand. In 2013, he started Midnight Studios, inspired by a Miles Davis song he heard on the radio when he was taking a ride in a New York taxi. Since then, the young label has been edging into the limelight; its FW15 collection was produced in collaboration with punk photographer Steve Emberton, who plastered his images of the Sex Pistols’ tearaway bassist Sid Vicious all over Gonzales’s pieces. Fall/Winter 2016’s set of patchwork tees with Virgil Abloh’s OFF-WHITE label literally stitches the two brands’ aesthetics together, and was shown at Abloh’s Paris runway show. Oh, and there’s the small matter of a collaboration with Gibson, makers of some of the most popular and iconic instruments in music history. Gonzales’s clothing has been spotted on the backs of many a modern-day tastemaker — A$AP Rocky is a big fan — and the label is one of the most talked-about names in LA’s thriving streetwear scene.

Like so many of his peers, the internet enabled Gonzales to consume a vast amount of cultural influences, make them his own, and take his vision to the masses. Shane linked with Ian Connor via Instagram, and the stylist-cum-tastemaker gave Midnight its first taste of exposure. “Ian is a big part of how the brand grew so quickly,” Gonzales told Mass Appeal. “He liked it so much that he just wanted to give it to everybody. So that’s when it started picking up; he gave stuff to Wiz, Rocky and Theophilus.”

Connor has very publicly fallen from favor in the past few months, but his past influence on streetwear and hip-hop style is undeniable; soon after he linked with Connor, Gonzales was supplementing Midnight Studios with work on rap artists’ album covers and tour visuals, including designs for Vince Staples, Wiz Khalifa and A$AP Rocky.

Now for Fall/Winter 2016, Midnight has expanded its offering from streetwear basics to a full-fledged line of cut-and-sew.

There’s striped tees that have been sheared clean down the middle and stitched back together, while gratuitous D-rings, straps and pockets dangle off many pieces. Most startling of all is a completely see-through PVC biker jacket. It’s a big, big step up from the graphic tees and sweats that Midnight’s collections have revolved around in the past.

I sent Shane a few quick questions over email, to get his words on Japanese designers, Midnight’s recent collaborations and what the future holds for the label.

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How big is your personal clothing collection at this point? Where do you find all those rare pieces?

It’s hard to say at this point with items constantly coming in and going out, but I’d say I’ve got around 200 items right now. Most of them come from Japanese auctions, but if I’m lucky, I find something local in Los Angeles here and there.

What is it about these niche Japanese labels that you find so compelling?

My interest in Japanese labels started in about ’06, ’07 — 6th or 7th grade for me — with A Bathing Ape, mastermind, etc. Later on it developed into UNDERCOVER, Number (N)ine and brands with a bit more of a story behind them. I became a bit of a super-fan, learning about the meanings behind the collections and history of their collaborations.

How does your archive impact Midnight? Does it inspire the brand’s collections?

It’s hard to say that these brands and pieces don’t inspire Midnight Studios. I try not to take too much from the archive items I own, but I look at them for inspiration on construction, fits, fabric treatments, sewing, etc.

In my opinion, Japanese garments are constructed better than all others.

How big is the Midnight team currently?

Currently the Midnight team is very small. There’s no more than five employees at the moment.

It seems like the West Coast is killing it these days. How does it feel to be a designer in LA right now?

To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to other LA designers, but I’m glad that Los Angeles is making an impact. I feel like coming from here and breaking into the high fashion world is very uncommon, due to the fact that we don’t really have a respected fashion week, nor many fashion-based events. I’d like to think that will all change soon.

How did the Gibson collab come about? What was the idea behind it?

The Gibson collaboration came about through some friends at 2nd Renaissance, who had an existing relationship with the brand. We were introduced to one another, and we both felt it made sense to work together on a capsule collection.

How about the BOUNTY HUNTER collab?

BOUNTY HUNTER is another brand I fell in love early on in my life. Hikaru of BXH is one of those people I strongly look up to and admire, considering his history in the fashion world and the punk scene as well. I’m honored to be given the opportunity of collaborating with his brand this fall. As for the rest of 2016, I don’t want to say much but we have a few more very exciting collaborations lined up for later in the year.

Your pieces have recently gone up in price — are you angling the brand to a high-end consumer now?

I’ve always wanted the brand to have more integrity and better quality pieces from the beginning, but with that comes a higher production cost, so our prices have gone up as well. I’d like the brand to be available for all consumers who have an interest in Midnight Studios, but with everything being made in Los Angeles from scratch, we have to raise prices to generate income.

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Is there any irony in making high-end gear inspired by punk? Similarly, do you care that these points of inspiration come from way before you were born?

I think to an extent it can be ironic and a bit against some peoples’ definition of “punk,” however, many fail to recognize that Vivienne Westwood is credited with starting punk fashion, and she’s a high-end designer — both back then and to this day. Vivienne is one of my favorite designers and her work from the ’70s and ’80s has inspired many designers after her.

Is there such thing as genuine subculture anymore?

Subcultures certainly do still exist, but I think they’ve become less recognizable and obvious as they once were in the days of punks, mods, hippies, etc. Nowadays, I think while these subcultures are still alive, the shift in the music industry has left them a bit foggy and less clear. It’s all mixed up now.

Is it hard for a brand to stay truly underground in the age of the internet? Or does that even matter?

I think every brand owner and designer’s intention is to be as popular with consumers as possible.

Unfortunately in this age, the consumers themselves don’t like seeing their favorite brands grow up and “escape” the underground scene.

Tell us about your work with A$AP Rocky. How did it come about?

Our work with Rocky came through a mutual friend, Ian Connor. We were introduced to each other in New York for the first time in 2014, and since then there’s been a mutual respect for each other. We’ve completed several projects together and there’s many more to come.

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TAKAHIROMIYASHITA The SoloIst.

Nonage Photography Ash Reynolds Styling Atip W Hair Natsumi Ebiko using Bumble and Bumble Make-Up Andjelka using MAC Cosmetics Casting Director Sarah Bunter Photography Assistant Straton Heron Model Khalid @ Elite

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Beautiful Destruction Matthew Miller Words Alec Leach Photography Takahito Sasaki Styling Atip W Hair Takuya Morimoto using Bumble and Bumble Make-Up Andjelka using Laura Mercier Digital-Operator Jennifer Mika Casting Director Sarah Bunter Photography Assistant Dilan Ergench Hair Assistant Manami Matsuki Models Charlie C @ Models 1 & Jennifer L @ Supa Model Management Special Thanks CRE8 Studios — Footwear Minna Parikka & UTC

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Matthew Miller’s Fall/Winter 2016 show contained a spectacular piece of artistic appropriation, as the London designer used his collection to replicate, then destroy, the works of Baroque painter Caravaggio. Miller isn’t afraid to speak his mind, but his clothing itself is innovative and modern—an approach that makes him one of the most exciting names in the UK, if not the world, right now.

We caught up with Miller to discuss his collection, philosophy and views on Britain after the “Brexit” vote.

On June 23, at the height of Paris Fashion Week, the British public voted in a national referendum to permanently leave the European Union. The result of the “Brexit” vote threw the country into political crisis, and exposed just how fractured and divided British society really is. London, the big cities, Scotland and Northern Ireland all wanted to remain, but England’s factory towns and rural heartlands overwhelmingly voted to leave.

Like most of the menswear industry, Matthew Miller was in Paris at the time of the Brexit announcement, doing business for the Spring/Summer 2017 season. For Miller, myself and so many other Brits in Paris, it was a shocking realization that the UK wasn’t the liberal, outward-looking country that we thought—or at least hoped—it was. A subdued atmosphere hung in the air of Paris’s bars and restaurants, and many of us were left unsure of what it even meant to be British anymore. Brexit was a hammer blow to our national identity.

But for the people of Stoke-on-Trent, where Matthew grew up, Brexit was a way of protesting against a system that has for generations ignored them. Like so much of the North, the old industrial city has been left behind by the ruthless march of globalization and capitalism, forgotten and overlooked by decades of elitist governments ruling from London. What was once the heart of Britain’s pottery industry is now home to call centers, warehouses and retail parks, with high unemployment and few opportunities for young people. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the city voted to leave the EU—though Matthew himself is, like so many British creatives, staunchly pro-Europe.

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Miller’s Northern roots have given him an outsider mentality that doesn’t have time for pretension or snobbery.

You’re more likely to find him in the pub than at a celebrity-filled fashion week party, and he regularly sits down for cups of tea with the factory workers producing his clothing. He’s down-to-earth, straight-talking and completely devoid of the head-in-the-clouds mentality that you find in so many fashion designers; rather than abstract concepts and theatrics, Miller uses clothing to comment on what’s going on around him.

Case in point is the designer’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection. After spending two months writing a business plan for GQ and the British Fashion Council’s Designer Menswear Fund, Matthew vented his frustrations at corporate tedium by tearing suits to shreds and piecing them back together again. The previous year’s spring collection was, in his words, “a response to the hopelessness of war.” He recreated the cheap pinstriped suits that were given to soldiers at the end of World War II, as they tried—often unsuccessfully—to return to normal civilian life. For FW13, he scrawled “Born To Fail” over his designs, angry at the uncertain future facing British youth after education funding was slashed and university fees tripled.

Despite all his rabble-rousing social commentary, Miller designs with razor-sharp efficiency: his clothing is free from clutter, innovative and thoroughly modern. I spoke to Matthew for an hour and a half over the phone, and the designer spoke at length on his philosophy, influences and aspirations, as well as his many frustrations with the fashion industry.

How does it feel to be a designer in London right now?

Err… it’s a bit weird at the moment to be honest, with Brexit. Times are changing, both politically and globally, and I don’t think 2016 has been a great year for people in general. I mean, what do you think?

Well, it’s fucking shit really, isn’t it.

(Laughs) Exactly!

How did Stoke vote in Brexit?

Out. One of my own brothers voted out. I texted him like, you fucking prick! You just cost me a fortune! The exchange rate bombed just as I had to pay all my factory bills. The pound dropped and we lost thousands.

Is Brexit impacting your business already?

Short term, yes. But long term it won’t. The UK is so buoyant because we’ve got this incredible city called London. But it’s gonna take two years to fully come to terms with what Brexit means. The other question is, how do we define ourselves now? In Europe? Out of it? What’s our identity in the world?

It was especially strange when we were in Paris, thinking just how international the menswear industry is—I’d spent three weeks hanging out with guys from Italy, from Belgium, from all over the continent, and it’s like our country gave them all the middle finger.

(Laughs) I was apologizing to people!

Do you find London inspiring?

Yeah, it’s incredible. I’m currently stood outside the Tate Modern, it’s pissing it down with rain; it’s bleak, but it’s London, so it’s beautiful. It’s an incredible city. It voted to stay in. It knows how incredible multiculturalism and diversity is. That’s the sad part about Brexit, ‘cause London’s so forward-thinking. You look at the sky and it’s full of cranes—the city’s going up.

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Matthew Miller’s studio is in the British capital, and a lot of his clothing is produced there, too. His Fall/Winter 2016 collection was unveiled in January during London Collections Men, the city’s dedicated menswear week. The collection’s tailoring was, in typical Miller style, a subversion of upper-class sensibilities, with suits executed in athletic fabrics and styled like they belonged on the streets. The collection’s show-stopper, though, was a stunning display of cultural vandalism: a series of raw-hemmed coats and T-shirts adorned with the work of 16th-century Baroque painter Caravaggio.

Miller explains that he was originally going to indulge in a little side project where he’d put together soundtracks for famous paintings. While listening to The Smashing Pumpkins, he went for a walk around London’s National Gallery in search of inspiration. Stood in front of Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, Miller got side-tracked, and wondered how beautiful it would be to take such a symbol of aristocratic wealth, fake it, destroy it and make it back into something genuine.

He decided to incorporate the idea into his collection, and took some photos of the Caravaggio piece as it hung in the gallery. He then commissioned a painter to painstakingly replicate it using oil and canvas, before tearing the fake artwork to shreds and piecing it back together in the form of coats and T-shirts. The process cost Miller a fortune, but the results were spectacular, and each of the breathtaking pieces seen in Miller’s show was used as a blueprint for made-to-order garments, which will cost an estimated £10,000 each.

It’s a genius example of cultural appropriation, and Miller avoided any legal trouble because the fakes were based on his photos of Caravaggio’s paintings, not the originals themselves (ever wondered why so many museums don’t allow photography?). Someone — “some rich geezer” — actually offered to buy one of the prototypes for £50,000, but Matthew politely declined. He needed the garment for production and couldn’t bear the thought of such an important piece not making it into the collection.

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Why Caravaggio in particular?

I love his life. He destroyed himself, and I think that’s what was really beautiful about destroying one of his paintings. He was wild, he was murdered in his 40s, he abused drugs and drink but he was incredibly talented. I found that form of self-destruction really beautiful.

What was the story behind the armbands?

You can go two ways with armbands. They’re either for the military police—control—or for a militia—freedom.

They were part of the Caravaggio piece as well, they were made from cracked canvas. I loved the idea of juxtaposing art with freedom of expression.

It feels weird talking about FW16 when the last time I saw you was at the SS17 fashion shows in Paris. And you’re probably designing… FW17 now?

(Laughs) Yes! I’m actually walking along the Thames now. I like to not be in the studio when I’m thinking about what I want to do with a collection, I just need some space to really think about what it’s gonna say. This is where designers fail: if you’re not relevant in the time that you’re in, then it’s pointless being there. Do you know what I mean? No one really says anything, so it’s like, what’s the point?

Do you think about people’s tastes when you’re designing?

That’s a hard one. Five percent of the world has taste, 95% of it doesn’t. I have to think about relevance now.

That’s the most important thing. How relevant is this? What’s it saying? At the moment religion is pissing me off, really badly. Everyone’s using religion as an excuse to kill each other.

What was pissing you off for FW16?

I wanted to destroy something that meant something to the generation above me. I think the older generation has basically fucked us all over. So I was like, I’m going to destroy the icons of their wealth.

Do you think of Matthew Miller as a fashion label?

No. I think I’m anti-fashion, and I think people in fashion are anti-me (laughs).

Care to elaborate?

I just think people think I shouldn’t open my mouth. I’ve heard a lot of things where it’s like, I’m never gonna be “the face” of British fashion because I’m too honest. And too Northern.

Too Northern?

Yeah. Too common, basically. I think it’s not just me, though, I’m not singling myself out. I’ve heard horror stories where people have been considered “not good enough” for certain jobs because of their social class.

People say there’s no such thing as classism anymore but there certainly is.

What would you say your brand’s about?

My brand is a philosophical view on our existence, basically. I’m probably the bastard lovechild of Marcel Duchamp and Helmut Lang, ‘cause I love utilitarian clothes and I mark every person wearing my clothes with the words Untitled, Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable—referencing them as a piece of art. I think in terms of us, as our existence, from the cradle to the grave, all we do is create chaos and it’s kind of a beautiful chaos.

You know, we’re these destructive beings and we kind of destroy everything around us.

Are there any other designers, apart from Helmut Lang, I guess, that you…

Helmut Lang in the 1990s was incredible. From marketing to adverts to images and color. So, so good. And the fact that he got to a certain amount of money, he got investment from Prada but they fucked him off, so he was like, fuck it, I’m just gonna go and make art—I don’t need to engage with the world anymore, I’m just gonna go and make some stuff.

It’s funny, you look at that stuff from the ’90s and it feels modern now.

Exactly. Exactly. It’s incredible. And no one else has managed to do anything like that. Even if you look at Raf Simons and Margiela, they referenced Helmut Lang a hell of a lot. They’re like the sons of Helmut Lang. They were his disciples. They looked up to him and now you can see the references.

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It’s easy to see where Helmut Lang’s utilitarian sensibilities have rubbed off. Miller’s got an amazing knack for singling out wardrobe staples and making them just right.

Shearling jackets are tipped to be Fall/Winter 2016’s “must-have” piece, and the one Matthew showed in London was by far and away the best of the season. Powder grey, with oversized zips and the dangling grosgrain tags which are now a Miller signature, it had more of the show’s editors and buyers salivating than the jaw-dropping Caravaggio creations (which, to be fair, could be mistaken for Givenchy pieces, were it not for their genius conceptual subtext).

Many of the pieces from Miller’s Fall/Winter 2016 show were crafted from uncut velvet.

The old-money material is actually made by weaving two yarns together and then pulling them apart, but when the fabric is left uncut, it’s got a more modern, athletic feel. Miller took velvet, a rich man’s staple, and made it look like sportswear: clothing for the masses that could hardly be less aristocratic. The collection was united by a restrained use of color, which makes those Baroque artworks even more striking.

Matthew’s product-driven aesthetic and modern design style has clearly been noticed by the rest of the industry; he’s seen that some of his pieces are being suspiciously ordered straight to the headquarters of big-name luxury houses. “I was like, erm, no. What are you doing with this? I cancelled their orders,” he explained.

Just looking through your collection, everything is really easy to wear, everything is like…

Accessible.

Yeah, but I mean, not like, dumbed down.

No, it’s not dumbed down. If you go outside of London, if you go to Stoke, people think I’m mad! Do you know what I mean? People are like, what the fuck are you doing? “You still fucking around with that fashion shit Miller? What the fuck are you wearing Miller?” I just made this amazing fucking outfit, that’s what I’m wearing.

Where other designers have done great, is they’ve created a cult around their ideas. Not a cult where everyone kills each other, ‘cause that’s wrong (laughs), but you know, a group of people who believe in the same ideals. That’s where someone like Rick Owens has done so well. If you see someone walking down the street wearing Rick Owens, especially in London, you would be like, what the fuck? But that person in headto-toe Rick Owens will buy everything. They’ll be in that cult. They want to wear everything you do, because they believe in everything you do. That’s the goal.

The thing with Rick is, he’s built this huge business, but he hasn’t compromised at all.

Yeah. It’s fucking genius when you think about it. It’s the same with Raf Simons. He’s built a strong business, but he still put Robert Mapplethorpe’s cock on a jacket. He’s not gonna be making thousands of them, but he still did it. He understands that you need that cult as a fashion label. It’s the cult that keeps you and your work alive.

Is Rick Owens something you’d aspire to?

Going back to designers I admire, it’s Helmut Lang and Rick Owens. They’ve got a very clear vision of what they are. If Rick Owens died and you looked back 20 years from now, you’d still think his work was current.

It’s exactly the same with Helmut Lang. Timeless design.

It’s funny ‘cause Rick Owens is ripped off so often. But you see his work, and you still know it’s him.

Exactly. That’s just a sign of someone who’s doing well.

Has anyone ripped off Matthew Miller?

Yeah. Fucking ZARA did it. They released all of the “Born To Fail” collection with a different message, but the same font. They did the burgundy biker jackets, too.

You seem to have fewer slogans in your collections these days.

There’s certain things that really piss me off about the fashion industry. I had all these really aggressive slogans, and everyone was like “oh, you’re getting on your high horse, who do you think you are?” Then Vetements comes along and everyone says they changed the fashion system! I was doing that five years ago.

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What are the biggest parts of your business?

The leather jackets. People love them. The leather jacket suits me. It embodies rebellion, and that’s what I’m all about.

Why so much tailoring, then?

Tailoring is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the world. I subvert tailoring, so it’s never normal.

What was the subversion for this season, then?

It’s taking a fabric that’s a sportswear fabric, and making suits out of it. It’s this really beautiful thing, but it’s been subverted. The suit symbolizes money. The suit symbolizes a uniform of prison, where you have to wear it for your daily drudge in a call center. Call centers are the new factories. You have this uniform that keeps you in place. Or does the suit symbolize beauty and elegance? It means so many different things. People are so precious about the suit. Savile Row are so precious about it. It’s so easy to subvert it. You can very easily anger people with it. So that’s why I do it.

British tailoring in particular is so conservative.

Yeah, it’s so fucking stuffy. I’m not a fan. It’s anal.

There’s nothing spontaneous.

No. Apart from color, and they keep wheeling that one out. “It’s got color in it!” – well done, mate! Again, it’s the establishment. Savile Row is a symbol of the establishment. It’s infuriating. They try and make you believe that you’re not anything until you’ve got a suit from Savile Row. But when you look at it, the suit is dying. Suit sales are plummeting!

Yeah. J.P. Morgan officially relaxed their dress code in the workplace the other day. So you don’t have to wear a suit now.

If you stopped forcing people to wear suits during the week, they’d probably wear them on the weekend!

The United Kingdom is a pretty ironic name for Britain at the moment. It’s a country in turmoil, and it’s only beginning to acknowledge just how fractured its society is. Like so many of us, Matthew Miller is deeply worried about the nation’s future, and for good reason. Divisive tribalism threatens the very fabric of British multiculturalism: there’s already been an avalanche of racist incidents in the period following the Brexit results. Miller told me how he’d like to find a sponsor to help organize free open-air cinemas across the country, so he could screen films like Schindler’s List to highlight the importance of a united Europe.

Britain’s fashion scene is as divided as the country itself. On one side, there’s a generation of London designers who are hell-bent on boundary-pushing creativity at all costs—often at the expense of building a viable business. The country’s menswear establishment, on the other hand, is stuck in the past, rolling out the same tired “classics” season after season. It’s a balancing act, but Matthew Miller has one foot planted on each side of that divide; his clothes are forward-thinking and modern, but familiar and wearable. More importantly, he’s got something to say, and isn’t afraid to use clothing as a platform to question what’s going on around him.

To outsiders, it might just look like a game of expensive clothes, but fashion at its best is a reflection of the real world—it holds a mirror up to society, reflecting modern tastes, ideas and values. It’s early days yet, but on that count, Matthew Miller might turn out to be one of our generation’s most important designers.

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25 Years of FUCT Erik Brunetti Words Naavin Karimbux Photography Emmelie Brunetti

After more than two decades in an industry he was integral in creating, Erik Brunetti looks back on what made streetwear great and where it went wrong.

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Before online shopping, before the lines snaking down Fairfax Avenue, before the vinyl toys, before contemporary “street culture” as you know it, there was Erik Brunetti. The early 1990s would find Brunetti at the helm of a rebellious social pirate ship named FUCT. To label FUCT in this era a “brand” or “streetwear” would be reductive and inaccurate. FUCT was a social experiment, a movement, a subliminal middle finger to the man.

In its early days, there was a palpably dangerous spontaneity to FUCT. It represented the mindset of a young and unsettled sect of American society, through graphics that subverted imagery to show viewers a certain lifestyle, political outlook and disposition.

At the beginning of the ’90s, Erik Brunetti, along with several others such as Shawn Stüssy, Rick Klotz, James Jebbia and Hiroshi Fujiwara, initiated an entirely new culture that would later be termed “streetwear.” Rugged and nihilistic, early streetwear was able to make social commentary that empowered and spoke to a very specific demographic of disenfranchised youth. Almost like a secret club, streetwear was a haven for the wayward and those on the fringes of society.

The next 25 years would see what was a once tightly knit and cultish subculture balloon into a multi-million dollar industry.

As the foundational streetwear companies began to amass large international followings, a phenomenon akin to a gold rush took place. Hundreds of brands flooded the market looking to make a quick buck. Only capable of imitating the original spirit of streetwear, they diluted the industry and sold to vendors without discretion, pushing what was formerly an underground culture into malls across America. Streetwear is now firmly part of the popular culture about which it used to subversively comment.

Many of the first streetwear companies were sold or have faded away, but Brunetti and FUCT have persevered. Brunetti has managed to stay independent at every turn, even walking away from streetwear for three years in 2001 rather than compromising or cashing out. “FUCT is like classic Coke,” Jordan Hartigan, owner of BURMA—one of the only young streetwear brands that Brunetti stands by—tells me. “It will always be the original, it will always stand the test of time, it remains unaffected by everchanging trends. FUCT is forever. Even when the day comes that Erik says enough is enough, he has already influenced the culture in so many ways that there will always be FUCT.” To understand how Brunetti has navigated the treacherous industry for the entirety of its existence without concession on any front, one must first understand his roots, and therein the roots of streetwear itself.

Brunetti spent the 1980s skateboarding, playing in punk and hardcore bands, and doing graffiti under the moniker DEN ONE—a name that was known on both coasts. He started writing graffiti in the tri-state area—Philadelphia, New Jersey and New

York—where he grew up, and would continue the practice when he moved to Los Angeles in 1988. Brunetti spent his formative years immersed in these subcultures, and the ethos of the scenes he grew up in became his own.

It was never Brunetti’s intention to directly translate graffiti, or any of the other subcultures he was engaged in, to apparel.

“Once you take graffiti out of the public and start containing and packaging it, it’s no longer graffiti. It becomes safe, it’s not dangerous or alluring anymore,” Brunetti explains. “You take out the most important part of graffiti, which is the viewer looking at it and questioning it. You’re creating a dialogue with the viewer every time someone looks up at a throw-up on a freeway overpass. The viewer asks, ‘How did he get up there, why did he do it, what was it done with?’ It creates all these questions and that’s what good art does. Once you take that same throw-up and put it on a vinyl toy or some garment, it loses all its meaning.”

From a young age, Brunetti had an excellent grasp on the importance of art’s context, an understanding that was integral when he unknowingly laid down the groundwork for what would become streetwear. When Brunetti started to make apparel, it was an impulse; an extension of the creativity that he had already been exploring in other media. “When I created FUCT, there was no focus or plan. There was no blueprint,” he tells me.

“It happened very organically and there were no premeditated motives involved. I never planned on making money or hitting a certain quota or anything like that.”

Over the course of our conversation, it becomes clear that Brunetti is, down to the very essence of his being, a true creative, capable only of making what he perceives to be authentic.

“A lot of people try to put meaning behind FUCT,” he says. “But, to me, it is just something that I do. Like music is something that I do, drawing and painting is something that I do. It’s just an experiment in another subculture.” What separates Brunetti’s foray into attire from his previous artistic endeavors is that he was creating in a medium that did not yet exist. He was creating an entire culture.

Ironically, FUCT’s longevity and continued integrity has to do with Erik Brunetti’s indifference to the company’s monetary success. “You’re talking to a guy who isn’t looking at this as a business,” he tells me. “When we started, we were printing 50 to 100 shirts, and that was a big success to us. We didn’t care if they sold or not, it was the feeling of looking at them and knowing, ‘We can do this.’ It was done out of love and curiosity.

That doesn’t exist these days, because everyone thinks there’s this get-rich-quick scam.” One of FUCT’s most characteristic qualities is its pervasive nihilism, a direct result of Brunetti’s attitude to running his brand. “It could fall apart tomorrow and I would not care. I wouldn’t give a shit,” he says vehemently.

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Many of the larger brands in today’s industry grew at an irresponsibly fast pace and are now held hostage by that avarice.

“When you start to get too big, you’ve got employees to pay, you have huge production costs and overheads,” says Brunetti, who learned early that growing too large could be fatal. “My brand was big in the late ’90s, which resulted in us having 13 employees, and they were all embezzling and stealing money,” he says. “With more people, you have more problems. I learned the easiest way is to cut out all the fat. Especially now, with the internet, you don’t need employees, which is a good thing.” Today FUCT employs only Brunetti, his wife Emmelie and his Japanese distributor Mei. By keeping the operation small, Brunetti has maintained sovereignty over the brand. Limited releases have become a defining feature of streetwear, but they were a necessity rather than a marketing strategy when streetwear began. In the early ’90s, getting stuck with leftover stock was not an option for young brands, so they made only what they knew they could sell. As streetwear swelled into a global phenomenon, many brands tried to grow like normal corporations, bringing in investors, marketing specialists and teams of graphic designers.

The usual rules of American capitalism are rendered strangely obsolete when applied to the streetwear industry. Structuring a brand like a normal business almost always fails. “I don’t have a group of shareholders or a board of directors to answer to, and I don’t do focus groups to see what’s trending and what to design,” says Brunetti. Hasty expansion leads to a brand being spread too thin, and its message becoming watered down.

“A lot of brands out there now have all that shit,” he continues.

“If they want to screw in a light bulb, shareholders need to vote on which way to turn the bulb. All of that restricts creativity and the spontaneity that was there at the beginning of streetwear.” If a brand is too calculated and contrived, it loses the insurrectionary aura that made streetwear enticing in the first place.

Throughout its existence, FUCT has attracted dissenters: individuals who relentlessly question society and its established rules. At its core, FUCT captivates those who need to live life on their own terms—the kind of existence that Erik Brunetti leads. “FUCT” is the perfect indicator of the subversive nature of the brand. “The name FUCT immediately stood out to me,” Zac Clark, owner of FTP says. “That shit was really cool, seeing a subliminal expletive like that everywhere.”

One letter away from the most well-known curse word in the English language, the name manages to pique the curiosity of passersby without employing blunt shock value. The viewer recognizes that something is amiss, but it takes deeper investigation to understand what exactly is so unsettling. This is emblematic of modern American life—one of FUCT’s favorite subjects to criticize—where mass shootings and Applebee’s abound: something is wrong, but one has to push past the surface to fully grasp how unsound the back-end of the country truly is.

Because of its nihilistic, outsider energy, it would seem natural for FUCT’s graphics to be brash, raw and difficult to look at. Instead, the brand’s output is beautiful. “I’ve always had a problem with releasing something that’s ugly,” Brunetti tells me. Early FUCT graphics and ads are gorgeously subliminal: the Rolling Stones tongue and lip logo with a tab of acid placed on its tip to speak to the darker side of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s; the famous Jaws poster inverted to show a social role reversal, with the woman ascending from the depths to attack the shark; a careful illustration of a simian from Planet of the Apes to evoke memories of events such as the civil rights movement; the Vietnam War; and anti-nuclear sentiment.

Brunetti is rigorous—bordering on neurotic—when it comes to design. “When font is done properly, it becomes an illustration, and therefore a work of art,” he says emphatically. “For example, you can look at a lot of the early work that Eric Haze did for Def Jam Records. The EPMD logo, the Public Enemy logo, his own tag with the bubble—those are works of art, and, if you look back on those, you still remember them because the font design was so great.”

“ I’ve always had a problem with releasing something that’s ugly.”

Throughout its existence, FUCT has utilized hundreds of logos; some of them flips such as the classic Ford logo and others created from scratch. The logo is one of the most important visuals that a streetwear brand provides. It is reproduced innumerably in various medias, becoming embedded in viewers’ subconscious, an ever-present background noise. “Font designs are what stick in people’s heads,” explains Brunetti. “It’s a form of design in itself. Usually, if someone doesn’t understand fonts they don’t have any business getting involved, not only in streetwear but design, period. The FUCT logo is iconic because I chose a good font to manipulate. I didn’t choose it overnight, I worked with it and I kept looking at it everyday until I got it to the point where I liked it, and finally it stuck.”

Streetwear came into being shortly before computers became an inextricable part of everyday life. All of the early FUCT graphics were meticulously created by hand. The painstaking care and thought that went into everything that FUCT released, from Thrasher ads to lookbooks, is evident. Graphics were made using pen and paper, acetate film separations and hand-cut Rubylith.

The handmade nature of early FUCT designs stands in stark contrast to today’s graphics, which are produced on a screen using Photoshop and Illustrator. “When I started my brand in the ’90s, no one was using computers,” Brunetti tells me. “Everything had to be illustrated. If you wanted a particular image, you had to research books and find it, even looking in other countries.

Today there’s Google, and if you have Google you have your art department.”

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From a technical standpoint, computers allow brands to do much more than was previously possible, and, given streetwear’s DIY nature, there is a considerable upside to providing virtually everybody with the tools needed to create and contribute to the culture. Besides the Adobe programs, access to the internet comes with unprecedented marketing power. Deploying imagery for a brand is easier than ever with social media, blogs and brand websites. The last five years have seen a spike in DIY brands, as thousands try their hand at what was once a niche subculture.

There are, however, downsides to the internet’s effect on streetwear that match, if not overshadow, the upsides. “The internet is great because it allows a lot of people to start brands, but that’s also bad at the same time,” says Brunetti. “It’s made individuals lazy. People who start brands aren’t really part of a subculture. It’s easy for them to fake it, because you can just Google things and go on YouTube and watch videos. Someone can become an “expert” on a culture within six hours online instead of actually playing in a band, or going to punk and hardcore shows, or submerging themselves in art. People learn about all this stuff online, and are completely out of touch with reality. And that shows.”

The internet has created a tumultuous inferno of brands grabbing at trends and celebrities fighting for fleeting fame.

Streetwear is made from and complements other subcultures, but, on the internet, individuals are exposed to streetwear outside of the context of those scenes. Brands are based on a life that their owners have lived through a monitor. One of the most iconic renditions of the FUCT logo is in Friz Quadrata, a typeface that was readily available in Letraset Transfer Packs, rub on letters that were commonly used in hardcore scenes to make DIY flyers and logos. “A lot of bands from hardcore subcultures used it. Black Flag, Bad Religion, the list goes on,” Brunetti says.

Countless brands would later come to use the typeface, only not as reference to the hardcore culture that Brunetti drew from but because they saw it in older, hyped streetwear graphics. “Most of these brands that are using it now don’t even realize where it’s from. They think, ‘Oh, well they used it, so I’m gonna use it.’ A lot of brands don’t think for themselves. They don’t research deep enough when it comes to referencing things.”

If knowledgeable streetwear customers detect even the slightest whiff of inauthenticity, they will balk. Having a poseur stigma associated with a brand heralds imminent doom, and for the companies that grew too quickly, with their shareholders and boards of directors, losing business is not an option. The solution has been for brand owners to fabricate street credentials, feigning ties to scenes and subcultures. “When I started creating, designing and producing garments, I never even referred to it as streetwear,” Brunetti tells me. “It wasn’t even in my periphery to start looking for street credentials, because I didn’t have to prove that. The guys that I was hanging out with at the time were all skaters, into punk rock and did graffiti. Nobody even used the term ‘street.’ You would have been laughed at if you said,

‘Yeah I’m doing streetwear,’ because we were from the streets.

We didn’t need to talk about the streets.”

The internet has made brand owners more visible, and many owners have become intertwined with their brand’s image.

Whereas product used to speak for itself, owners are often now a part of their company’s disposition. “I’m a 49-year-old man, I don’t wear streetwear,” Brunetti says derisively. “I think that has been a strength. I have been able to separate myself personally from the product, whereas a lot of owners can’t, and they get too wrapped up in it.” A trend that Brunetti—who continually puts emphasis on not hiding who he is—finds especially absurd is the use of brand related pseudonyms by owners. “Many of the newer brand owners that came out from 2003 to 2007 created characters of themselves. They don’t use their real names. Every time they do something they ask, ‘Would my cartoon name do this or would my real name do this?’ I mean, I had a different name, it was DEN ONE. I vandalized public property through the ’80s and ’90s under that name.”

Celebrities’ direct involvement in streetwear recently also contributes to owners chasing the spotlight. At the turn of the century, streetwear and hip-hop grew closer together, with many rappers donning what were once underground labels. “Hip-hop was just starting to emerge when I started FUCT,” says Brunetti.

“It existed prior, but it didn’t begin to be involved with streetwear until the early 2000s. I remember Pharrell calling me on the phone in 2002, asking me to help style and work with him.” Soon after, Pharrell would partner with NIGO to launch Billionaire Boys Club.

“ If your brand is authentic, why would you pay someone to wear your clothing? There are a lot of people I would pay to not wear my clothing.”

Today, the hype around celebrity and fame is manipulated by many streetwear companies, with brands sponsoring public figures to sport their apparel in supposedly “natural” social situations. Initially, however, celebrities appeared in streetwear completely organically: they would wear a garment because they appreciated it on an aesthetic level and because they had prior knowledge of the brand. Perhaps the most legendary celebrity cosign in the history of streetwear came when Keith Richards wore a FUCT shirt bearing his own likeness, with the caption “TOO TOUGH TO DIE.” “I don’t know how exactly he got the shirt, I didn’t send it to him. Nor did I get a license from him to use his face, but he saw it, evidently he liked it and he wore it,” says Brunetti. Keith Richards discovering and wearing the T-shirt aligned his own brand and persona with FUCT, becoming a part of its legacy. “If your brand is authentic, why would you pay someone to wear your clothing? There are a lot of people I would pay to not wear my clothing,” laughs Brunetti.

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FUCT has always been unsusceptible to industry currents, often setting them in motion rather than following them. One of the most ubiquitous trends in streetwear is the fetishization of the 1990s. “I think brands need to focus on creating something new,” says Brunetti. “I don’t think they should try to fabricate their histories to be a part of something that they weren’t. A lot of the people doing this are young, and they weren’t actually around in the ’90s.” This false nostalgia forges the past in an attempt to gain credibility from an era in which most brands weren’t present yet.

The ’90s aesthetic characteristic of many older streetwear brands exists because those brands were actually created and existed through the decade. “What people don’t realize is that the ’90s was actually a horrible period. There were some cool things in the ’90s, but there were more bad things,” Brunetti tells me. “I remember working with my brand and avoiding all these horrible fashion trends that were going on, avoiding them at every turn.

Now I see big brands celebrating those terrible, horrible fashion statements.”

Herd mentality is what FUCT originally set out to escape, emphasizing the value of individuality and independence. That mindset has allowed Erik Brunetti to steer clear of decentralized decision-making and create a product that is timeless. “I think the reason that FUCT has stayed relevant over all these years is that we have never bought into trends,” says Brunetti. “Not just from the ’90s, but from any era. We’ve never done things just because they’re in at the moment. Good fashion, music and art stands the test of time.”

It may seem that Brunetti is thoroughly disheartened with where streetwear has gone, a realization made even more painful for him because he was so instrumental in the culture’s genesis.

“People always say that I’m too down, that I’m always bashing streetwear, but that’s not true, man,” he says defensively. “I just hadn’t seen anything that I liked.” Brunetti still maintains a flicker of hope that a new generation will pick up where he left off, taking the reins and steering streetwear in unexplored directions. He talks specifically about two brands, BURMA and FTP, who he believes have potential, despite their youth. “When I saw BURMA, it instantly reminded me of what I was doing in 1995. A lot of the same references, fonts, typesets; I really like what BURMA is doing. And I like what FTP is doing, I think that they’re extremely relevant right now. Especially due to the political climate, I think that they’re relevant in a way that’s important. And they’re both created from a very organic, pure place.”

Both Jordan Hartigan, 25, and Zac Clark, 22, drew immense influence from FUCT, as well as Brunetti himself. “I remember when I first discovered the brand, I felt an immediate connection to it,” says Hartigan. “I was immediately drawn to the man behind the curtain, and started being not only influenced by FUCT’s

attitude and design archetype, but the allure of Erik himself. He speaks vocally through his craft and he’s not afraid to talk that shit and say what he wants to.” Both BURMA and FTP continue in the original spirit set by FUCT, albeit with slight differences.

Hartigan’s designs feature the same scrupulous attention to detail that is typical of FUCT, while Clark’s brand utilizes guerrilla marketing tactics and an outcast, members-only attitude that is quintessentially FUCT. BURMA and FTP have made Brunetti cautiously optimistic that the youth will restore some of the early energy that existed when he started his brand. “They’re still young, so we’ll see,” says Brunetti. “There are no ulterior motives or big money behind them, it’s just them. And that’s really, really important.

The moment you’re owned by somebody else, they can control your movements. You cannot have your freedom restricted in this industry. You can’t have your voice restricted.” Brunetti’s newfound hope culminated in a recent FUCT × FTP collaboration, a moment that was exceedingly important for Clark. “It was insane meeting him, he’s a genius,” Clark tells me. “I remember in 10th grade, mocking logos up saying ‘FUCT The Population.’

Doing that collaboration with Erik was a dream come true.”

In 2016, streetwear has reached a peculiar junction. What used to be a small, secretive community has been put under a microscope; mass-produced, packaged and sold. The last 25 years have seen a subculture that Erik Brunetti was integral in creating spiral out of anyone’s control, often contradicting what it originally stood for. Money and fame have replaced streetwear’s original motives, and the subcultures that initially informed it have drifted further away.

As thousands of DIY brands have twisted through whatever “streetwear” means today, a few have risen out of the chaos and gained slight footholds. That some have caught Brunetti’s eye is perhaps a sign that the rebellious and threatening attitudes that fledgling streetwear brands once possessed are returning to favor, and the love Brunetti used to have for the medium is being rekindled in a new generation. Or perhaps the next generation is doomed to repeat the mistakes that have plagued streetwear, falling into the same capitalistic pitfalls that ruined countless brands before them.

By the end of our conversation, however, it is clear that Brunetti no longer has any personal stake in whatever happens next with streetwear. For the entirety of his existence he has created through a variety mediums, deaf to what others are doing and focusing exclusively on what he regards as legitimate. That integrity is transposed to all of his life’s work, and personified in FUCT. “Erik Brunetti is Erik Brunetti,” he tells me. “I don’t hide behind anything, what you see is what you get. And that shows in the product.”

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Never Good Enough Photography Mathieu Vilasco Styling Adam Niedbal Assistant Joanna Vankerckhove Model Edouard @ Rockmen Model Paris

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SWEATSHIRT RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2002-2003 COAT HELMUT LANG FALL-WINTER 1995-1996

TROUSERS RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 1998-1999

SHIRT & TIE RAF SIMONS SPRING-SUMMER 2005 JACKET RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2002-2003

SWEATER RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2015-2016

TROUSERS RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2002-2003

SWEATER RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2001-2002 COAT RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2003-2004

CAPE RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2005-2006

T-SHIRT RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2003-2004 JACKET RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2002-2003

SHIRT RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2003-2004

TURLENECK TOP RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2003-2004 BRACELET RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 2003-2004

JACKET RAF SIMONS SPRING-SUMMER 2000

TROUSERS RAF SIMONS FALL-WINTER 1999-2000

Beauty in Imperfections Christian Dada Words Alec Leach Photography Chikashi Suzuki Styling Masanori Morikawa Hair Keiko Tada @ Mod’s Hair Make-Up Masayo Tsuda @ Mod’s Hair Production Junsuke Yamasaki & Risa Yamaguchi Models Shuntaro Yanagi @ Anore & Kako Takahashi @ Eva Management

Back in January, Christian Dada unveiled its Fall/Winter 2016 collection during Paris Fashion Week. A high-octane onslaught of statement pieces, the collection was one of the most powerful of the week, and featured some dark, erotic imagery from Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. I caught up with the label’s designer, Masanori Morikawa, to chat Dadaism, biker gangs and Japan’s legacy in craftsmanship.

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Following the outbreak of World War I, a group of counterculture artists in Europe and America looked on with horror as their countries descended into inconceivable violence. The Western imperial powers sent thousands of their own boys to murder each other on muddy fields in Europe, and dragged their colonies — the countries they’d invaded and declared their own — into the mess too. Seeing how cold-blooded thinking had driven the West into mutual destruction, the artists founded the Dada movement based on anti-war, radical left-wing principles.

Dada rejected mainstream tastes and conformity, countering the West’s bourgeois tastes with nonsense. If art was about soothing the senses, then the Dadaists wanted to repulse them.

Dada was so controversial at the time that American Art News declared it “the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man” — pretty ironic given the atrocities unleashed during World War I. Back in 2010, Japanese designer Masanori Morikawa started his own label inspired by Dadaism’s anti-establishment thinking.

He named it Christian Dada, partly as a tribute to the movement, and partly as a tongue-in-cheek homage to a certain Parisian couture house. Now in its sixth year, Morikawa’s brand blends traditional Japanese craftsmanship with dissident thinking and a penchant for witty statement pieces. “The concept of Dadaism corresponds with my fundamental view,” Morikawa explained to me via email. “I find beauty in imperfections. I like unconventional approaches and nonconformist attitudes… something that may not look perfect and beautiful in traditional meanings.”

His label is based in Tokyo, but also shows on the Paris schedule. Whereas the Japanese capital is a swirling whirlpool of niche labels and trends, the Parisian fashion scene is a slick, welloiled machine, dominated by the biggest names in the business.

Showing in Paris is a smart move for Asian labels wanting their vision to reach a global audience, but Morikawa himself admits his label is still taking baby steps in the French capital.

“ I find beauty in imperfections.

I like unconventional approaches and nonconformist attitudes… something that may not look perfect and beautiful in traditional meanings.”

Dadaism was intended to offend — the movement’s aesthetic was a petulant mockery of mainstream tastes. Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal on its side and called it art. You’ll find that same non-conformist attitude in Christian Dada’s Fall/Winter 2016 collection, which was inspired by the work of legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki shares Morikawa’s fascination with unconventional beauty, and the morbidly erotic photos from his Love On The Left Eye series were reproduced throughout Christian Dada Fall/Winter 2016 via digital jacquards, embroideries and prints. Most striking was a ghostly shot of a naked, tied-up girl, bent over and on all fours. It’s an unsettling, disturbing image to lay eyes upon — even for the boundarypushing world of high fashion — and the photo was liberally plastered over many of the collection’s pieces.

Araki’s fascination with bondage appeared throughout Christian Dada’s collection, albeit in more subtle ways. Comically oversized belts exploded in both width and length. Jeans, in lieu of a belt, were fastened by a mile-long denim sash. Huge pieces of rope, the sort of things you’d find attached to a church bell or battleship, were wrapped tight around boys’ waists. Flailing straps were fixed to vast, billowing trousers, which pooled around models’ ankles as they stomped around the Parisian show space. Practical everyday wear, it was not. In fact, the whole collection was bursting with head-turning statement pieces — sheer silk pants, glistening leather trousers, purple biker jackets and, of course, those fucked-up photos from Mr. Araki.

A bouquet of flowers, photographed by Araki and reproduced via lush embroideries and silk jacquards, adorned topcoats, jackets, sweaters and shirts. Christian Dada’s onslaught of statement pieces was hard to forget. With such a visually-charged design language, it was bound to stick in the minds of busy editors and buyers on the jam-packed Paris schedule.

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While the Dadaists witnessed the horrors unleashed by the imperial powers in the early 20th century, Morikawa needed only to read the news to find similarly morbid subject matter. Dada may now be a century old, but the human race is still gripped by the same bloodthirsty insanity that disgusted the movement’s progenitors. “I was forced to contemplate life and death after witnessing consecutive catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunami, terror attacks and wars,” Morikawa explained of his collection. “How Araki, suffering from serious illness himself, deals with such themes through his work inspired me at the beginning.” Araki’s work is deeply personal, and the 75-year-old photographer famously documented his entire marriage: from his honeymoon and sex life right up until his wife passed away from ovarian cancer. He produced Love On The Left Eye after he lost the sight in his right eye, and scribbled out half of each photo with a marker pen, to give the viewer a rough idea of how the world looked to him. Shot with eerily flat, high-key lighting, the series’ images of bound-up girls are just as uneasy on the senses as Dada’s “anti-art” was back in the early 20th century.

If Araki’s work is all about his own experiences, then Morikawa’s men’s collections are a similarly personal and intimate affair. He may have built a name for himself with Christian Dada’s romantic, evocative women’s collections — he even designed a crane-covered couture dress for Lady Gaga — but his menswear is all about his own perspectives and tastes. “The Christian Dada man encapsulates my memories and my feelings,” Morikawa told Buro 24/7. “It’s a projection of me, essentially… the menswear line represents my heroes and my personal style.”

Christian Dada’s man is brooding, a daring dresser, and, if Fall/ Winter 2016 is anything to go by, has a taste for unsettling erotica.

Morikawa has used previous men’s collections to pay tribute to skate culture’s glorious Lords of Dogtown heyday — an era he found particularly inspiring, as well as his own family.

Morikawa’s grandfather was a master craftsman who, against the law, embroidered the jackets of Japanese biker gangs.

Japan’s bosozoku are obsessed with customizing their rides in all sorts of nefarious ways, and just like bikers all over the world, use their leather jackets to pledge allegiance to particular gangs and crews. Christian Dada’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection was a direct homage to the bosozoku subculture in all its rebellious glory, complete with, you guessed it, embroidered jackets. For Morikawa, it’s vital that he honors Japan’s illustrious heritage in craftsmanship. “I’ve been fascinated by the beauty of Japanese

traditional crafts and its culture,” he commented. “It’s something irreplaceable to me.” The brand works with expert craftsmen and technicians on thousand-year-old Japanese methods like Nishijin, a decorative weaving technique, and Yuzen, a dyeing process from Kyoto, commonly used in the crafting of kimonos. “We have less and less traditional craftsmen in Japan nowadays. Just like Issey Miyake has been supporting them for years, I strongly feel that younger generations — including myself — should inherit their tradition and support their craftsmanship.”

While there’s an entire ecosystem of Japanese labels that lovingly reproduce Western styles using their own artisanal methods, it’s refreshing to see a designer using the country’s heritage in craftsmanship to create something really new.

Reproductions of American army jackets and jeans are all well and good, but Morikawa is using Japanese tradition to really bring something new to the table; Christian Dada’s Fall/Winter 2016 line feels exotic, what with all the Japanese lettering, lush florals and adventurous silhouettes. It’s a lot more exciting than the seemingly endless army of Japanese labels that are happy to just sit back and resurrect archive pieces again and again.

“ We have less and less traditional craftsmen in Japan nowadays.

Just like Issey Miyake has been supporting them for years, I strongly feel that younger generations — including myself — should inherit their tradition and support their craftsmanship.”

On the surface, there’s not much uniting the Dadaist movement, Nobuyoshi Araki and Christian Dada, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that they’re brought together by the same fiercely independent streak. Dadaists despised the mainstream, so they countered the Western establishment’s taste and reasoning with ridicule. Nobuyoshi Araki used his photography to express the turbulent events of his own personal life. Finally, Morikawa’s Christian Dada label is staying true to Japan’s heritage while simultaneously creating its own boundarypushing aesthetic. What’s more, Morikawa is determined to support his country’s independent craftsmen by ensuring their techniques aren’t forgotten.

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The Eternal Stranger — Haider Ackermann

Words Jian DeLeon Photography Robert Wunsch Photography Assistant Robert Hammann

Haider Ackermann embodies a man who is at home everywhere and nowhere at once. His loose, colorful clothing is the uniform of the modern jet-setter; the eye-catching, welldressed individual whom you can’t quite place, but his style suggests he has somewhere better to be.

Last June, a gloomy sky loomed over the Palais Galleria in Paris, and its visitors were none-so-pleased, as intermittent showers pitter-pattered on tarp-covered seats and the runway that would soon host Haider Ackermann’s Spring/Summer 2017 fashion show. The 45-year-old designer found the weather fortuitous, as it reflected his inner tumult. The clothes he designed for the season, including bright metallic salmon bomber jackets, dusty pink patchwork skinny jeans, brilliant magenta pleated trousers with cropped hems and lemon yellow short-sleeve shirts with thorny floral prints, stemmed from a desire to show something positive in a world laden with negativity.

While the thunder may have threatened to kill his show, Ackermann found beauty in the juxtaposition of the grey skies and his colorful clothes. He has established a design language built on contrasts — sporty track pants and one-button tailored blazers, pink houndstooth bombers with diamond jacquard printed trousers, golden crushed velvet Asian-inspired jackets with frog buttons paired with embossed leather pants. Every collection is a story that begins with a mood. Ackermann absorbs the world around him, taking into account current events, his own emotions, and then he begins to translate that into clothing.

“Fashion always dictates the times. After great crises, after world wars, fashion always renewed itself, and there’s always a new movement coming out of it,” he says. “We have to understand that fashion moves forward values. We have to embrace everything and see what we make out of it.”

So for Spring/Summer 2017, Ackermann noticed all the darkness in the world — from terrorist attacks, racial tension and police brutality, to the fractured political landscapes in Europe and the United States, and he found something positive. Trips to Korea and Japan made him aware of a new kind of modern youth — a young man who lives with a sense of reckless abandon in a turbulent world, but forges a unique sense of freedom through traveling to different places and socializing with different people.

“By traveling, you think that you escape your life, but most of the time that’s not actually true,” he explains.

“The more distance you take as you go farther abroad, the more you’re getting close to your own life.”

Ackermann dubs this virile jet-setter as “the well-traveled boy,” whose story is about traveling to escape your problems, only to realize you’ve brought them with you. He likens it to being on the other side of the world, and reflecting on a certain night with a certain person, and how much stronger the memory feels when you’re even further removed from it. For Ackermann, “the well-traveled boy” is able to set these past regrets aside and feel hopeful for the future. The boy remains unburdened by the inevitable emotional baggage of age, whether it’s because he’s fallen in love for a night at a darkly-lit club or chooses to have a good time with friends abroad, rather than wallowing in self-pity or self-doubt. This youthful radiance became the well from which Ackermann drank, imbuing him with a shrewd confidence that things would get better.

“This world is quite insane. And just to have those carefree boys walking around in metallic colors, the contrast was very interesting,” he explains. “We need the energy, we need the positivity of this young generation who shows us that we can be free.”

Freedom is a word Ackermann often repeats, and it’s intrinsic to his approach to everything. It’s the thing he values the most. It’s the message he communicates in the signature rakishness of his clothes — fluid tailoring juxtaposed with slouchy knitwear and shirting that looks and feels liberating.

Born in downtown Bogotá, Colombia in 1971, Haider Ackermann was adopted by a French Alsatian couple — a cartographer and his wife. He grew up roaming from country to country, living in Africa and the Netherlands, where his family eventually settled down. As a teenager, he became enamored with the work of Yves Saint Laurent. Ackermann says that Saint Laurent placed an emphasis on making a woman feel beautiful and powerful. He describes it in a stoically romantic way, saying that even if a woman did not have a lover, she would still have the dress. During a time when there have never been more people talking about clothing — what it means, who it’s for, and how it’s made — Yves Saint Laurent represents the type of designer who simply wants to make something nice.

Aspiring to be like his hero, he enrolled at Antwerp’s prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Art in 1994.

But three years later, Ackermann was expelled for failing to complete any of his assigned collections, which is attributed to his staunch perfectionism — his own desire to “make something nice.” In 1998, he interned for John Galliano in Paris and eventually became the assistant of Wim Neels, who had been one of Ackermann’s professors at the Royal Academy. He continued to add to his portfolio by working with designers like Mayerline, Patrick Van Ommeslaeghe and Bernard Willhelm, and launched his first, self-financed womenswear collection 2002. It caught quick attention from buyers, but also Tuscan premium leather supplier Ruffo Corsi. He went onto design the Spring 2003 collection for Ruffo Research, the manufacturer’s incubator program for young talent, whose alumni include Raf Simons, Veronique Branquinho and Riccardo Tisci. By 2005, Ackermann signed with Belgian investor Anne Chapelle’s group BVBA 32, the same parent company as Ann Demeulemeester, one of the famed Antwerp Six designers.

In 2013, Haider Ackermann and Ann Demeulemeester were split into two separate companies, a decision that Chappelle said reflected the health of Ackermann’s business, and granted the label the independence to grow at its own pace. The designer says the split wasn’t complicated, and didn’t change too much.

“We’re just happy to have our own company, our own story that we built ourselves,” says Ackermann.

“And that gives you the strength and the force to continue step-by-step.”

As a result of his well-traveled upbringing, Ackermann is fluent in four languages: Dutch, French, English and German. But it’s also left him feeling like a nomad.

“When you travel that much, you don’t have a home,” he says. “You can belong anywhere and nowhere at the same time. Speaking different languages gives you that sense of freedom, but for many years, I thought that I belonged nowhere because there was no country that was really my home.”

Perhaps a more appropriate descriptor is the Japanese word ronin, the term which denotes a masterless samurai and translates most accurately into English as “wanderer.” Fashion critic Tim Blanks described Haider Ackermann’s first menswear collection as “part samurai, part corsair,” and the same could be said about the designer himself.

With a dark, curly, disheveled head of hair, the suave, slightly-trimmed facial hair of a swashbuckler and trademark almond-shaped eyeglasses, Ackermann conveys the image of a worldly Bohemian intellectual.

His tanned, olive-toned skin is ethnically ambiguous, but firmly places him the realm of the “other” — distinctly apart from a white majority. Ackermann once told an anecdote about how as a younger man, he would go out in New York and people would ask him what he did for living. He would jocularly reply that he was a dishwasher — sometimes, people would believe him. For a man born in Colombia, reared by French Alsatian parents and educated all around Europe, it’s easy to imagine how it would be hard to selfidentify with a particular place or ethnicity, especially when he’s never felt specifically mired to a country or language.

“I never felt like a Colombian designer,” he says, and cites the different nationalities that have been thrust upon him in an editorial context. “Sometimes I’m Dutch. Sometimes I’m French. Sometimes I’m Colombian, but to be very honest I’m none of them. I will be an eternal stranger.”

Indeed, Ackermann draws from multiple cultures, traditions and aesthetics, but it all occupies a consistent universe. The implementation feels like it’s coming from someone who has experienced these things firsthand, not a person working off of mood boards or mining through a Google image search.

Ackermann works off of memory and feeling, noting that his process feels very subconscious. He likens it to seeing a series of misty images in front of you, and grabbing a small part of them.

“It is not interesting to appropriate something which belongs to another culture literally, because it will never be as beautiful as it is on them, and this is what you have to honor,” says Ackermann. “We cannot translate all this, but what we can do is absorb all those images, and at some point make it your own story, but never freely take it.”

Ackermann also cites artists like David Bowie and Keith Richards as being particularly inspirational in the way they mixed different styles together in their own respective ways, to the point where you were never really sure where they were coming from, or where they were headed to next.

“Life is full of contradictions, so why not the same with clothes?”

“I’m attracted to the unknown, and the unknown comes from mixing everything, and then somewhere it clashes but makes sense at the same time,” he says. “Life is full of contradictions, so why not the same with clothes?”

While Ackermann’s distinct brand of multiculturalism comes into play in his collection, he’s slightly perturbed by the conversation surrounding diversity on the runway. His shows tend to include a wide range of nationalities, but it’s done to tell the story of the collection, not out of a sense of obligation.

Ironically, Ackermann couldn’t be more aware of the myriad of differences that constitute a global sense of beauty, but he never wants to feel constricted when it comes to casting. He reiterates it’s about freedom.

As a designer, that means being able to express his vision as he sees fit.

“Whoever we are, wherever we come from, whatever our sexuality or color is — we are free,” he explains. “I want to have that freedom when I express my collections.”

He takes things like color and skin tone into consideration when casting models. If a particular jewel tone looks great against a model of color, or if the inspiration of a certain garment takes cues from Ethiopia, he might choose an Ethiopian model to wear it, for example. He’s one of the few designers whose initial vision already includes the width and breadth of humanity, but he always wants his choices to come from a sense of authenticity and service to the story, not one of politically correct obligation. As someone who spends plenty of his time self-reflecting, travel continues to play an important part in Ackermann’s creative process. The idea of luxury continues to shift as physical space and solitude become rarities in a constantly connected, rapidly expanding world. Some of his favorite places to travel are Bhutan and Mongolia, where cellular service is especially spotty, allowing him to literally disconnect. He thinks platforms like Instagram have debased the value of travel in a way, as more and more people live vicariously through a stream of images on their phones, tapping into a shared fear of missing out.

“Nowadays with Instagram, we travel with our eyes. It’s very easy — you go from one picture to the other and have a feeling you see everything, so you don’t need to take a flight again to see all this,” he laments. “The only luxury we have nowadays is just to stand still and absorb the moment, which is very rare.”

It’s contributed to a culture of oversaturation, and that ties into the increasingly fast pace of the fashion world that’s seen designers like Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane burn out after three years at the helm of a fashion house. Ackermann is aware of how that kind of workload could be creatively stifling, which is why it’s even more important for him to maintain the pace he’s set for himself.

Ackermann doesn’t analyze consumer behavior, and while he questions himself as a designer, he still retains the passion for his work. He admits he doesn’t even like to do many interviews, afraid that his own inspiration will inadvertently influence how people see the clothes. He wants people to have the freedom to interpret each collection for themselves. That manifests in the presentation of his menswear line, which is referred to as his “men’s wardrobe,” while his women’s offerings are referred to as a “collection.”

He understands the fundamental difference between menswear and womenswear is that the male consumer is more discerning about individual pieces, and how they’ll fit into his personal sense of style. During market appointments with buyers, the men’s clothes are arranged to feel more like an intimate wardrobe rather than soulless pieces on a rack.

For Ackermann, menswear was a happy accident. After making his debut at Pitti Uomo, he took a few seasons off as a sabbatical, not wanting to return until he was truly ready to commit to a men’s line.

Thankfully for buyers and customers, he resurrected it in 2013. One of the main hurdles he was figuring out was what kind of man would complement the ideal Ackermann woman, the one who is beautifully draped in his colorful clothing with a natural sangfroid. Was this man her opposite, or did they share similar values? Was he one of those men, like Ackermann previously described, who only looked like he didn’t give a damn, despite caring a lot about his appearance?

“There is no interest to make a man beautiful,” he says. “There is only interest to give men a certain attitude and a sense of style.”

The main difference, he realized, is that men everywhere are wanting to buy a feeling and not a look.

Because the majority of menswear is so rigid in its silhouettes — the suit, the trouser, the hoodie — Ackermann’s penchant for excruciating subtlety makes it the perfect canvas for him, “A blazer is a blazer, but you can change the attitude just by making the sleeves a little bit shorter, like he’s wearing the jacket of his girlfriend, or the color is just a little bit higher,” says the designer. “It’s all about those little centimeters which will make the whole difference, and that’s what you’re searching for.”

There is a bit of his own aspiration in his menswear designs. Ackermann himself wishes he could be “one of those men who would be perfectly dressed,” citing French photographer Serge Lutens, director Luchino Visconti and Karl Lagerfeld as personal style heroes. They’re the embodiment of what perfect men’s style is — immaculate dressing that looks like you just woke up that way. But Ackermann laments he’s not one of those precise, tailored guys. Even if he starts his day looking extremely put together, he says that by his very nature things get a little more loose and relaxed — a tie might come undone, a shirt may untuck itself a bit over the course of a day. Perhaps that’s why his men’s clothes exude a bit of that natural looseness, a certain laid-back opulence that transitions from day-to-evening.

“You can take his slouchy pants and flowy tops, put a structured jacket over it, and bang — you’re ready to go out,” says Stylezeitgeist’s Rabkin of Ackermann’s clothes. Rabkin alludes Ackermann’s aesthetic to the monied loungewear look of the vampires in the film Only Lovers Left Alive, which stars Tilda Swinton, an actress who regularly wears Haider Ackermann. But to the designer, celebrity dressing isn’t about marketing, and more of a platform for him to build a special story with his clients, which include Keith Richards, Isabelle Huppert and Kanye West.

“They’re your playmates,” explains the designer. “You have a playground together, and you’re a companion for those moments. And that friendship is very honorable and beautiful.”

Ackermann describes it in the French très commerce fidélité, a social loyalty between people. It’s all about cultivating a relationship and constructing a personal narrative. His designs are worn by celebrities, but he is not what one would typify as a “celebrity designer.”

“There is no interest to make a man beautiful...

There is only interest to give men a certain attitude and a sense of style.�

“This is not a designer who’s super-plugged in with celebrities. This is a guy who’s been grinding away for a long time, who’s been very respected by the industry,” says Lawrence Schlossman, brand director at Grailed, an e-commerce platform for high-end secondhand clothing. “He’s focused on his craft, he’s focused on the clothes he wants to make. And when you get a guy like Kanye West wearing his clothes — and wearing them a lot — it’s the best marketing a guy like Haider could get.”

Indeed, the reserved Ackermann is not one for the spotlight, and feels genuinely blessed to work with people like Tilda Swinton, Keith Richards and Kanye West, though he’s fully aware of the contrast between his celebrity clientele. When West began wearing plenty of Ackermann’s designs during the global fashion weeks, and at performances like the Grammys and VMAs, it put the designer on the map for a new kind of consumer — the highly-engaged Kanye West fans who want to emulate the artist’s style. West often stepped out in Ackermann’s luxe loungewear, preferring burgundy velvet tracksuits, intricately embroidered bomber jackets and various iterations of his Perth jersey fabric offerings — especially the oversized drabcolored sweatshirts with frayed reversed seam details. That sweatshirt style was later knocked off by Swedish fast-fashion chain H&M, and West acolytes, eager to buy into the Ackermann look but unable to afford the real deal, readily settled for the 30-dollar facsimile. But now, Haider Ackermann was a household name among hypebeasts and high-end fashion fans alike.

Haider Ackermann continues to be popular among the internet style set. Schlossman says it’s one of the few designer brands on Grailed that fetches near the retail price on the aftermarket — and sometimes more. He attributes that to the scarcity of the product. Pieces often sell out at one of Ackermann’s limited global stockists, so even if someone buys one of his bombers, wears it a few times, and chooses to put it on a platform like Grailed, it holds its value. Of the items that are moving on Grailed, it’s mostly Ackermann’s oversized jersey products, though there’s an increasing interest in his tailored goods like sport coats and jackets.

With so many eyes on Ackermann, rumors swirl that he is poised to take the creative helm at Berluti, a 121-year-old luxury shoemaker owned by LVMH. In recent years, the label has attempted to transition into ready-to-wear offerings under Alessandro Sartori, who left in February to rejoin the team at Italian menswear label Ermenegildo Zegna. Under Sartori, Berluti’s clothing toed the line between high-end casual and classic menswear. Items include pleated orange trousers, geometric-patterned intarsia knits, tomato red double-breasted leather sportcoats and bold variegated stripe bomber jackets. Berluti is in dire financial straits right now, and is estimated to incur a €50 million loss this year. Haider Ackermann declined to comment on the rumored position, but his touch could be the one that turns around the brand’s fortune.

One could easily imagine the parallel universe he could create for Berluti, informed by the same sense of relaxed opulence that shines in his clothes.

Rumors aside, more people are paying attention to the menswear market, and — more importantly — more money is flowing into it, which is why a move to Berluti would make sense, especially given Ackermann’s previous experience designing for Ruffo Research. But what Haider Ackermann is most attracted to currently is the notion of modern male vanity. He incites the myriad of actors, athletes and rappers who are really pushing forward an unmistakable sense of personal style, and is especially curious of where it’s going.

“We live in a society where the man is almost more vain than the woman,” he says. “He’s much more dressed up than the woman, and he’s much more aware of every millimeter, centimeter and whatever color shade he puts on himself.”

To him, it’s sort of a return to dandyism, but today’s peacocks aren’t afraid to show more colorful, artistic plumage — or even a few ruffled feathers.

“They look like they allow themselves to not give a damn, but they do,” he says. “And trust me, I’m embracing it.”

Cult Photography Takahito Sasaki Styling Atip W Hair Takao Hayashi using Bumble and Bumble Make-up Jennifer Mika using MAC Cosmetics Casting Director Sarah Bunter @Buntercasting Photography Assistant Takumi Monji Styling Assistant Sophie Casha Models Francois @ Wilhelmina London, Gabriel & Rayan @ AMCK

The Calm After the Storm — Edison Chen Words Alec Banks

Photography Assistants Scott Leon & Tucker Leary

Photography Kenneth Cappello

Special Thanks Milk Studios LA & Jay Vasquez

Producers Jamie McPhee & Maria Rubin

BLEACH HOODIE & JAIL JACKET VLONEÂ MASK SHIN MURAYAMA FOR ALYX

CUT HOODIE ALYXÂ

MASK SHIN MURAYAMA FOR ALYX

Edison Chen may be a little bit older and a little bit wiser, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything polarizing to say anymore. Having left behind the glitz and glamour associated with being a movie and pop star in Asia to focus more on fashion endeavors like CLOT, VLONE, Anti Social Social Club and Emotionally Unavailable, his unique viewpoint still comes through — you just have to press him on the issues and aspects of life that mean the most to him.

Studio 4 at Milk Studios in Hollywood gives you the visual impression that you’ve left behind the outside world – chock full of colorful advertisements and street noise — and can finally imagine a place where you can wear what you want and say what you want without fear of judgment. That is to say, it’s a place that is a blank slate; white, almost too white, so that those that are setting up for the photo shoot and arranging lights to test camera exposure pop from the colorless stage as if infiltrators to the serenity.

I’m here to speak with Edison Chen, a creative who is responsible for populating fashion, music and cinema with bouts of color that are distinctly unique to the 35-year-old who calls Los Angeles home. Equal parts a vital component of clothing entities like CLOT, VLONE and Anti Social Social Club, there is also the part of Chen who remains a worldwide icon for his work in Chinese film — where he appeared in the popular Infernal Affairs trilogy — as well as those who know him for his impressive discography in the music business, in which he sings and raps in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

Chen strolls into Milk Studios in a black T-shirt, tan sweats and flip-flops. He greets everyone enthusiastically and seems thankful to even have made the photoshoot, given his location only 24 hours earlier. He tells me that he made the last flight out of Hong Kong in the waning hours before Typhoon Nida unleashed 90 mile-per-hour winds and forced the cancellation of 180 flights to or from Hong Kong’s airports. It seems particularly fitting that Chen’s salvation from the storm was Los Angeles. In the wake of a photo scandal in 2008 that threatened — and continues to derail — his Chinese movie career, the City of Angels served as a safe haven from the Asian media which chastised Chen for the release of several personal photos after he had taken his computer in to be repaired. In the days after his personal files were released, news about Chen’s scandal populated the front pages of Chinese newspapers, despite a series of winter storms which had affected large portions of southern and central China from January 25 to February 6 and which, according to some reports, accounted for 129 deaths. “I love LA,” Chen enthuses. “I wouldn’t be sane if I didn’t live in LA. There’s community here. And [I have] peers where I sit back and think, ‘I don’t even want to do that, because you do it so well. I just want to watch it.’ LA is definitely my home now and I’ll probably call it my home for a very long time.”

Despite his tense relationship with the Chinese media, it’s still an integral part of building out his fashion and media ventures.

“I like to say that when he goes to China, he gets plugged into the Matrix,” says VLONE brand manager, Jay Vasquez, one of a handful of brands that Chen has a role in shaping. “He’s a total different person.

He plugs in there, and he has to stay in his office; he can’t go eat, he can’t do the normal things that he could in LA. Yeah, in LA people will notice him, but it’s not in mass volumes. It will be in a small group.

It won’t be 200-300 kids lined up outside.”

Chen has seemingly left the events of the past in his rearview mirror, but there are still hints that it impacts him to this day. But when he alludes to things that “happened,” they register on his face more like a dull ache than something that is still an open wound.

“The thing that I like to tell people that are always fucking with me and trying to watch me is, ‘While you’re watching me, they’re watching you,’” he says.

Although conventional wisdom tells us that “time heals all,” one can’t help but think that Chen’s endless stream of work in fashion was probably the best therapy for him. It’s allowed him to channel his anger into something positive. In a United States context, Chen is probably best known as one half of the duo — alongside partner Kevin Poon — responsible for CLOT. Their mission is to be “a creative moment that celebrates individuality and injects life and character to the local culture [and] promotes creativity and inspiring perspectives in hopes of bridging the gap between East and West.”

“Everything else – from acting to music to VLONE to whatever – I can take weeks off,” Chen says. “But I feel like CLOT, it’s my first baby and it means a lot to me how people perceive that brand over the years, and how people have changed their opinion on what we do and what we represent.”

Chen has been at the forefront of CLOT’s relevance in the streetwear sector for well over a decade.

It’s a role he jokingly refers to as the “Mickey Mouse” of the operation because of his acceptance that he needs to be the face of the brand.

“For CLOT, I’m always the one standing in front doing the creative job and behind-the-scenes job and working with Kevin [Poon] directly about the financials and how we run the company,” he says.

“New Age Ethnic is the world we live in now, all kinds of people and all colors of skin all in a melting pot.”

The point is perhaps best illustrated by the photoshoot taking place with photographer Kenneth Cappello. Chen is styled in ensembles by brands he works with, like Emotionally Unavailable, VLONE and CLOT. While he chose to obscure his face as a reference to working behind the scenes with EU and VLONE using ALYX masks from Matthew Williams’s upcoming Fall/Winter 2016 collection, “Natural Order” — which are made from vintage cigarette brand tees like Camel and Newport — his face is unhampered when he dons his CLOT wardrobe. “[The masks] allow me to be in different roles,” he says. “I love to act, and I’m not saying that I’m acting when I’m doing these jobs, but it lets me assume something different than I have to deal with every day as me. It’s more like being able to extend who I am via a different vehicle. It’s not like a superhero feeling. It’s more like being able to go to the sandbox to play.” In recent months, CLOT has only grown — evidenced by their “New Age Ethic” show in Paris — amongst the graffiti-laden streets of the Place de La Republique and a subsequent pop-up shop featuring their trademark spin on a pair of SUICOKE sandals and collaborative capsule collections from brands like Club 75, 40s & Shorties and adidas. “New Age Ethnic is the world we live in now, all kinds of people and all colors of skin all in a melting pot,” explained Chen when the show premiered. “Personally, I am influenced by Western culture, but I identify myself as an Asian. These two merging together have created my diverse mindset. We all share one world, one sun and one internet, [and] boundaries are a thing of the past.”

Our conversation about Paris Fashion Week focuses on how it’s of vital importance to Chen that trips like those also serve as opportunities to be inspired.

“I went to Paris for Fashion Week. Granted, I may not be as busy as my peers, but I tell them, every time you come here, in addition to try and express something, you should also go and take something in.

I just went to Versailles and they had the Olafur Eliasson show. It was crazy! That shit was fucking crazy!”

Chen also recalled a recent trip to the North Pole which had a similar desired effect.

TIE-DYE LONGSLEEVE HOLY FAMILY

DTF JACKET EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE

SCARF SHIN MURAYAMA FOR ALYX (FROM MASK)

SKI MASK HOLY FAMILY

CUT HOODIE ALYXÂ

MASK SHIN MURAYAMA FOR ALYX

“Basically overnight, my management company sold me to another management company for a good amount of money, and I didn’t get a dollar of it. So I got angry and went to Japan and started CLOT. That made me the ‘independent guy.’”

TIE-DYE LONGSLEEVE HOLY FAMILY

DTF JACKET EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE

SCARF SHIN MURAYAMA FOR ALYX (FROM MASK) SKI MASK HOLY FAMILY

“As a creative, you continually have to deliver to do your job,” he says. “I feel like people have a source bank. And maybe they have a source bank that they can feed off of for three years. Still, information and things that inspire you run out and you need to go out and recharge it. I’m a firm believer in that. I just went to the North Pole. I was without the internet and telephone for 11 days. I was on a boat. I went to look for polar bears. It was crazy. The whole trip was super inspirational, as well as rewarding for my life. Seeing what people were wearing and glacier waterfalls inspired me for a few pieces for CLOT Fall ‘17.”

CLOT is a direct reflection of Chen’s troubles with the media in China and served as a vital component in establishing himself as a true original who embodies an independent spirit.

“I would have never thought about opening CLOT unless a certain thing happened to me,” Chen says.

“Basically overnight, my management company sold me to another management company for a good amount of money, and I didn’t get a dollar of it. So I got angry and went to Japan and started CLOT. That made me the ‘independent guy.’ I was never a conformist. I was outspoken, but I was never the ‘independent guy.’”

Whether consciously or subconsciously, Chen’s entrepreneurial spirit would be nurtured as a teenager as he bounced between Canada and Hong Kong, thanks to a healthy dose of hip-hop music which continues to shape him today.

“When I was 13, I was really into hip-hop and basketball,” he says. “I wanted to be an NBA basketball player, I swear. I was playing in Hong Kong and made the team. Then I went to America and just got my ass kicked and I was like ‘ah, shit.’ I think the spirit of entrepreneurship has to come from hip-hop from people — for better or worse — like Suge Knight, Diddy or Jay Z. I saw them make clothing and champagne and [live] a lifestyle that I bought into. It’s very strange that now I’m able to be in a position to also have that mentality put onto the next generation of kids. I think that had to have influenced my life really deeply.”

Although Chen ultimately views CLOT as priority number one, he also has become an important connector and consultant for other brands looking to make a name for themselves in the industry like VLONE and Emotionally Unavailable, in addition to Anti Social Social Club and a new, androgynous brand called Holy Family. Holy Family is just being gifted to friends and family before a planned roll out next year and features at least one piece that should of be interest to those who pine for Supreme items. Each project is decidedly different than the other. Whereas he views himself as Mickey Mouse with CLOT, he likens himself more to Walt Disney when it comes to his other ventures. With Emotionally Unavailable, Chen has cultivated a partnership with former UNDFTD designer, KB Lee, which has seen their dropping heart logo appear on notable collaborations with Buscemi and UNITED ARROWS & SONS and represents a new take on military aesthetics. Chen’s international business acumen has helped indie label Anti Social Social Club diversify from pop-up experiences in their Los Angeles backyard to retail ventures in Tokyo with BEAMS T Japan, and speaks to him wanting to aid with the “evolution of that brand.”

VLONE is perhaps the brand that stands out most, due in large part to the involvement of A$AP Rocky and A$AP Bari. Aesthetically, it attempts to pass along a message to kids who feel like introverts and encapsulates an ethos of “live alone, die alone.”

“I’ve been really lucky to meet a lot of new talent and have new opportunities to do new things,” Chen says.

Chen is also quick to offer up that he’s also been privileged enough to receive solid guidance from mentors, both past and present.

“Definitely a lot of people have helped me throughout my career,” he offers. “Hiroshi [Fujiwara] is one of them. Eddie Cruz is one of them. Lately I’ve been talking a lot to Ai Weiwei about certain thoughts I’ve been having. I’m very lucky to have these people that I fully admire. I’m like, starstruck when I’m with these people. Even still today, when I see Hiroshi, I’m in awe. These people have definitely guided who I am and what I can be.”

Although CLOT and Chen himself have come to represent a DIY attitude that reflects the morals and values of today’s youth, he is not insistent that companies he works with behind-the-scenes share his same outlook.

“I‘m not the creative director or boss of that company,” he says. “I have to figure out what they want and then how I have to make it the best for them with the objective that they have. So, on a consulting level, it’s a little different. It’s more tapping into my creative mind and my network and not really driving a certain type of force.”

Despite Chen’s continued dealings in China after the scandal with three Juice stores in Shanghai, Beijing and STAND CHANGSHA, which promote Western culture and forward thinking, he recognizes that the Chinese youth are still being hampered by their own self-doubt and unwillingness to forge an independent path for themselves.

“In China, even if they have the money and resources, they don’t really believe that they can do it. I mean, they can do it!

I think that’s the type of mentality that I’m trying to have them break free from. You might fail, or you might win. But if you don’t try, you’ll never know.”

“I’ve seen so many people in LA who get together and say ‘this is a cool idea,’ and then three months later there is a T-shirt out. That’s independent and based upon creative momentum. In China, even if they have the money and resources, they don’t really believe that they can do it. I mean, they can do it! I think that’s the type of mentality that I’m trying to have them break free from. You might fail, or you might win.

But if you don’t try, you’ll never know.”

The gale-force winds surrounding Edison Chen are finally starting to die down. The scandal was over eight years ago. He’s also realizing that he doesn’t need an endless stream of projects to serve as white noise to drown out the negative comments.

“I don’t think I can take on too many more [brands]. After Holy Family — and maybe doing one or two more things, like some kind of food and beverage or maybe one day a hotel — I’ve just got to kind of guide these through the stormy waters to better days. It’s a good enough job for me already.”

As far the events of the past, Edison Chen is seemingly at peace with everything.

“I think at certain times in my life I’ve wished certain things never happened to me,” Chen says. “But because of who I am today and who I am associating myself with and how I’m living my life, I’m actually pretty happy with the way that things have turned out. There are certain things that I feel like pushed me back a few years. I’m pretty happy right now, especially because I live in LA.” As the photoshoot takes on new life and energy with the appearance of A$AP Rocky, A$AP Bari, Playboi Carti, and a dozen other affiliates who have smoked the studio into a fog, Edison Chen politely says goodbye before calling it a night.

He’s once again found the perfect time to depart.

“Be who you are, and be who you are supposed to be,” he says.

CHECK HOODIE, COACH JACKET & PANTS CLOT

The Lonely Boys VLONE Words Alec Banks Photography Kenneth Cappello Producers Jamie McPhee & Maria Rubin Photography Assistants Scott Leon & Tucker Leary Special Thanks Milk Studios LA & Jay Vasquez

While the A$AP Mob is known primarily as a music collective, they’ve exemplified what the crew is capable of outside of the sonic realm with the introduction of clothing label, VLONE. Comprised of A$AP Rocky, A$AP Bari and CLOT’s Edison Chen, they’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what “always strive and prosper” truly means.

In recent months, upstart label VLONE has introduced itself to the world with key retail experiences around the world in notable places like colette in Paris, where they collaborated with OFF-WHITE, and in Los Angeles, where they took over a space in downtown once inhabited by Wes Lang — the man responsible for Kanye West’s tour merchandise — to create a memorable Stateside pop-up chock full of imagery indicative of skateboard culture during the Dogtown and Z-Boys era of Venice Beach.

Spearheaded by A$AP Bari, A$AP Rocky and CLOT’s Edison Chen, VLONE is unapologetically a representation of how all three view the world in the face of success, failure and scandal.

As famous American thespian, Orson Welles, once said, “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

VLONE has prominently latched onto that ethos. We caught up with A$AP Bari and A$AP Rocky to get further clarification of what that represents to them.

How would you summarize what VLONE means?

[Rocky] A broad statement for me to generalize everything would be just “you live alone, you die alone.” That’s it. I think it’s simple.

What do you think the main goal is for VLONE in the next year?

[Bari] I can’t tell. I really don’t have any goals. If you set a goal, it will make you disappointed if you don’t achieve it. The goal is to live life.

How do you view Edison Chen’s role within the brand?

[Bari] We’re all a team. Nobody really has too much of an [official] position. Edison does what he does. I do what I do. Rocky does what he does.

Rocky, how do you see your role with VLONE? [Rocky] I think VLONE isn’t too far-fetched from A$AP. It’s just a lifestyle. For lack of better words, I’d say VLONE is like A$AP. They’re parallel. You know how A$AP is just a collective of different talented people?

VLONE is just a lifestyle: live alone, die alone. People these days are just adapting to that lifestyle, whether you feel ostracized from society for whatever reason; your own internal reasons. A lot of people adapt to the lifestyle and manifest that lifestyle into a clothing line. It’s just how we life everyday amongst each other.

But as far as the business aspect of it, I think strategic moves definitely come from me and different partners within the company. Everybody just plays an important role on the business side. But the lifestyle side — that’s really what it’s all about. It’s not just cool clothes. You might see homeless people sleeping on the streets in VLONE. You might see 400 kids in SoHo all ridin’ [who are] all wearing VLONE. You never know.

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Bari, do you think you’re the consistent voice as the figurehead?

[Bari] No. I try not to talk. My whole thing is “less talking, more working.”

What does the “Friends” motif on the clothing mean to you? Is it supposed to be tongue-and-cheek?

[Bari] With the T-shirt, the reason why there is “Friends” on it is because it has a minus [sign] on it. If you minus anything it’s “zero.” Minus life. Minus style. Minus food. Anything you put a minus to, you end up with zero.

So the whole meaning behind the T-shirt is that “minus friends” means “zero friends.” I’m just more alone.

Live alone. Die alone — that’s the whole meaning.

Has the “live alone, die alone” mantra changed at all in the last six months with the success and reception of the brand?

[Bari] It’s more of a lifestyle, you know. We want it to be something where you wake up and you wear that because that’s how you’re feeling. “I don’t want to take this T-shirt off for three months” type of shit. So, that’s always my vibe, and how I approach anything that I do.

Have you always considered yourself to be a private person?

[Bari] No, I’m always out there. I have friends. I have brothers. But I am VLONE. I am alone. I do spend time alone, but I do spend time with people. But sometimes you have to spend some time alone and work on you.

Rocky, in the past you said “the only thing mainstream about you were your investors.” Do you still think you maintain that independent spirit of going out and getting it without relying on outside sources?

[Rocky] One hundred thousand million percent. Yes. How do you deal with the feeling of wanting to be creative, but not being able to?

Does that happen to you?

[Bari] Not really socially, but more emotionally. I get into a family issue where I have to worry about my family and I can’t worry about anything else. That’s the only thing that gets me into a fashion block or a creative block.

Have you ever tried to spin that and use it as inspiration?

[Bari] Yeah. My whole clothing experience is just based on my life, you feel me? I don’t wake up and go buy the newest high fashion. I try to do things by beating around things instead of just going straight to the facts.

Not everybody can be me. Not everybody can be you. With that being said, you live alone and you die alone.

It’s a lifestyle.

You said in the past that Harlem was a major influence and that “style is in our DNA.” With the Harlem Renaissance of the late teens and into the 1930s serving as a major movement in culture, do you think Harlem is still a prominent, creative hub?

[Bari] No.

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What changed?

[Bari] Police taking away people’s freedom. You can’t do what you want to do in Harlem. You can’t chill on your stoop with your homeboys and cool all day and shit like that. Cookouts ain’t the same. Parades ain’t the same. I guess where I’m from — my ‘hood — is changing, and not for the good. The culture is just slowing fading away. I wish I had the time travel to go back and get that good Harlem feeling that I used to have. I live in California now, but every time I’m in New York, I stay in Harlem. I live in Harlem. I go back as much as I can. I appreciate what Harlem was.

And does that make it all back into the clothing?

[Bari] My thing is, what I do — the whole theme of A$AP — is taking Harlem and bringing it elsewhere.

Bringing it to London. Bringing it to Russia. Bringing it to Germany. It’s taking our culture and traveling with it and giving people the knowledge. So you look at A$AP and [you see] kids who made it from nothing to something.

Rocky, is Harlem still as much of a muse in fashion and music as it once was for you?

[Rocky] I think Harlem will always be an inspiration. I do agree that it’s gentrified. There are so many buildings and developments and shit going on there. People I grew up with don’t even live in the neighborhood anymore.

Was it a conscious decision to avoid Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles for the VLONE pop-up shop?

[Bari] Yes. Fairfax is not California to me. I know the person who built Fairfax who is Eddie Cruz. He started Undefeated, Supreme, Stussy. He’s from New York. What he saw was a new culture and brought it to California and started a whole streetwear culture and a whole block of streetwear brands. So that’s nothing new to me. Something new to me coming to California is going to Venice Beach and seeing amusement parks and lost boys. That’s what amazed me. I felt like Downtown was more of a New York feeling. It was crazy that Edison is close friends with Wes Lang and he was giving up his space and Edison bought the space from him and was like, “I’ve got this space downtown” and I called up my homie Paulie from Australia and was like, “We’ve got the chance, let’s whip it up.” The whole vibe of it was like Venice Beach/Dogtown.

An ’80s/’90s California skate vibe.

You also didn’t want to get lumped in with the streetwear label on Fairfax?

[Bari] I’m not streetwear. I’m not high fashion. I’m hood fashion. I do my shit for the hood niggas. I do my shit for the neighborhood drug dealer or anybody that is in the struggle.

Do you ever think the pop-up shop model is going to get overdone?

[Bari] A pop-up is like the best thing. It can’t be played out. The only way it’s going to get played out is if you play it out. With me doing pop-ups, you’ve gotta understand that I’m not doing it because Kanye West is doing pop-ups. You understand? I’m doing it because at the end of the day, I have these special pieces and I only want to sell them to a limited amount of people. When I sell it to these people, it’s out of my hands. A reseller might sell it or abuse it, but it’s out of my hands. Me breaking bread with the stores like Barneys? Why do I need to do that?

Cut out the middleman?

[Bari] Cut it out.

And you can also get the personal satisfaction of seeing someone purchase your items?

[Bari] Yes. When you come and purchase VLONE from a VLONE pop-up I’m probably 85 percent at the store handing you your own piece.

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Chasing Jeffery — Young Thug

Words Stephanie Smith-Strickland

Photography Assistant Sterling Pickett

Photography Thomas Welch

Styling Assistants Alaina Watts & Rae Lesperance

Styling Jenny Haapala

Special Thanks NĂĄtia

Grooming Jeffrey Clarke @ Clarke Shave Company

SWEATER NO.21

STRIPE BLAZER SANKUANZ

LEATHER JACKET FAITH CONNEXION STRIPE PANTS SANKUANZ

HANKERCHIEF VIVIENNE WESTWOOD SHOES GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI

TURTLENECK DRIES VAN NOTEN TRACK JACKET SANKUANZ FUR COAT COACH

When Young Thug burst into mainstream consciousness many labeled him a hip-hop purist’s nightmare. His lyrics were garbled, many times they were unintelligible. His impassioned keening, howls and yelps stood in the place of language. They were a feeling; an expression that went beyond the capabilities of speech. It makes sense for a personality who often feels so misunderstood that he intentionally avoids interviews.

A photoshoot. An interview. A popular talent. Multiple third-party connections. We know in advance that something will go wrong. So, when I arrived in Atlanta with our photographer and a stylist, I was laboring under no illusions that Young Thug’s cover shoot would miraculously follow schedule.

Nevertheless, there was still a fair bit of wind in our collective sails as we lugged five hockey bags of clothing and two duffels worth of accessories up the manicured lawn to the luxury home where the shoot would take place.

Amina, Thug’s day-to-day manager, had already been in contact to make sure we were adequately prepared for his arrival. Shortly after, Thug’s Atlantic Records publicist arrived, and suddenly it seemed like we might actually glide through the day with Southern charm and grace to spare. After sending an assistant out for a few last minute items requested on Thug’s behalf — multiple bags of candy, eye drops, fluffy slippers, hand towels, several buckets of KFC, and so on — all that was left to do was track down a mobile barber and spend some time pondering the paradoxical figure that is Jeffrey Lamar Williams.

We ended up spending all day on the pondering part, sans the artist. When the noon call time rolled around, Thug was still in the wind. At first his management was quick to assure us things were merely running behind schedule, which, to be honest, is standard. When an hour and then two and then three went by, we started to worry that something was seriously amiss. After a flurry of phone calls riddled with politely suppressed disgruntlement on both ends, we discovered Thug’s location: at home, sleeping. He’d been in an intense studio session with Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Birdman until around 9 a.m. that morning.

Furthermore, no one had told him he had a photoshoot. When it was all said and done, he’d simply been whisked back to his condo, where he fell into an exhausted slumber that absolutely no one was willing to rouse him from.

As a compromise, we were told there was a possibility he might wake up sometime around 7 p.m., but even that came with a ‘no promises’ disclaimer. Since our location doubled as a private home, we immediately had serious concerns about wearing our welcome thin, as we had only booked the space until early evening. In an effort to get ahead of the situation, we started to explore other options, namely Billboard, a recording studio frequented by Thug. We were assured it was where he spent many evenings, and was also likely the first place he would go when he joined the mortal realm again. The mere possibility he would show up was all we needed to pile into a car and head over. And there, amidst ’80s neon lighting, wall-length posters of famous rappers, and the underlying scent of marijuana and fried food, we met the one person who has no qualms about waking Thug up: His little sister, Dora.

Thug has developed a bit of a hit or miss reputation where interviews are concerned. He’s been known to spurn lengthy discussions with journalists in favor of one word answers, and has been described as somewhere between unnervingly intense and unintentionally combative in the interviews he does do. Earlier in the day, his publicist even warned me that he didn’t like the traditional question and answer format, so I was advised to treat our sit-down like a casual conversation if I wanted him to be responsive. If Thug is considered a difficult interview subject, then Dora would be his opposite. Effervescent, gregarious and disarmingly charming, she has the demeanor and attitude of a PR girl who always gets the client placement.

In fact, within 40 minutes of introducing herself, Dora singlehandedly averted impending disaster.

“Thug has a photoshoot? Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she asks, affronted. Sensing the tide changing in our favor, I explain how we came from New York for the shoot and tell her we have racks of clothing and enough food and candy to satisfy a large family on location. Dora immediately springs into action: wielding her cellphone like a weapon, she FaceTimes the necessary parties, arranges a car to take her to her brother’s condo, and assures us she will personally wake him and have him on set within an hour. She makes good, and around 10:45 p.m. a sleep-addled Young Thug finally arrives with his management in tow.

At 6 feet 3 inches tall, with a build like the sharp edge of a jack knife, Thug resists categorization, mostly because he’s a completely new breed of Atlanta oddball. Far removed from the funk-inflected, afrofuturist aesthetic of an OutKast, but still a bit too ostentatious to be one of the city’s lauded trap stars like 2 Chainz or T.I., Thug exists completely in a category of his own making. He’s been known to refer to close friends as “hubby” and often describes the things he likes as “sexy,” regardless of the subject. Even his fashion sense is uncharacteristically flamboyant, especially in comparison to industry peers like Gucci Mane or Travis Scott, whose more traditional brand of hyper-masculinity bleeds equally into their style and music.

Thug is so completely self-assured that he’s become an inadvertent champion of personal authenticity.

So much so, he is currently plastered on a giant billboard in New York City’s stylish SoHo neighborhood as part of Calvin Klein’s Fall 2016 global campaign. What’s more, Thug is wearing the hell out of a tunic dress and wide-leg pant combo from the brand’s women’s collection. The advertisement fittingly reads, “I disobey in #mycalvins.”

Despite the fact that his predilection for both men’s and women’s clothing led to much early debate about his sexual orientation, Thug has never faltered or changed. If anything, he became more resolute.

And, unsurprisingly, the gossip over his sartorial preferences is something Thug cares very little about.

“At the end of the day, I ain’t never gave a fuck about what people thought. I’m a small guy, I’m slim, and men’s clothes always fit me baggy and I never liked baggy clothes, never. I always used to try to get the smallest size in men’s and it still wouldn’t fit, but I could go get a pair of girl’s pants and it would fit how I want it to fit.”

“At the end of the day, I ain’t never gave a fuck about what people thought.”

It’s a simple explanation; it’s also something Thug knows he owes no one. But that’s the real mystery of Young Thug — he is so fiercely guarded by friends, family and his own silence that it’s genuinely difficult to tell what he cares about outside of his immediate circle; to whom he is adamantly loyal.

In past interviews, he’s revealed that he has personally made sure each and every one of his 11 siblings had everything they needed, be it a car, clothing or property. He even purchased a palatial home with an elevator for his mother, whom he refers to as “Big Duck.” She suffers from an enlarged heart, and Thug’s purchase was purely to make sure she no longer had to take stairs and risk her health.

Before I’m cleared for the interview, Manny, Thug’s official manager, conducts a test run that involves him pretending to be Thug and me rapidly crossing off the topics I am not to breach: No questions about rap beef, no inquiries about legal matters (this actually hadn’t even occurred to me), and no discussions about politics or social justice issues. “Just don’t ask him about shit he doesn’t care about,” Manny says, accompanying the ominous summation with a flick through his smartphone and a harried expression.

SWEATER MAISON MARGIELA

JACKET & PANTS KENZO

SUNGLASSES RETROSUPERFUTURE®

“I always used to try to get the smallest size in men’s and it still wouldn’t fit, but I could go get a pair of girl’s pants and it would fit how I want it to fit.”

While I reevaluate my approach, the number of spectators rises from Thug’s sister, his two managers and his publicist to several others who, on arrival, merely identify themselves as members of his team.

A stocky young man with neatly-kept locs seems to occupy the role of social media manager; he snaps iPhone pictures of Thug’s outfit details and jewelry with admirable solemnity. Meanwhile, at Thug’s request, Dora uncorks a small vial of cough syrup and begins to mix the concoction dubbed “dirty Sprite” by fellow Atlanta native, Future. When Thug asks for food, another young woman who previously introduced herself as “Thug’s sister” fixes him a generous plate of KFC chicken and sides.

Through it all, he seems to lean on Dora the most. He looks to her for confirmation that his outfits are well-styled, and in return she fusses over him, pushing an errant dreadlock out of his eye to get the perfect shot or bringing him whatever new accessory he requires. Thug even wears a chain that bears Dora’s name, and another that bears the name of his sister, Dolly; he also featured the two on his single, “Family.”

When I ask Dora if they’ve always been so close, she tells me they had bouts during their childhood where they would fight, but what person with siblings hasn’t? Yet, seeing Dora’s quiet protectiveness and then watching Thug return time and time again to an addictive substance mixed by her own hand wordlessly illustrates the complex relationship between love and enablement.

At one point, I even find myself drawn into Thug’s stable of helpers when a particularly tight-fitting Margiela shirt proves to be too much to handle; he has become slightly disoriented after a few deep swigs of spiked Sprite. “Can you please get this off?” he asks, far more soft-spoken than the passionately wailed and yelped ad libs of his music would imply. His stuporous state is accompanied by a slightly dazed expression, and it distantly reminds me of the sleepy-eyed innocence of a drowsy child. Though he easily dwarfs me by six inches or more, he suddenly seems very approachable, and perhaps even a little vulnerable.

Not 30 minutes later, that part of Thug has all but disappeared. His schedule was dramatically set back by his day-long siesta, so I end up interviewing him in a car en route to the studio. Perhaps the prospect of a long night of music has perked him up, because Thug suddenly becomes more animated. He cracks a joke, graciously allows our photographer to take candid photos, and listens intently to my questioning in 10 to 15 second bursts before he’s pulled in more interesting directions, namely answering a FaceTime call from fellow Atlanta native and Duct Tape Entertainment rapper, Trouble.

“Sorry,” he tells me, sounding genuinely apologetic. Trouble, who Thug refers to as his brother, has spotted the flash of a camera and soon has questions about the random white dude snapping pictures in Thug’s backseat. “They doing an interview on me,” Thug says, before officially making introductions: “this is Trouble, he’s on a song with me.” Trouble is standing in a studio booth holding an AK-47, and Thug bursts into a fit of delighted laughter when he sees it. Frankly, eavesdropping on the two is much better than any conversation I could ever have with Thug, simply because he is in his element. He’s chatting with a genuine friend and not some interviewer who may or may not have nice things to say about him after the fact.

“That nigga crazy,” he says with an almost paternal sense of pride when Trouble finally hangs up.

Fresh off of such a relaxed conversation, it seems like the right moment to ask him about his aversion to interviews.

“I’m a quiet person and my main thing is that I want to be private,” he responds after a slight pause.

“Plus, a lot of interviewers just take a piece of what you say and then turn it around on you.” He tells me about a particular radio experience that ended with a single comment being mashed up with a Lil Wayne interview from 15 years earlier, just to make it appear that the two were fighting. Considering he’s had his fair share of media-fueled drama with Wayne, whom he often refers to as one of his influences, it’s not hard to see why a misquote of that magnitude would leave him with a once bitten, twice shy mentality toward journalists.

“Me and my mom was talking last night in the car,” Thug continues. “I was telling her I’m misunderstood to the point I don’t like to talk no more. I know the type of person I am and God knows the type of person I am, so I don’t got to do an interview to explain myself to nobody.”

The studio, however, is one place Thug seems to feel very comfortable talking. We trail him in, hoping to catch another glimpse of what he’s like in the company of friends and family. I’m also curious to see his notoriously chaotic creative process in real time. He had already told me he never writes down song lyrics, but rather occasionally draws pictures that somehow turn into songs. The process sounds almost like the equivalent of a picture-rhythm synesthesia.

“I might draw a head with, like, Goku hair, and then I might start with the left side of his ear and go to the right side of his ear and the way I do his hair, those are my rhythms,” he explains. “So, if I draw his hair and it’s like porcupines going all up and down then when I started rapping I’m going to rap with that melody.

That’s only sometimes though, not the majority of the time. Mostly I just hear a good beat and it turns me on and I’m just like, ‘Fuck, let’s go.’”

“Fuck, let’s go.”

Thug’s “fuck, let’s go” moments are so prolific that he often has to relearn the lyrics to songs he’s recorded years and months in advance before releasing them to the public. On this evening, he is joined by several Atlanta-based producers, Quavo of Migos and numerous other local rappers. Thug, with a pistol slipped neatly between his waistband and boxers, is perfecting a liltingly melodic track that is a catchy ode to the wonders of a well-lubricated vagina. His signature ad libs are front and center; this time it’s a mellifluous “whoa whoa.” After the track plays a few times, there is some debate about whether the ad libs should be expanded past the hook into the entirety of the song. “My girl told me that was the best part,” Thug says, referring to his fiance Jerrika Karlae. “But we can’t have it everywhere; it’s too much.”

Ultimately it’s the arrival of Birdman, who is accompanied by his older brother, Slim — the less-seen cofounder of Cash Money Records — that shifts the raucous tone of the evening. While Birdman disappears into a back room, Slim makes his way into Thug’s session. As he enters, the room falls into such a hush that even the persistent haze of smoke clouds seems suspended in stillness. Thug solemnly pulls out a chair and seats Slim with all the reverence due to any respected elder. They shake hands in a ceremonial manner and then, with a rapt audience around him, Thug plays his new music. Slim says little in front of the crowd, but when he departs Thug seems satisfied by his reaction. Around 2:30 a.m., we finally head outside to find Thug and his sister chatting in the parking lot. Consummate night owls, it seems they will continue the session well into daylight. Now fully awake and reigning as king of the castle, Thug bids us a goodnight and tells us to get home safe before meandering back towards the studio.

I wonder what Slim will tell him about the new songs when they finally have a moment of privacy, but I also have a feeling that even if it’s decided they’re not quite perfect yet, Thug will easily figure it out.

He said it himself: “I think God gave me the gift of having the courage to just do me.” So far, it’s been working in his favor.

SWEATER NO.21

STRIPE BLAZER SANKUANZ

LEATHER JACKET FAITH CONNEXION

HANKERCHIEF VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Nordic Invasion Words Alec Leach Photography Nick Thompson Styling Atip W Hair Kristopher Smith using Bumble and Bumble Make-Up Nikki using MAC Cosmetics Casting Director Sarah Bunter Producer Alex Oley Models Jordan @ Wilhelmina London & Grace @ Viva Models

Over the past few years, Scandinavian brands like Acne Studios, Norse Projects and Our Legacy have staged a silent takeover of men’s wardrobes, luring countless guys all over the globe with their modern, functional clothing. We went behind the scenes to find out what exactly it is that makes the region so successful when it comes to menswear, with a few interviews with some of Sweden and Denmark’s foremost labels.

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KNIT OUR LEGACY

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SHIRT & JACKET YMC × KATHERINE HAMNETT, TROUSERS NORSE PROJECTS

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Just think of Scandinavia and all sorts of clichés will spring to mind. There’s the usual stereotypes of beautiful blue-eyed women, egalitarian societies and freezing-cold winters, but when it comes to design, the Nordic region is synonymous with a particular kind of understated, utilitarian style. Designers from Scandinavia — Sweden and Denmark in particular — have perfected a low-key aesthetic that can be found across all design disciplines, from furniture to glassware.

Scandinavian menswear is all about functional minimalism; it’s those basic wardrobe staples that everyone needs, but perfected and simplified. The look feels pretty tame compared to genrebending concoctions from the likes of Rick Owens, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of Scandinavian brands when you realize just how many guys are drawn to them these days. Workplace dress codes are relaxing across the board, and it’s no longer unusual for men to be passionate about what they wear, so the appeal of considered, high-quality clothing is obvious.

Look at any retailer in the “contemporary” section of the men’s market — i.e. anything that’s not streetwear, designer fashion or tailoring — and chances are, you’ll notice there’s a lot of Swedish and Danish brands in the mix. They’re basically doing to your wardrobe what IKEA does to your home: putting good design within arm’s reach. It’s clothing for men with refined taste, for guys who care about what they wear, but who don’t want anything too trendy.

Back in February, a Danish government minister opened Copenhagen Fashion Week with the eye-opening claim that the entire country’s menswear exports had increased by 20% in 2015 alone. Swedish labels have grown at a similarly explosive rate.

That’s not to say that the rest of the Nordic region is a styleless wasteland, but when it comes to clothing, Norway, Finland and the like just don’t have the same prestige as their more prominent neighbors (though it’s worth noting that Kanye West’s Design Director, Sasu Kauppi, is Finnish).

The Swedish and Danish invasion is even more apparent when you look at the bigger picture. American brands are chasing trends, Japan is too inward-looking, and the British and Italians are stuck in the past, unable to think beyond tired clichés of how a man should look. There’s a gap in the contemporary menswear market, and Scandinavian labels are filling it; if you want something modern, but not too flashy, then labels like Norse Projects, Acne Studios and Our Legacy are a no-brainer. The only other country rivaling Scandinavia’s menswear excellence is

France; Parisian labels like A.P.C. and AMI, just like their Nordic peers, excel in catering to clued-up guys who are just looking for something nice to wear on the weekend.

“The strength of Nordic menswear is more to do with lifestyle than trend,” Henrik Ralf Nielsen tells me. Henrik has over a decade’s experience in the Danish fashion industry, both as the Executive Editor of Fashion Forum, which is pretty much Denmark’s Business of Fashion, and as part of the Danish Fashion Institute, an organization charged with the development of the country’s industry. “It reflects the way people in Scandinavia live their lives,” he continues. “It isn’t testing the boundaries of how men can dress, it’s just tweaking classic styles to suit a man that lives in a country with a flat hierarchy.”

“ T he strength of Nordic menswear is more to do with lifestyle than trend... It reflects the way people in Scandinavia live their lives.”

— Henrik Ralf Nielsen When it comes to equality and egalitarianism, the Nordic states are world leaders. They’re not overrun with rampaging, out-of-control capitalism like the UK and USA; they’re the kind of places where men go on maternity leave and university students are actually paid to study. Scandinavians’ tastes are pretty lowkey, they’re not big on crass displays of materialism, so for many of them, functional clothing that isn’t too trendy just works. Where the world’s fashion capitals are constantly reinventing themselves, constantly looking for the next big thing, places like Copenhagen and Stockholm are quiet and free from hysteria — who wants to change their wardrobe every six months anyway?

Nordic labels’ lifestyle-driven approach to clothing is what’s resonating with people all over the globe —not just the corner of northern Europe that those brands call home. “Trend” is not a favorable word among the majority of the Western male population (neither is “fashion,” when you think about it). Progress is being made, but men, as a rule, are pretty conservative dressers, so it’s easy to see the appeal of a premium product that’s done just right. Buy a few well-designed wardrobe staples and you’re done. That’s not to say that all Scandi brands are one and the same; each of the labels I spoke to for this story is bringing something new to the market, but they’re doing it with their feet on the ground and the needs of ordinary guys in mind.

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“Coming from a small place, you quickly realize that you need to travel in order to spread your message and communicate with likeminded people,” Silas Adler, co-founder of Copenhagen brand Soulland explains. Silas, a self-confessed skate head, started Soulland 10 years ago with his good friend Jacob Kampp-Berliner, and says that the international network he built from years of skating and traveling was invaluable in getting his label off the ground. Copenhagen doesn’t attract attention in the same way New York or Paris does, so it’s important for Danish talents to be proactive and really put themselves out there. Silas and Jacob are down-to-earth, friendly guys, and their extrovert mindset is plain to see — Silas even gave out his phone number at Soulland’s Spring/Summer 2016 presentation, in case anyone wanted him to personally explain the collection to them. He adds that many of his successful Danish peers share a similarly outgoing worldview.

“ C oming from a small place, you quickly realize that you need to travel in order to spread your message and communicate with likeminded people.”

— Silas Adler The pair’s easygoing nature translates in their work, too.

Soulland’s collections feel Scandinavian, but they’ve got an eclectic, youthful flair to them. “We don’t have one guy, it’s more fluid,” Silas says. “We’ll have the streetwear scene kids, hip-hop, techno, gay, straight, Middle Eastern, black kids, Danish kids, we even have a lot of customers who are over 40.” Soulland’s recent Nike SB collab is one for the skaters, but in the brand’s Fall/Winter 2016 collection you’ll also find flowery pants, huge shaggy cardigans and dip-dyed roll-necks in among all the usual menswear essentials. “Our strength is that we’re talking to a bunch of different people,” he adds. And that strength shows; Soulland’s turnover has grown 50% each year since 2013.

Copenhagen’s thriving menswear scene is home to many other labels sharing Soulland’s outlook — and success. The likes of Norse Projects, RAINS, Han Kjøbenhavn, Elka, Libertine Libertine, Wood Wood, and Rascals all have their own identities and stories, but they’re united by a lifestyle-driven approach to design, and a price point that’s within the reach of most guys with a bit of disposable income. “Denmark is a very free country,

it’s not hard to start a business,” Silas explains. “I wouldn’t say easy, but you can get a loan to get started.” For all this talk of style, aesthetics and design, fashion is a business at the end of the day, and a brand will never succeed if it’s impossible for it to get off the ground in the first place. “In somewhere like Milan, you can just see that it’s so hard to come up, so people don’t even try,” Adler adds.

A short five-mile drive from Copenhagen, just across the Øresund strait, Sweden’s menswear labels are embarked on a similar quest for world dominance. The country’s neighbors consider it to be the most chic — some would say aloof — of the Nordic states, and while the Danes and Swedes share a rich design heritage, there are distinct differences between their outlooks when it comes to clothing. If the Danish are all about easygoing lifestyle, then the Swedish — their historic rivals — are a lot more style-conscious.

No brand embodies the Swedish success story like Acne Studios. What started as 100 pairs of jeans given out to friends and family has, in almost 20 years, grown into a full-fledged fashion house, with prices to match. Unlike most of its peers, Acne is more than happy to play the fashion game; the brand shows in Paris, and its fashion week presentations are filled with boundary-pushing, androgynous geek chic. However, it’s still modern-day utilitarianism that’s made the brand the contemporary fashion giant that it is today; Acne’s turnover is well over €100 million, and you’ll find its clothing in 66 countries around the world. Where Danish menswear is accessible, everyman clothing, Acne’s collections are elevated — they’re still functional, but they’re aimed at a more fashionable customer.

Take Acne’s Ryder pant. It’s a wool trouser with an elasticized waist, loose leg, front pleat and crease-resistant finish. It’s smart, but comfy as hell, and it won’t get crumpled in the hustle and bustle of the average day-to-day. You can wear it with pretty much anything and when it’s paired with a matching jacket, you’ve got a suit that’s free from all the fuss that normally comes with wool tailoring. Acne’s Charles coat, meanwhile, takes the topcoat — a menswear staple if ever there was one — and turns it into a 21st century piece of casualwear, thanks to an elongated silhouette, dropped shoulders and unlined construction. It’s that sort of clever-but-familiar design that’s made Acne a staple for guys working in the fashion industry — people just can’t get enough of all those perfectly executed essentials.

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KNIT & JACKET STUDIO NICHOLSON, PANTS WOOD WOOD

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TOP NORSE PROJECTS, SHIRT NANAMICA

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Like Acne, Our Legacy has quietly infiltrated wardrobes all over the globe, and like Acne, its collections are built on witty interpretations of men’s basics. You can’t accuse the brand of playing it safe though; Our Legacy is almost Margiela-esque in its love of the strange and unusual. Its oddball eccentricity means staples are never quite what you’d expect; T-shirts are cut from toweling fabric, shirts are given a heavily-washed, worn-in feel, sweaters are turned inside-out and turtlenecks have their collars cut in half. Weird statement pieces are there to push the customer into something a bit more daring: how about a tie-dyed bomber? A suede windbreaker? Or a parka crafted from handdyed nylon paper?

“Well-educated, with high integrity, and open to try new things” is how Our Legacy co-founder Jockum Hallin describes his customer. It’s easy to see how Hallin’s label has become a menswear favorite; Our Legacy pushes boundaries, but does so in a way that’s easy to relate to. Our Legacy’s business is growing 15-20% year on year, and the UK and USA are the brand’s strongest markets. Hallin is pretty modest on his achievements though. “The winters in Sweden are long and cold, and summers are short, so we stay inside and work hard,” he tells me. Interestingly, Jockum is the person I interviewed who’s willing to describe his label as a fashion brand — albeit an “unconventional” one.

“Sweden has a strong heritage of functional and straightforward design, especially in architecture and product design,” Eytys co-founder and Acne Studios alumnus Max Schiller explains. “When the same modern, no-fuss aesthetic is applied to fashion, it’s strong, minimal and functional — which is very much how men like to dress.” At just three years old, his brand has experienced explosive growth, and is now stocked at 200 accounts worldwide — including Dover Street Market, colette and Opening Ceremony. When you take a look at the product in Eytys’ (pronounced “eighties”) collections, it’s not hard to see why.

Characterized by an extra-thick rubber sole, cork footbed and purple pull-tab on the heel, the brand’s unisex sneakers are basically grown-up skate shoes that are built to last, thanks to their extra-thick rubber sole. As Schiller is keen to point out, you can wear Eytys’ shoes with pretty much anything, and they’ll suit everyone from a 20-year-old student to a clued-up dad. It’s a single-minded, design-driven approach to clothing, and Schiller is reluctant to describe his label as a fashion brand. “We’re much more about product than fashion, and we find it hard to relate to the fast-paced and trend-sensitive fashion world,” he tells me.

“ W hen the same modern, no-fuss aesthetic is applied to fashion, it’s strong, minimal and functional — which is very much how men like to dress.”

— Max Schiller Some of Eytys’ chic-but-functional Swedish peers include CMMN SWDN, Tres Bien’s in-house label, Stutterheim and L’homme Rouge. The list could go on forever, really; the thing with Scandinavian style is that absolutely anyone can relate to it in some way or another. Oxford shirts, wool topcoats and pleated trousers are blank canvases — they can be worn by a million different people in a million different ways. People want to believe they’re investing in their wardrobes by buying longlasting clothing, by wearing stuff that won’t be thrown away after six months. The minimalist look might be everywhere these days, but you couldn’t really call it a trend — it’s too accessible, too agreeable, too functional. There’s no fuss, no hype to it, and it’s going to be hard for guys to move on from it because it just works. It looks like the Nordic menswear invasion has only just begun then.

203

Zayn’s World — Zayn Malik

Words Nico Amarca

Producer Jean Jarvis

Photography Robert Wunsch

Photography Assistant Robert Hammann

Styling Chantal Drywa

Styling Assistant Zoya Skya

Grooming Shannon Pezzetta

Light Assistant Alex Fenyves

Casting Director Anissa Payne

JACKET & HOODIE GIVENCHY

SWEATER CHRISTOPHER KANE

By definition, Zayn Malik contains all the trappings of a celebrity, but the perks of fame and fortune weren’t enough to compensate his desire for creative freedom. Now, over a year since his notorious divorce from One Direction, the singer explains that while he’s enjoying his new independence, the repercussions of stardom are still a struggle.

The unremitting desire to achieve notoriety is a human sentiment that stands the test of time. While some are more adamant in their pursuits and others may be striving for it subconsciously, what remains uniform for everyone is wanting to be recognized and lauded for our achievements. Prom Queen. Employee of the Month. Most Valuable Player. Volunteer of the Year. All of these titles were invented to award someone for excelling at a particular trait or action, whether that’s spending your spare time serving up food at a soup kitchen or being the most fashionable person in your high school.

While everyone wants to be personally celebrated for something, it would be ill-advised to hastily suggest that anyone seeks to strive for “celebrity.” On paper, the term strikes nothing but the most lustful layer of the retina - global praise from complete strangers, making a living through a cherished craft and powerful access, both personally and publicly. Trying to negate the allure of this scenario is strenuous, but once the glossy sheen of the wet ink dries, more and more smudges appear the closer you look.

Exchanging personal freedom for such a lifestyle may seem trivial when taken at face value. Not being able to shop for groceries without being accosted or photographed by someone at any given moment, forced interactions with sycophantic enablers looking to leech off your success or being told how to behave and dress under contractual obligation might seem like minor payoffs when your cultural influence, relevance and affluence stand (seemingly) unconquered.

But it was the very paucity of these freedoms that lead to the demise of celebrated figures across various periods in pop culture, from Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland to Kurt Cobain and Britney Spears.

The dark side of fame is certainly not a new concept, but it’s one that continues to be revisited and consumed time and again.

“I hate the word celebrity,” says Zayn Malik, a guy who knows a thing or two about living life in the public eye. “I think it’s a dangerous road to go down, thinking of yourself as a celebrity, because then you somehow automatically think that label makes you superior to other people. Some people just want to hang around you because they know your name, so they think that means they know you, and I can see through that bullshit a mile off.” As one of the most recognizable contemporary pop stars in the business, Zayn’s adroit ability to spot bullshit when he sees it could be his greatest talent - aside from his musical capabilities, of course.

The British 23-year-old’s recognition as an individual singer wasn’t always as potent. Before being acknowledged simply as Zayn, he was known as Zayn Malik, a one-fifth singing counterpart of the colossally popular UK boy band, One Direction. For over five years, Malik sang, danced, clothed and even groomed himself in accordance with the group’s brand policies. “We were literally meant to ask permission before we changed our hair or like, grew a beard,” notes Malik. “It was ridiculous.” Yet this chapter in the singer’s life would close on March 25, 2015, when he announced his permanent departure from 1D, marking the dawn of Zayn 2.0 - a move that would promote a distinct evolution in sound, attitude and facial hair for the artist.

“I don’t think you can ever be prepared for something like that,” said Malik. “I knew there would be a big reaction in the press, because there was so much attention on us at that point, but I had no idea how fans would react.” While he may not have known exactly how fans would react, it’s hard to believe that Zayn didn’t have at least an inkling of how monumental the news would be for his followers.

With the force of Leviathan, the internet was violently pummeled by a tidal wave of tweets, Facebook updates and Instagram posts from emotionally-vulnerable adolescents, most of them female, exclaiming that the day of reckoning had finally come. The hashtag #AlwaysInOurHeartsZaynMalik hovered as the number one trending topic for a full 24 hours, while a much darker hashtag, #cut4zayn, trumpeted a disturbing trend of girls carving Malik’s name into their forearms with razorblades as a means to eulogize his departure from the beloved pop group.

It was a day that claimed a fragment of countless teenage girls’ souls; an emotional apocalypse defined by gallons of tears, razed hormones and distressed parents. “I try not to take [my actions] into consideration too much because if I did, I’d never do anything,” Malik proclaims. “It’s a lot of pressure. I never claimed to be a role model, I just make music.”

It’s astounding to fathom just how grave an impact such a decision could have on literally millions of people in nearly every crevice of the world. You might’ve lost a few friends when you quit the football team to join the drama club, or had a nasty rumor spread about you after you broke up with a girlfriend to start dating her best friend, but in Zayn’s case, a personal choice holds such clout that it can puppeteer the mental stability of legions at the drop of a hat. Throw social media into the mix, and the repercussions are inescapable.

“Everyone has an opinion on social media, even though they don’t know you, and it gets exhausting.”

“It was great seeing the support I was getting from a lot of people, but there was also a lot of negativity and criticism and people talking shit about situations they knew nothing about,” said Malik. “Everyone has an opinion on social media, even though they don’t know you, and it gets exhausting. You get misquoted in the press or a bullshit rumor gets printed and it’s frustrating to watch people believe those things and form opinions on you based on what they read. I’ve learnt to ignore it for the most part, but it still pisses me off occasionally.”

Though he cited privacy as the principal reason for leaving the band, the singer’s life today couldn’t be positioned closer to the pounding rays of the media limelight. In March 2016, the one-year anniversary of his notorious divorce from One Direction, Malik released his debut album, Mind of Mine, via his new label affiliate RCA. Following the success of the LP’s first single, “PILLOWTALK,” which broke records back in February for having the most global first-day and weekly streams for a debut artist track (and knocking fellow pop deity Justin Bieber from his glorious Billboard reign in the process), Mind of Mine bulldozed its way to number one on both the U.S. and UK charts, becoming the first solo album from a British male singer to do so.

In addition to his musical feats, post-1D Zayn would also gain acceptance from the fashion community; from sitting tête-à-tête with the industry’s front row elite at Louis Vuitton and Valentino’s SS16 shows last summer to turning heads in a metallic-sleeved Versace suit at this year’s Met Gala, and, most recently, landing a collaboration with Italian shoe designer Giuseppe Zanotti. “I like to express creativity in as many different ways as possible and I’m always exploring new things. Designing shoes was an interesting form of art for me because I was having to create something that has aesthetic value, like music or painting, but is functional at the same time.”

T-SHIRT ACNE

JACKET CHRISTOPHER KANE

“You have to not give a shit what people think about you.

You have to guide your own career and not follow other people’s expectations of what kind of artist they want you to be.”

Creative projects notwithstanding, the hype fueling Zayn’s popularity can perhaps only be trumped by his widely publicized love life: his girlfriend just so happens to be social media queen and ubiquitous “It Girl” Gigi Hadid, and together they form one of the most mooned-over millennial couples in Hollywood. So much for a guy who wanted a bit of privacy.

But while the ex-boy band member has all of the accoutrements of an A-lister, there’s still something very authentic about him. “It’s cynical to say, but I think to really ‘make it’ in a commercial sense, you have to be a bit of a faker. If you’re not going to be fake, then you need a really thick skin,” says the pop star.

“You have to not give a shit what people think about you. You have to guide your own career and not follow other people’s expectations of what kind of artist they want you to be.”

Zayn’s dauntlessness is a clear attribute to his prosperity, but his career in entertainment thus far has served as a training period, forcing him to build up an armor thick enough to dodge the countless adversities thrown his way. It comes with the territory for every pop icon, but Malik’s cases of objectification cut a bit deeper.

Born and raised in the working class neighborhood of Bradford, West Yorkshire to a half Irish, half English mother and Pakistani father, Malik’s ethnic background has been put under fire throughout the entirety of his career. As the (former) only person of color in One Direction and quite possibly the West’s single most prominent Muslim celebrity, Zayn has faced a bevy of abuse in the form of anti-Muslim slurs and even death threats.

In June 2012, rightwing American blogger Debbie Schlussel accused him of “boy band jihad” and “pimping Islam,” while earlier this year, rapper Azealia Banks, after accusing the artist of lifting her image in the video for “Like I Would,” took shots at Malik’s race on Twitter, spitting out terms like “sand nigger,” “faggot” and “curry-scented bitch,” and even referred to Malik’s mother as a “dirty refugee.”

“Generally, I try not to comment on politics or controversial issues in public because I don’t think that it’s my place,” says Malik. “I struggle with the invasion of privacy that comes with this job. I also think one of the most negative aspects of being in the public eye is that you have no control over people’s perception of you.”

But despite the crunches, Malik has never shied away from being proud of his ethnic background, discernibly demonstrated in one of Mind of Mine’s more distinct ballads, “INTERMISSION: fLoWer,” where Malik incorporates Qawwali vocal techniques with lyrics written in Urdu. Given the record-shattering success of Malik’s career sans 1D, it seems the singer has more than conquered the odds faced against him.

So what’s next for Zayn? “I’m in the studio right now,” says the singer. “That’s all I’m saying.” For his sophomore album, it’s been confirmed that Malik will record with Malay, the LA-based beat master responsible for Mind of Mine’s lush electro-R&B production, and whose additional credits include mastering Frank Ocean’s 2012 pièce de résistance, channel ORANGE. But as far as a release date goes, well, that still remains in the shadows.

“One of the defining things about this whole experience is that there have been a lot of emotions, sometimes conflicting emotions, that I’m having to figure out,” notes Malik. “I’m curious to see where it all goes from here. The not knowing is what makes it exciting, but daunting, too. And I’m appreciative of the fact that I have this opportunity. I don’t ever let myself take this for granted.”

JACKET & HOODIE GIVENCHY

SWEATER CHRISTOPHER KANE

DENIM & SHOES DIOR HOMME

F/W

Umit Benan

Gravel Photography Sascha Heintze Styling Naz & Kusi [Tzarkusi] Hair Pawel Solis @ Atomo Management Photography Assistant Stefania Fresch Model Ingmar van der Meulen @ Success Models Paris

2 016

F/W

Opening Ceremony

Peacocking Photography Thomas Welch Styling Jenny Haapala Grooming Ayaka Nihei using MAC Cosmetics Casting Jibran Siddiqui Photography Assistant Byran Luna Styling Assistant Joel Norman Model Conrad Bischoff @ Red models

2 016

SWEATER, JACKET, PANTS & SHOES OPENING CEREMONY

TOP, JACKET, COAT, PANTS & SHOES OPENING CEREMONY, GLASSES GARRETT LEIGHT

SHIRT, SWEATER, CARDIGAN, PANTS & SHOES OPENING CEREMONY, GLASSES GARRETT LEIGHT, SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN

TOP, SWEATER, PANTS & SHOES OPENING CEREMONY, GLASSES GARRETT LEIGHT

T-SHIRT, PANTS, SCARF & BEANIE ESPRIT BY OPENING CEREMONY

F/W

GUCCI

Insomnia Photography Stephenie Kay L.C Styling O_C Hair Harry Lau Make-Up Angel Mok Photography Assistants Keith Hui & Fei Lung Model Edwina @ Starz People

2 016

Travel

Introduction Nick Schonberger Words Benji Wagner Photography Parker Woods

24 Hours in Rose City Fans of the comedy series Portlandia will know Portland, Oregon is a city of characters. It’s got quirks and peculiarities, and these are, thankfully, rarely hidden — artisan goods and barista behaviors gleefully lampooned for television by Armisen and co. And within its limits, Portland manages a healthy balance of old/new, concrete/green space and, well, pretty much any other yin/yang.

Analog record stores share blocks with digital agencies, avantgarde clothing shops are situated next to thrift treasure troves, and in the same food cart pod (yes, those exist) one can find both chicken & waffles and vegan BBQ. Going from walking a vibrant urban grid and hiking a dense forest is possible in essentially the time it takes to watch an episode of Hot Ones (a web series where celebrities are interviewed while eating hot wings). Craft brewers serve the standards and the unimaginable. Chefs turn the elevated into street food, and vice versa. As such, Portland is one of America’s best places to stoke creativity and fuel the imagination. Plus, you can pretty much always wear a T-shirt.

It’s only natural a city with balance of typical urban pursuits and immediate access to the greater outdoors would birth a brand like Benji Wagner’s Poler Stuff. Hitting the sweet spot between action sports and wilderness pursuits, Poler Stuff embodies Portland’s eternal humor and creative spirit. Likewise, Wagner understands the local dyad, celebrating in equal measure neighborhood treasures and national recognized hot spots.

This is Wagner’s Portland.

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Portland

Ace Hotel

Kure Juice Bar

The Ace was a game changer in the West End. Sure, the Seattle Ace was the first, but it was really the Portland location that established the hotel’s reputation. The unique lo-fi/highbrow combo brought new life to the area and was ahead of its time.

Now that so many shops have clustered around it, including our Poler Flagship store right next door, the Ace is a better place to spend the night than ever before. Stumptown Coffee in the lobby makes hipster dawn (noon) a little easier after that late night drinking at the subterranean bar beneath the hotel, Pepe Le Moko.

Every city has its own version of Kure and ours is as good as any. My go-to spot for fresh juices, smoothies and acai bowls.

My favorite is the Bowl of the Gods, an acai bowl with peanut butter mixed in for some protein. They have expanded to five locations throughout the city, including the Eastside where I live and work as well as a new flagship location in the West End right up the street from the Ace.

Address 1022 SW Stark St

Address 4409 SE Hawthorne Blvd

Website acehotel.com

Website kurejuicebar.com

233

Travel

West End District

The Columbia River Gorge

Powell’s Books is the heart and soul of downtown Portland.

I think it is the largest bookstore in the country, and one of the only ones that is still family owned and operated. If you are a bibliophile you can spend days in here thumbing through books of all kinds. The art and design section alone is larger than most bookstores in America. Immediately adjacent to Powell’s is the Pearl District, home to Weiden+Kennedy, great restaurants and shops of all kinds. The Pearl was the first part of town to see new condos and an influx of money and construction, so it’s a bit more established in that way than other parts of town.

On the other side of Burnside Street from Powell’s is the West End, which was on a different timeline than the Pearl. This area has changed dramatically in the last couple years, with loads of renovations and new businesses flourishing. Anchored by the Ace, it features Union Way, Frances May, Poler, Woonwinkel and many more. Check out the #downtownproper postcards available at retailers in this area for a complete guide.

Head just 30 minutes out of town to Multnomah Falls, one of the largest waterfalls in the country. Take the Columbia River Scenic Byway out to Vista House and take in one of the most epic river views in the country. A little further along you will pass a half a dozen waterfalls and hiking opportunities of every level from easy walk to all day jaunt until you finally end up at Multnomah Falls. At 620 feet tall it is one of the grandest waterfalls in America. The byway itself is quintessential Northwest, perfect for motorcycling or driving under a canopy of green. If you want to drive a little further head to Hood River, a small resort town at the foot of Mt. Hood and a great jumping off point for further outdoor activities of pretty much every kind.

234

Portland

Hat Yai

Stumptown on Division

Chef Earl Ninsom should have already been on your radar for Lang Baan, his incredible prix fixe Thai restaurant that is one of the most difficult seats to get in Portland. I consider my dinner there to be one of the best meals I have ever eaten. Hat Yai is his new casual spot on Killingsworth in NE Portland. The focus is on the fried chicken, which is served with a rich curry sauce and unusually sticky rice, a slab of roti bread, and another sweet and spicy sauce of some kind. It’s quite simple yet the flavors are complex and wonderful.

This is the original Stumptown location and my local cafe.

Stumptown was one of the first brands to popularize single origin, high quality coffee in a post Starbucks world. It’s as good a cup as you will have anywhere in the world thanks to founder Duane Sorenson’s dedication to building long term relationships with the farmers themselves and a dedication to quality control that never eases up. I live up the street and am there every morning. It’s as close to my Cheers as I will probably ever get.

Try the new cold brew drinks like the Duane Sorenson (named after the founder), an amalgamation of cold brew coffee, and an Arnold Palmer that is my new summertime drink of choice.

Address 1605 NE Killingsworth St

Address 4525 SE Division St

Website hatyaipdx.com

Website stumptowncoffee.com

235

Travel

Ava Genes

The Woodsman Tavern

One of the best Italian restaurants in Portland, or anywhere for that matter. Chef Joshua McFadden beings a modern vegetable-driven sensibility to an ever changing locally-sourced menu. Joshua has his first cookbook coming out next year, after making a splash with Ava Genes over the past couple of years. He is a savant with vegetables in particular, creating simple combinations that are anything but traditional. I always tell people to close your eyes while eating the salads and try and pick out what you are eating without looking at the ingredients.

I can’t do it, and I doubt almost anyone can. It’s cool to realize that after all the food you have eaten in your lifetime, someone like Joshua can come up with combinations of very simple, natural ingredients that engage your taste buds in a way you never thought possible.

The Woodsman is a great American restaurant and bar owned

by Duane Sorenson, founder of Stumptown Coffee. It’s my neighborhood local, so I’m biased, but the cocktails are as good as I’ve ever had and the vibe is pure Portland.

Address 3377 SE Division St

Address 4537 SE Division St

Website avagenes.com

Website woodsmantavern.com

236

Portland

Crystal Ballroom

Olympia Provisions

This is the classic spot to see a band in Portland. Built in 1914, it’s not too big, not too small, has floor to ceiling windows and fancy chandeliers, and the old wooden floors actually bounce when things get cooking. I’m not just saying that, this is one of the only ballrooms left with a ‘floating’ or ‘sprung’ wooden dance floor that adds a bounce to your step. The Grateful Dead played here and so has pretty much everyone you can think of, most recently Portland Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard (yes, the basketball star) played his first concert here.

Screen Door is my favorite brunch and the best Southern food in the city in my opinion. I used to go there all the time for the chicken and sweet potato waffles, and the banoffee pie is one of the greatest things I have ever eaten, bar none. The problem is that a few years back, the word got out and the line is now so long you should bring a camp stool and a Tolstoy novel.

Standing in line forever in a town with this much good food is bananas, at least that’s how I feel. So Olympia Provisions is my go to. There may be a wait here too, but it’s manageable. These guys are famous for their sausage, and rightfully so, but it’s the brunch I dig the most. Hard to recommend anything specific because I have never had anything disappoint. Lunch is also great; if you like sandwiches, and since you can read this, and are a human, I assume you like sandwiches.

Address 1332 W Burnside St

Address 107 SE Washington St

Website crystalballroompdx.com

Website olympiaprovisions.com

237

The Life & Times of Desiigner Words Stephanie Smith-Strickland Photography Robert Wunsch Styling Chantal Drywa Casting Director Anissa Payne Producer Jean Jarvis Photography Assistant Brendan Phelan Styling Assistant Josie Danziger

POLO SHIRT, HOODIE & COAT GIVENCHY

“I’m catching up on sleep, ya know? I’m just trying to keep grinding and keep my creative ideas going. I’m doing this BET ‘Rip the Runway’ thing right now.” Desiigner is his usual buoyant self when our team arrives at MILK Studios for an in-person followup on a phone interview. Anyone who has seen Desiigner perform live or even seen the video of him catching Pokemon in Central Park knows that a phone interview would do no justice to such an ebullient, rapidly-speaking personality.

Nevertheless, finding time to chat has been a feat of will and persistence considering the rapper, born Sidney Royel Selby III, is quickly become one of the most in-demand names of the moment.

At the tender age of 19, Desiigner is still in the midst of a whirlwind journey that has taken him from his mother’s home in Bed-Stuy where we first spent a day with him, to studio sessions with the likes of Kanye West and Pusha T. Surprisingly, he hasn’t changed much since that first meeting where, though shellshocked by the sudden shift in his fortune, he still believed his success all came down to destiny and talent.

He’s still a frenetic ball of energy, and he still carries the conviction that everything that’s happened to him was pre-written in the stars. Though we don’t have a lot of time to chat, Desiigner throws himself into the conversation with the same gusto with which he approaches everything else in life.

Lately there’s been a lot of debate about hip-hop is losing its lyricism in favor of melody, do you think there’s any truth to that? Does it matter?

To me, music itself just sounds good, and if it sounds good that’s what makes you superior, period. It’s always been that way, it’s just that now melody is at its peak. Everybody is doing melody and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think the ones who want to listen to more lyrical hip-hop can still find it. There are still artists out there who are still doing their thing with that style of music. But you know [what] time it is, melody always.

Your single “Tiimmy Turner” references The Fairly OddParents. Were you a big fan of the show as a kid?

Yeah, for sure I was a fan. The reason I used Timmy Turner is because I was using myself as Timmy Turner.

I felt as though I was him at the time. You know, at that point in time I was saying that I wanted to kill everybody walking, and I knew that my soul would be in the furnace if I did. I also knew a girl, you know, she was doing everything. She was fucking for BET shit, when I say fucking for BET I just mean fucking for the fame. Doing anything just to be on and be on top on a larger platform, so I just put it like that. It was a personal experience. Everything I write is personal experience, you feel me? Ain’t no fake.

Last time we talked to you had just been signed to G.O.O.D. Music. A lot must have changed…

Yeah, yeah, now you see me on the billboards and in magazines, you know? I didn’t go to G.O.O.D. Music and just get signed to not do anything. I got merchandise on the way, I’m touring, I got plenty of music dropping; I’m trying to come in with the movies. You know what time it is. Album coming soon, visuals about to drop, shit is crazy…

How’d you connect with Mike Dean, and what was it like working with him?

Working with Mike was just like magic, and it just came with the G.O.O.D. package. Me and him worked well together; we’re great artists. He put down his tunes, I put down my tunes, we put it together and we made a smash. There’s beats, there’s drums; shit’s knocking. It was all very organic with “Tiimmy Turner.”

I made the beat but Mike did the chords. I don’t know how to play the chords but you know Mike Dean is a problem, so when he got on the chords he already knew what he was doing. So he got down on the chords and he was like, “I’m going to put some extra on there for you,” and we just kept at it. Our vibe is crazy.

239

A lot of people describe your music as sounding very Southern. However given the speed at which information travels these days, do you think we’re beyond regionally-specific music?

You hear me talking to you right now and you realize, to me, it’s not about something being my sound.

It’s just how I talk. I don’t know how people can say it’s Southern music when it has no label on it. I don’t put out music with a label on it, it’s just me. The way I’m talking to you right now is just how I talk.

We just saw you performing with Pusha at Tunnel’s closing party. A lot of people have commented on the level of energy in you performances — the way you dance, the way you move. How did those signature dances come along?

Yeah, I always used to dance like that. That’s how I turned up in the hood. We used to dance like that and just make mad noise in the middle of the street [makes git git git sound effect]. We used to be crazy, so that energy I just bring it to the stage now. I was always like that even as a kid. I was always singing, I used to be in the choir, I used to do performances, I used to be a train performer [one of New York’s many subway performers], you know, I came from the grind. That’s where I get my harmonies and my melodies from, it comes from my soul.

There’s been a lot of conversation about what’s going on in the world in terms of issues with injustice, police brutality and more. Do activism and hip-hop go hand in hand? Is it fair to expect artists to speak on these issues?

Activism as in how we’re approaching things and how we’re saying things? Are you asking if we’re igniting anything?

Yeah, do you think it’s fair that people are asking entertainers to take a stand on these issues?

I’ve made a statement about what was going on. How I feel about it is that these things needs to come to a stop. I also feel like all lives matter, not just black lives — all lives matter. I’m not just going to say one race should just be saying stop it, because it happens to everybody, so all lives matter. So that’s why I say that more. I just feel like it’s time to stop the violence, period. I actually wanted to do something in the hood like march through the hood just to motivate and show inspiration. I want people to see that I’m still there and still watching, even though I left the hood. I might be off the block, but I still hear that crazy things are happening. I want to keep it true to where I’m from and pay attention to the neighborhood and help the community.

T-SHIRT ACNE STUDIOS, HOODIE & JACKET GIVENCHY

JACKET PUBLIC SCHOOL

“Tiimmy Turner” came out of your XXL freestyle. It was pretty polarizing at first. Are you surprised at the reception the actual song got?

I make music, baby. I knew what time it was. I’ve had that thing in the sauce since, like, three years ago off of a promotional app I used to use for my “Zombie Walk” shit. If you go down my Instagram, I used to promote my songs with this app that was on the Android. There was a loading screen and they had a sound check on the app, and I used to sing behind that, like, “Timmy, Timmy Turner, he be wishing for a burner.”

I lost the app, but I always had the melody in my head. I started building on it because I had lost the app for so long that I had to start building on the mufucka to keep it going.

There’s an idea that rappers don’t know how to freestyle now. Does it even matter anymore?

Music is art. Freestyling is a way to show a taste of that art; it’s not supposed to show you a complete form of what I can do in the studio, it’s just a taste of the art. Some people go fiend for freestyles, I love when people do that; it’s not like I’m discrediting them because that’s their way of forming their art. I never give you too much in a freestyle because I’m not that type of freestyling dude; I’m an artist. So, I give you a form of the freestyle, but not the whole thing. It’s almost like marketing, because you just give people a taste.

Are you nervous about the future? It must feel like there are huge expectations...

I’m not nervous. I’m really here and I’m ready to put my creative art on the map. I’m making records, putting records together, I’m writing records with people, I’m just trying to do my thing. You know what time it is.

Do you plan on working with Menace again? He did make the “Panda” beat after all...

Definitely, definitely, definitely! Hell yeah!

Your grandfather was a blues musician. How did that legacy influence your music? Especially since so many people feel like there’s such a generational gap between the popular music of now and that of the past...

I can say that my voice... it turned different the more I got older. It dropped and got this really dry sound, like my grandfather. So, my grandfather, he inspired me through his music and soul. I just made a song for him recently, he’s going to be on the track. Me and my grandfather about to be on the track together soon!

What makes you independent as an artist?

My energy. I give you energy every time, and I have a vision — even the video for “Panda” is doing nice.

I got tremendous numbers on it. When “Panda” dropped, I didn’t give people too much, I just let them rock on it. I gave them one verse and shut it down. It makes you feel like that shit should jump back on one more time, so then they keep it on repeat.

What do you think it takes to create longevity in an industry as competitive as music?

Creativity. If you are someone who has always had a creative mind and were interested in creative things outside of music, you can make it. You can’t just do a track and be creative. It’s visual, it’s everything about the art. And, with music, you have to treat it like art. You need to be good with art and able to see things in more than one way. If you’re someone who knows how to put things together, who sees how colors work, sees what’s beautiful, and sees what makes people feel good, that’s what it’s about.

Why the title New English for your debut mixtape?

Because I’m talking that new English, that new style of funk. It’s that new way of talking, that new way of walking; it’s just a new style and a new way of life. I gave it that straight trap vibe just for that New English, but then I slowed it down with “Overnight” so people could know I fuck with other shit, too. People were already fucking with “Tiimmy Turner,” so I think they understood what I was doing. There’s probably going to be a New English II coming soon. Ey, ey, ey!

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The “Fetish” Rapper Breaking Every Rule Tommy Genesis Words Nico Amarca Photography Emanuele D’Angelo Special Thanks Love Andishae

Vancouver-bred artist Tommy Genesis is not someone you can categorically label. Though her look radiates saccharine femininity, her brand of “fetish rap” boasts a complex aggro-sexuality that challenges anyone looking to undercut her creative authority. Tommy tells us why she can’t be put in a box.

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The music industry has made ample strides to fan down the testosterone-fueled fires that’ve guarded its gates, but the question as to who still demands their operation remains: is it Hades or Persephone? In a perfect world, the two share equal responsibility, and while we’ve seen improvements in the distribution of power throughout the years, the former still holds the staff – and he doesn’t show signs of handing it over, or even breaking it in half, anytime soon.

Although reality attests to Hades’s prevailing control, Persephone’s own clout is not something to undermine. She may not have the full set of resources to snatch the staff completely (yet), but she’s certainly catching up. Tommy Genesis knows a thing or two about keeping Hades in line, but while she may be adamantly going the distance for her own kind, calling her Persephone wouldn’t be a fitting title.

Born and bred in Vancouver to a South Indian father and Scandinavian mother, Tommy is a figure laden with contradictions. At first glance, the artist has all the trappings of a bonafide pop darling; a doe-eyed beauty with ombré curls and a penchant for pleated skirts, cropped T-shirts, glossy lipstick and combat boots. But underneath the schoolgirl allure lies something far more esoteric. Sure, she may look like the kind of girl you’d want to sit and smile in the bleachers while you score the winning touchdown at Homecoming, but in actuality, she’s the girl scoring the touchdowns, blowing you a kiss, then taking home the game’s head cheerleader.

Openly bisexual, Tommy’s music eschews nearly every hetero-normative motif commonly affiliated with the rap genre, spitting verses such as “She tell me he gon’ flip me like he flip his cousins back South / But she don’t know that I went from cunt to dick early this month,” only to follow up with “When you leave me I need to go take my mind off your dick / Get some yogurt covered pretzels and a pound of a clit.” The graphic volatility of Tommy’s lyrics seamlessly parallels the production of her songs, which swerves and slides across a slew of subgenres – witch house, IDM, trap – found in the darkest trenches of the SoundCloud underworld.

It’s the very unhinged, otherworldly quality of Tommy’s work that caught the ear of Atlanta’s leading underground rap king Father, who, after hearing a series of bedroom-produced singles while zipping through cyberspace, asked the artist to join his idiosyncratic label Awful Records in 2015. With one-third of her World Vision mixtape trilogy complete and the remaining two on the horizon, Tommy’s brief albeit potent mark in the music sphere has her leading the wave for the next generation of artists who are not only looking to fight the system, but leave it scratching its head while thirsting for more in the process.

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The term “underground” is thrown around very loosely these days. How do you react when someone describes your music as such? What does the term mean to you, personally?

If mainstream music is an oral orifice then underground music is the torso, where things pick up speed and digest. Mainstream appropriates from the underground because we keep generating new material. It’s untapped and raw. There is no system, there is no law. If you want war, you make war. If you want art, you make art. There is trash and there is gold, but it’s just another way to label someone at the end of the day.

Just another box.

You once tagged the words “fetish rap” to describe your sound. What did you mean by this?

Oral fixation. Sexual deviance. Saying things to get a reaction or coveting sexual experiences. I didn’t know how else to say, “You think I’m rapping but I just sex talk.”

Your style, that is, the whole schoolgirl uniform appeal, can be viewed as something that entices the male gaze, yet your persona as an artist is very alpha; almost intimidating. How do you use your sexuality and, by extension, your gender as a way to flip the role of power in a field dominated mostly by men?

I don’t use my sexuality as a tool, it’s a part of me. I am most interested in conversations about sexual ambiguity. In a way, my schoolgirl attire is my own personal drag. I dress up to crossover to another world, I have a masculine and feminine duality (we all do). The male gaze is like Mordor… the great eye is ever watchful, but I’m on the outside completely. I’m just watching the movie.

You have a background in film and sculpture. How did you start making hip-hop music? How does your art background translate into what you’re doing now?

I never started making hip-hop music. I’ve never made hip-hop music. But if this is hip-hop, then I really have to reevaluate my music. I try to make art. I try to do a lot of things. Some things come across the way I hope.

Others fail violently.

How has the internet shaped or guided your artistic progression?

The internet picked me up, but it didn’t guide my artistic practice. I think I’m too liberal at times with conversations about the internet being my home. I live inside my head. I often feel like I am digressing the more I put out, because less of me exists inside and more of me exists outside in the public.

Will DIY always be something that applies to you as an artist? Do you fear that as you get bigger, you may lose certain freedoms/control that you have now?

Yes. I do things DIY because I have control issues. I’m not afraid though. I’m more afraid of love and death.

I rarely think about music. Music is a tangent.

You approach sexuality in your lyrics in a way that’s a bit more complex and abstruse than most female rappers. What role does sex and its position in society have in your work?

Ever since I was little people would tell me “don’t sit like that” or “don’t stand like that,” or “don’t eat like that,” and as a kid, I’d ask myself “why?” They’d say because it’s too sexual. I am a product of society, but I’ve shed certain predisposed notions of who I thought I should be. My sexuality is simple to me – it’s black and white. But explaining it to someone else is like transcribing an abstract painting into essay format. I don’t think about “sex and its position in society” when I write, I think about what exists between me and the person who holds my gaze.

You said that your first three albums – World Vision, World Vision 2 and World Vision 3 – will act as a trilogy. Will all three albums act as chapters that tie together one particular story, or will each one explore a different theme?

There is no overall narrative. The themes go: World Vision 1, weird; World Vision 2, weirdly mature; and World Vision 3, melodies overlaid on top of cacophonous symphonies.

What kind of mark, if any, are you hoping to leave both within the music industry and on the people who listen and admire your work?

I hope they trip and fall inside my mind for a while. And I hope the hole does not fill them, but that they fill the hole.

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Words Anya Firestone

Photography The Skateroom

DECK THE WALLS As street culture and high art magnetize towards one another exponentially, the [skateboard Ă— art] collaboration signifies their acute meeting point in the 21st century. We took an in-depth cultural studies approach to rethink what the resulting object stands for, on behalf of contemporary branding and the future of art itself.

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DETAIL OF THE LAST SUPPER THE SKATEROOM × THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION OF THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.

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32 CAMPBELL’S SOUP CANS THE SKATEROOM × THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION OF THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.

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Rolling on skateboards and across hip-hop, at streetwear popups and in sneaker drops, contemporary branding has been cast under a creative spell, or perhaps curse, of the C-word. Just as “curation” has become a trendy term, decontextualized from its museological origin and misused across street culture (mostly as a poser-synonym for “arrangement”), so too has “collaboration” acquired powerful new impact in the space where curating first began: the art world. Today, the phenomenon marks a historic moment for both domains: in a dangerous liaison between low and high culture, we find the skateboard hooking up with artwork, and as a result, being curated on a wall as if it is one.

Regardless of whether we consider the decked-outskatedeck as objet d’art or not, it is almost precisely because we are so unsure that its existence marks a critical era for all players involved: for street culture, and its unquestionable move into elitist spaces; for art itself, an object on the brink of yet another identity crisis; and lastly, for art institutions — the galleries, auction houses, and foundations that seem to acknowledge and even ingratiate these objects into their histories (or at least, into their gift shops).

Art history is no stranger to the collaboration phenomenon, and many of its most prominent players have participated: Modernism gave us prolific works by Matisse × Derain, Cubism: Picasso × Braque, Abstract Expressionism: Johns × Rauschenberg, even in the 17th century Rubens’s portraits and Breughel the Elder’s landscapes linked up to form Flemish masterpieces just as Warhol and Basquiat created paintings, sculptures and installations in the 1980s. Yet in all of these instances, the motives and tastes of each creator — philosophical, aesthetic or otherwise — were somewhat analogous. Furthermore, unlike in fashion, for example, where creative collaborations usually result in mass production, collaboratively made artworks guard their uniqueness and singularity, no matter how many creators.

Today, as couture houses cross-pollinate with sneaker brands and sporting goods (Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs both released skate decks in Spring/Summer 2016 and 2015 respectfully) we see art following suit, entering new relationships, or, like the “design collective” Vetements, wild orgies with popular culture brands. From liquor labels (Hennessy V.S × KAWS) to streetwear (Raf Simons × Sterling Ruby), couture (Dior × Marc Quinn) to mass-fashion (H&M × Jeff Koons), and even to hiphop (Sotheby’s × Drake), art hops from hoodie to high-top with newfound passion, like a swinger at a swanky nightclub called #Collaboration.

From all the unlikely bedfellows that art would find itself on top of, the skateboard is perhaps the most perplexing. While we can compare the resulting object to the [sneakers × artist] dropping daily, from a material-culture perspective, a skate deck by megaartist Damien Hirst has a different narrative and impact than a pair of kicks by him. Something known to “tear up” and “shred” walls would seldom find itself on the same exact space of a painting,

historically created to do the opposite. Ontologically speaking, the work of art and the skateboard are not only different, but are inherently contradictory.

Art, first commissioned by kings and emperors, has been born into a privileged culture in royal palaces and temples, from Mesopotamia to Ancient Greece and up to the French aristocracy.

Beyond being decorative, art was also didactic, operating aesthetically and conceptually as a sign of supremacy: of god(s), kings, and the law. In sum, during the first defining touchstones of its history, art itself was a solid program of visual branding for the high-culture powers-that-be, from Ramses to the Apostles to Napoleon.

The skateboard, contrastingly, was born out of a counterculture.

In the 1960s, it entered the scene rail-sliding on park benches when the surf was too low and grinding in empty swimming pools during the LA droughts. While it was an object found in an exclusive circle, it was not rooted in elitism nor did it function dogmatically for the masses. Rather, the skateboard was a material good that moved against the grain of society and avoided mainstream integration (the sneaker, on the other foot, ran right in). As the skater scene developed a grunge and punk flair throughout the 1990s, its visual history that followed evoked its bad-boy temperament, with skull decals, violent doodles and tits. Not even Nike can claim to have successfully infiltrated the skater group until about a decade ago, with its SB shoe line launched in 2004. On the high-low material-cultural spectrum, while art started from the top, the skateboard started from the bottom.

And now we are here: at the Summer 2016 Sotheby’s contemporary auction in Manhattan, scratching our heads with our paddles wondering what three skateboards on the wall are really doing here. The triptych before us, a collaboration between contemporary artist Takashi Murakami and Supreme, is estimated for sale at $3,000-$5,000. Supreme has a history of engaging in high-cost collaborations, and even went so far as to host a retrospective in 2013, where skateboards made by Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, George Condo, Larry Clark and Jeff Koons, amongst others, hung on a wall encased behind glass, curatorially mediated like delicate gems at the museum.

There are more than a few street-elite-savvy brands producing limited-edition decks today, such as Boom Art, Mood Board and The Skateroom, to name a few. Unsurprisingly, there are many more art critics and collectors who reject the authenticity of these collaborations as valuable to art history, dismissing them not as art, but a cheap fetishism of it by brands acting like “posers.” Yet if such is the case, then there is a troubling incongruity regarding the willingness and desire of the artists to get on deck. The creatives are not just graffiti or street artists like Nick Walker or “The Gonz” (both of whom are very logical choices), but notably today’s highest grossing museum-represented figures such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei.

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Art hops from hoodie to high-top with newfound passion, like a swinger at a swanky nightclub called #Collaboration.

It is undeniable that the collaborations expose artist to new audiences who might not otherwise be familiar with them (except maybe from a Jay Z lyric). It is also clear that brands can (or at least try to) elevate their own identity by virtue of the highvalue association. Regardless of who is using whom, it makes us wonder about the raison d’être of the mysterious object that follows, and whether or not it is art or just artifact branded to look like it. Even if the artist is just a superficial marketing tool used to turn hay into gold, is there a way that the gold can be “real?” In other words, how can we imagine a skateboard, that which was born as high art’s opposite, to possess or extend art’s inherently unique qualities — those that distinguish it from pure commodity — notably, its conceptual, aesthetic and intellectual prowess that it has accrued over millennia?

Enter: The Skateroom, the first company formed on the basis of [skateboard × art] collaborations and the one whose specific aim is to preserve and proliferate the importance of art. So how do they do it given an unlikely meeting with art’s opposite?

With a conceptual goal to mix “the energies of a legendary underground culture and legendary artists,” the company, founded by gallerist-turned-philanthropist Charles-Antoine Bodson, pairs up with artists such as Paul McCarthy and Ai Weiwei, street artists like D*Face and Futura 2000, and foundations such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol to produce, promote and sell limited-edition skate decks. Yet by virtue of its unique business model and its artistic choices, The Skateroom shows us how its collaborative object can function not to undermine, but rather to conserve, if even marginally and widely ironically, the value of art and its history.

To this end, the company’s profits fund establishments like the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and the Guggenheim, all of which share a mission to display, conserve, and promote art and its history. Secondly, the company functions philanthropically, by supporting Skateistan, an NGO founded by skateboarder Oliver Percovich, with a mission to “empower vulnerable youth through art and skateboarding.” Skateistan creates schools and projects in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa for children at risk where “youth come for skateboarding, stay for education.” The company explains, “We offer artists a new and different support for contemporary art and the opportunity to link their art with a good cause.”

Yet in addition to their philanthropy (the limited edition Paul McCarthy decks just enabled the creation of Skatesian’s new school in Johannesburg), The Skateroom formed a collaboration that ironically fosters artistic ideologies because of their placement on a skateboard, which we would fear would do the opposite.

Notably, the company teamed up with the Andy Warhol Foundation, established in 1987 in accordance with the namesake artist’s will “to promote the advancement of the visual arts.”

Together, the two forces produce various singular and multiple skateboards sets using the artist’s iconic works. Recently, they dropped what perhaps exemplifies the very issue, or resolution, of the [skateboard × art] collaboration: a set of three decks that together depict the center detail of Warhol’s 1986 painting The Last Supper. Warhol’s painting, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century masterpiece of the same title, was not, contrary to popular misunderstanding, about the masterpiece; rather, it was about that masterpiece’s overexposure. In a sort of Postmodern mindset (which sounds like “ART IS OVER!”), Warhol recognized that on account of the machine in the modern age, great art like da Vinci’s mural had become so overly reproduced and circulated, that it was iconoclastically de-aestheticized and reduced to a cliché. He visualized this opinion by creating his painting from a screen print that depicted a cheap photograph that depicted a mass-made 19th century engraving that depicted the original 15th century artwork. Levels. Overall, Warhol’s Last Supper was a work of art that acknowledged the sad truth about art’s overreproduction and as such, a sort of “ending” to art’s image in the modern world. So what happens when Warhol’s visualization of the problem of reproduced and commodified art ends up being reproduced itself – and not on a canvas, but on art’s ontological nemesis, a withdrawn, consumer street good?

“I’m in the hall already, on the wall already/ I’m a work of art, I’m a Warhol already,” Jay Z raps in “Picasso Baby.” The Skateroom, like Jay, acknowledges the significance of Warhol as one of the most prolific figures in art history. And we cannot deny that mainstream culture has already become so inundated by his image just like we have been by da Vinci’s paintings. But the joke is on us if we see a skateboard as the final gesture to subvert what Warhol’s genius masterpiece signifies. Au contraire! we cry on behalf of art theory, because the image of it reproduced on the deck logically extends Warhol’s very own message one step further. Perhaps the skateboard’s finest trick.

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HAIDER ACKERMANN YOUNG THUG ERIK BRUNETTI Z AY N M A L I K VLONE OFF-WHITE

EDISON CHEN

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Coincidentally, Supreme released a set of decks with The Last Supper on it, but theirs was a direct blown-up snapshot of da Vinci’s original. Similarly, boom art created decks with images of high art Renaissance works, such as Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights as well as The Lady and the Unicorn, one of history’s most iconic wall-tapestries commissioned by the French aristocracy in the Middle Ages.

While these are fantastically decorative objects, they function aesthetically as whimsical appropriations of art, and do not operate conceptually by extending the “aura” or message of the original like those by The Skateroom.

perfect allegory for the concern: during this past couture week in Paris, head designer Demna Gvasalia hosted a gluttonous feast of an impressive 18-brand spread, including Canada Goose, COMME des GARÇONS, Brioni, Manolo Blahnik, Levi’s and Reebok (the latter two also collab’d with Gosha Rubchinskiy the same season). The results were as mixed as the smörgåsbord of its participating labels: while the Blahnik “Sky-High” waist-high boots showcased outstanding new heights, quite literally, in bilabel liaisons, Vetement’s rhinestone Juicy Couture look may have at best garnered a giggle, nostalgic #TBTracksuit, or a throwing in of the towel (or, terrycloth zip-up) to collaborations altogether.

Warhol took the everyday object and commercial brands — the Campbell’s Soup can and the Brillo Pad, for this reason: the gesture was his attempt to create anew, to make an event out of banality since the holy patriarchs and Mona Lisa were already done with. And he succeeded not because he competed against the machine, but because he was the machine. “I am nothing and I can function,” he said, “I am working on every level, artistic commercial, advertising…” Warhol’s art was groundbreaking because it was a sign of a no-longer existing sign system. If [skateboard × art] collaborations are authentically impactful when the art used announces its very usage, then we can look also to the decks by Paul McCarthy and Jeff Koons, artists whose repertoires extend a sort of Warholian belief about art’s metaphysical nihilism in the modern world.

We need not cross ourselves with the collaborative letter “x” and declare that one more sentence with “art and skateboard” will be art’s death sentence, for it is clear we do not need a conception of art to exist for us to decide to work in a mode that we could nominate as “art.” In other words, if there was no phenomenon called “art” we could still validly propose a mode of working that would turn out to be just like it (but without the name), lifting the encumbrance of the historical art to begin anew.

As The Skateroom’s Warholian Jesus sits on the triptych, extending his arms over the decks, he blesses the very objects upon which he finds himself. His gesture points not only to the skateboard’s holy ascension from dried out Los Angeles to a mural of angels but also to those very angel’s simultaneous descent into street culture. Indeed, art has come a far way from its elitist origins, and any attempt to redefine “art supremacy” today makes us flip up, flip out and land some place paradoxical, in between the Louvre and Supreme.

And who will show us the way? Is it the artist? The curator?

The collector? Sotheby’s? The Skateroom? Jay Z? Until that messiah arrives, we must continue to digest what contemporary culture is serving us — from an 18-brand feast at Vetements to an ironic Last Supper — and consider it food for thought for purists and posers alike. And so, as we stand in our Nike SBs during Art Basel only to find The Skateroom’s decks at the Beyeler Foundation, we can choose to look the other way, back to the holy book of art history, or else just hop on board, and roll with it.

Yet how can we imagine novel ways in which something like an art can be made, shown, displayed, used and contemplated, without being fully pressed to ideologies and enigmas like conceptual art, or else reproduced, branded and stepped on in an ironic secondary market — or worse, H&M?

We can be optimistic on behalf of material culture that art has become increasingly fashionable as a result. But what does it signify if art is acting like fashion too, moving from painting to skateboarding like couture moves to streetwear? If today’s fashion collaborations are becoming fashion themselves, do we take this as a warning that collaborations will signal the future of art? The Vetements Spring/Summer 2017 collection is the

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Words Eileen Sommerman

llustration Clara Lacy

GOOD VIBRATIONS: TINO SEHGAL IN MARRAKECH “The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times. But this motion is simply the perpetual consequence of crimes, and it is conserved by means of crimes alone.”

— Marquis de Sade

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There’s no signage at the entrance to Tino Sehgal’s exhibition in Jemaa el-Fna square. Either you know to come, or you stumble upon it. Everyone’s welcome. With a stroke of luck, you might be drawn there by the forces of the medieval square. The square will suck you in and spit you out, but walking into the old Bank al-Maghrib, or BAM, during Sehgal’s exhibition is like going down the rabbit hole.

It starts as soon as we enter, or so it appears.

We’re implicated from the start, and a bit self-conscious.

A bird flies in the same door we came through.

The work happens primarily inside the BAM, an obsolete building appropriately finished with restrained surface decoration.

It’s both banal and beautiful.

The piece feels trance-like and transient, as if we’re lucky to catch it.

The interpreters come and go: ruptures, departures and sutures.

Moments of slowness, silence and stillness, tending toward emptiness, Until it simmers again, and becomes feverish.

Freestyle dance moves feel more animal than human: Guttural, primitive and profound.

Because it is geometrical, you’ll always walk into the middle of the piece. Set in the polygon of the BAM, where there is no designated stage, Sehgal doesn’t so much present ideas as immerse his audience in them. Ultimately, you’re swimming in his conceptual, abstract language. The tendency to want to make sense of the piece, to determine cause and effect, waxes and wanes.

Then, a cross between a violin and an embrace.

A four-year-old crawls on all fours, gravitating toward the old bank vault which sits atop the space. It’s the nerve center, sending out cryptic messages to the bodies: prostrate; flail; dance; look alive; play dead; beg.

Dancers become singers—these are the interpreters, and they transform the artist’s ideas into action. There are two to start, discreet and independent. Eventually, they seem to recognize one another.

Singing turns to droning.

Noisemakers utter melodic gibberish, like soft antagonisms.

“I ain’t got no money I ain’t got no car to take you on a date I can’t even buy you flowers But together we’ll be the perfect soul mates Talk to me, girl.”

“Take your pain.”

“P-p-p-p-pain.”

The setting creates an intimate, unsettling relationship without the physical structure and hierarchy of theatre. Since the work is quasi-circular, free of linear supports and constraints, there is no clear divisions between them and us; beginning and end; art and artifice; something and nothing. The tension between trust and doubt helps keep the thing afloat.

The numbers double and then triple. There are men and women, about seven of them now, and the men surround us.

(Later, I’ll discover it’s Timbaland’s “The Way I Are.”) As people flock in, we wonder, did we trigger this? Where are these people from? And how do we fit in?

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Sehgal inspires something like relational independence: he shakes up the authority of who’s who and what’s what. It’s a lesson in modesty. He designs these subversive collisions in public—usually in the museum—that steal your immunity and austerity. While he is physically absent, his invisible hand directs.

In 2014, Sehgal realized “This Progress” in the Roman Agora at Athens; another charged public space. It was the first time he mounted a full-scale work outside the art frame. The piece was first shown at the Guggenheim in 2010, then translated from New York to plein air Athens. Sehgal’s aversion to planes and mobile phones coincides ironically with the title of the work.

It’s notable that Sehgal is now working in non-art spaces.

It’s a risk since what he’s doing is so porous and abstract, with strong affinities to both dance and theater. When he shows in the museum, he sticks to museum hours and follows the protocol of regular exhibition duration—an outstanding formality in light of his otherwise unconventional practice. Has Sehgal reached the point where his practice is part of the art lexicon and no longer needs the aid of signage?

The interpreters gather and start talking, perhaps making a new plan. All of them leave, except one. The four-year-old becomes the noisemaker for the last guy who has no one to hum for him.

“This Progress” is perhaps his only explicitly interactive piece; others are only potentially so. In fact, that’s the rub. Museum etiquette dictates that we don’t touch artwork and the stage keeps us away from the spectacle, but with Sehgal’s work we are not sure how to behave. There are several stories of an unassuming public having adverse reactions or overreacting to the artist’s provocations. The lure of transgression is part of what makes the work exhilarating.

The piece is exhilarating, and, as we lose agency, the motives are increasingly unclear and unimportant. The four-year-old is on fire as she enters the abstraction.

Sehgal is stringent about his work registering as art, which is both clarified and obfuscated by his selling practice. His awareness of the art world’s systems is underscored by his digressions. He sells his work, distinguishing it from dance and theater. However, the transaction comes with an oral contract only—in the presence of a notary, who could presumably be called upon if there was ever an issue. Ownership includes the right and instructions to remount the piece.

“Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be rebuilt.”

— Artaud

A new face shows up crossing the threshold from one madness to another. He cuts across the polygon. We start to see the alternative rumblings as a cruel escape, where cruel is not always a bad thing.

The dusty, clerestory windows open and red light pours in like an illicit suggestion. Suddenly, the scene is more frenetic: animal dancing, dancing animals; dancing like we’d all like to dance.

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A tall guy with high-top hair. A dance maniac in sport shorts.

A girl with cosmos tights and a voice to cry for. Two unremarkable guys who start small and know how to roll it out. An elegant woman who knows the moves.

There are seven interpreters coming and going. Watching them becomes a mapping of their movements and interactions, and we start to think we know their story. Sehgal’s narrative, if there is one, is rhizomatic. As Deleuze and Guattari describe it, it spreads like the surface of a body of water toward new spaces, through fissures and gaps, to find its own equilibrium. No beginning, no end—always in the middle. Inter-being: nomadic versus hierarchical.

When he as awarded the Golden Lion for best artist at Venice in 2013, Sehgal was praised for “the excellence and innovation that his practice has brought opening the field of artistic disciplines.” In keeping with his articulate, esoteric nature, he accepted it graciously saying, “Our inner images are not so far away from a stone.”

Sehgal’s form is protean and elusive. There are no permanent allegiances. Rather, couples turn to threesomes, foursomes and moresomes; there are endless permutations of bodies and rhythms, and tempos and densities change in a flash.

The structure is charismatic and unpredictable.

Sitting on the low-pile carpet, listening, we notice the mint-green walls of the BAM, decorated with dark wood and a traditional faience wrap.

The interpreters trickle out to the tune of “Good Vibrations” and slowly surround us, deliberate and aloof. It’s a loose huddle that sustains our relational independence. We’re both connected and separate, bound for the moment by a song that feels utterly apropos.

Their bodies ripple and a stunning dance erupts as they sing in a well-tuned and expertly improvised way.

On some days, at sunset, they take the work outside into Jemaa el-Fna square, not far from the snake charmers, freshly squeezed orange juice, foods stalls and goat heads. A thick crowd forms around them. At one point, the kid from the singing lesson leads them into traditional song, then he dances from the belly.

For better or worse, the work is less obtuse and more crowdpleasing here. As night falls, a fire lantern is set in the middle and the interpreters dance around it. Everyone’s welcome.

The next visit we arrive in the middle of a song. The interpreters are concealed behind the vault, singing. It appears to be a singing lesson led by a young kid. The group is bigger today: two more than last time.

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Masthead Issue 13

Publisher

Contributors

Head of Sales, Europe

David Fischer

Anya Firestone,

Ben Hakki

Naavin Karimbux, Clara Lacy, Editor-in-Chief

Vincent Levy, Nick Schonberger,

Head of Sales, USA

Pete Williams

Jack Smylie, Eileen Sommerman,

Rob Miller

Benji Wagner, DK Woon Executive Editor Jeff Carvalho

Advertising Executives Photographers

Lindsay Blue, John Flood,

Alexander Bortz, Emmelie Brunetti,

Tom Garland, Sebastian Koeltzsch,

Creative Director

Kenneth Cappello,

Caitlin Leroux, Angus MacEwan,

Edward Chiu

Koers von Cremer,

Marie Schu, Amy Tran

Emanuele D’Angelo, Nick Glackin, Art Direction & Design

Othello Grey, Sascha Heintze,

Special Thanks

Son Mok

Stephenie Kay L.C, Andrea Olivo,

Love Andishae, Dora, Bryan Luna,

Pani Paul, Piczo, Ash Reynolds,

NĂĄtia, Will Nichols, Michelle Ng,

Benjamin Robinson,

George Ocampo, Nina Schims,

Michael Rousseau, Takahito Sasaki,

Jay Vasquez, CRE8 Studios,

Synchrodogs, Chikashi Suzuki,

Milk Studios LA

Fashion Director Atip W Managing Editor

Nick Thompson, Asia Typek,

Brock Cardiner

Mathieu Vilasco, Leonn Ward,

Printing

Thomas Welch, Drew Wheeler,

Feindruckerei

Editors

Parker Woods, DK Woon,

feindruckerei.de

Nico Amarca, Alec Banks,

Robert Wunsch

Jian DeLeon, Jason Dike,

Contact

Jack Drummond, Maddie Holden,

Production Manager

magazine@highsnobiety.com

Aaron Howes, Alec Leach,

Klaudia Podsiadlo

advertising@highsnobiety.com

Production Assistant

HQ Address

Ufuk Inci

Titel Media UG

Stephanie Smith-Strickland Copy Editor Peter Suh

Highsnobiety Magazine Ritterstrasse 9, 10969 Berlin Germany Website highsnobiety.com

Highsnobiety is a trademark under license from Titel Media UG. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

All prices and credits are accurate at time of going to press but are subject to change. Manuscripts, photos, drawings and other materials submitted must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Highsnobiety Magazine cannot be held responsible for any solicited material.

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