In the last few years, fashion has beared witness to the unprecedented growth of streetwear. A style and culture originally born on the streets, streetwear and streetstyle represent a newfound freedom in fashion that rebels against the traditional constraints of couture. I am drawn to the honesty and self-expression that streetwear encourages — a democracy within fashion that gives power back to the people. At its core, streetwear is a celebration of unique styles and diverse perspectives, regardless of the trends being shown on the runway. I believe in the truth that streetwear allows us all to express. That’s why I decided to make it the theme of the Spring 2018 issue. Forgoing the professional studio lighting and the ease of digital photography, every photo in this issue of Fringe was taken on a chunky, medium-format film camera that looks straight out of the 1920s. We decided to shoot many of our photos on the streets of Chinatown in order to capture a gritty and unpolished feel. A huge thank you to Echo Chen, Sam Cheng and Julia Saliba along with the rest of the multimedia team who helped translate my wild, creative visions into a printed reality. Thank you so much to Amanda Burkett, my fabulous co-stylist, who helped keep our models looking fresh. Thank you to our management team — especially Veronica and Pam, for keeping my head straight and my feet grounded throughout the process of shaping this issue — and Rachel for crafting the beautiful layout. And lastly, thank you to our wonderful writers who tell the stories. Please enjoy this issue of Fringe, I hope you see the vision, too.
Beauty & Style Editor
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PHOTOS BY Echo Chen Sam Cheng MODELED BY Jia Liu Sanda Matchaba Theo Wayt
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Hustling the Hype
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High Fashion Swatches Culture
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Hustling the Hype THE LIFE OF A STREETWEAR SALESMAN WRITTEN BY Amanda Burkett
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Mollin have different ideas of what is in style. Mollin differentiates starkly between his own taste and what his buyers like — it’s all about the hype. “Hype is just what kids will be excited about,” Mollin said. “Basically all logo-heavy stuff, or anything endorsed by a celebrity like Kanye West [...] This stuff is kind of the moneymaker because it sells for a lot and I’m not really interested in keeping it.” Rather than buying into the logomania for his own wardrobe, Mollin believes fashion is a form of art, not merely a way to show off. He recognizes that the items purchased from art brands won’t necessarily sell for more, but will hold their value. “Brands like Prada, Acne Studios, Dries Van Noten, Maison Margiela, Marni, are art,” Mollin said. “I’ve never been into the logo-obsessed streetwear, really only the original archive stuff from the early part of streetwear.” Among the many fashion books and magazines on his bookshelf is a stack of blank colored sweatshirts. Mollin said that recently he has experimented with making his own clothes. He makes clothes for his friends as a sort of gag and even for himself to fill voids in his wardrobe. “I make bootleg stuff on the side for places I like in the city or at home on Long Island,” Mollin said. “I just make a few embroidered blank sweatshirts and sell it to my friends — just for fun. I really like restaurant apparel. I can thrift stuff from random restaurants, but it’s better to wear places you actually go to and like.” Mollin acknowledges, but doesn’t buy into, the stigma around men wearing expensive clothing and investing in fashion, saying that fashionable men are essentially nonexistent in his hometown on Long Island.
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“I probably spend over $2,500 on packaging each year,” Matias Mollin said. “I put it off sometimes, it’s annoying to wait in line and fill out forms — especially for international.” Mollin goes to the post office three to four times a week. No he’s not a mailman, and he’s not sending letters home to mom. Mollin spends his time after class at the post office, shipping out goods worth hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars to customers all over the world. Mollin may talk like a natural born businessman, he hasn’t even started his business studies as an LS firstyear who intends to pursue finance. Although he looks unassuming in his white Air-Force 1s, black jeans, white T-shirt, black puffer jacket and circular brown glasses, Mollin sold a total of $26,000 in clothing and shoes in 2017; it was his best year — yet. “My highlight was probably a 1997 Supreme Shark Tee that I bought for $200 and sold for $1500,” Mollin said. Before his sophomore year of high school, his only exposure to fashion was the seasonal J. Crew catalog jammed in his family mailbox. However, his interest exceeded the printed renditions of the high-end fast fashion brand that lined the closets of many Long Island homes where he’s from. Eventually, his interests turned to luxury brands. His first large purchase — a crewneck sweater from Acne Studios for $210 — eventually became his first online sale. “After buying it, I realized I wanted the money instead of the sweater,” Mollin said. “That’s how I found Grailed.” Grailed is an online buying and selling website for high-end menswear. Originally created to serve a niche group of guys on the hunt for archive designer collections, it has since evolved into a community of sellers with a variety of fashion tastes. After selling the sweater he no longer desired, Mollin began to observe a market that was only starting to grow. “I realized people were making a lot of money selling hyped clothes — mostly hyped sneakers,” he said. “It seemed easy, so I started doing it.” Hyped clothes are any items that generate a massive following, such as of Supreme merchandise releases that garner massive lines. Items like these surface in limited quantities, which is what makes them valuable. Hyped pieces he considers to be safe bets — Supreme box-logo shirts and sweatshirts, The North Face or Louis Vuitton Supreme collaborations, Off-White Nikes and Yeezys. Mollin finds out release dates and information about less obvious items on Twitter and Facebook. At the start of his Grailed career, he learned about archive Supreme shirts through a U.K.-based Facebook group. “I was looking at T-shirts that were worth around $100 in the U.K. but $300 in the U.S., so I began to import those and resell them for even more than they were selling there,” Mollin said. Mollin developed his eye for what sells and became a verified seller — a status determined by the Grailed operators similar to being verified on Twitter. He has since visited Grailed’s headquarters in SoHo twice. He now sells on several other platforms including Depop and eBay. He decides where-to-sell-what based on the desired consumer and personal use. Mollin designates non-designer vintage and less expensive pieces for Depop or eBay. He saves luxury, curated and tasteful pieces, as well as hyped pieces, for Grailed. “The hyped pieces go on Grailed, where the pieces will receive the attention they deserve, and so people don’t tell me I’m pricing things too high,” Mollin said. “On Grailed, people know what things are worth.” The consumers that throw their money at sellers like
MY HIGHLIGHT WAS PROBABLY A 1997 SUPREME SHARK TEE THAT I BOUGHT FOR $200 AND SOLD FOR $1500. MATIAS MOLLIN
“The hype around menswear isn’t as simple as who makes your suit,” he said. “It’s about who makes your sneakers and your jeans and what labels you wear.” He devotes time throughout the week to reading up on men in fashion, noting the recent generational shift in menswear. Always bookmarked is the young Wall Street Journal men’s fashion editor Jacob Gallagher, whose column embodies Mollin’s two passions — business and fashion. “Wall Street Journal fashion articles get some terrible comments,” he said. “Jacob Gallagher writes a great column for them, but there are some older readers that aren’t ready to accept fashion in their newspaper.” Not only is Mollin making money, but he views his “hustle” as valuable business experience. Currently his ambitions are to have either a finance career or a menswear-buying position. To Mollin, pricing clothes is a mix of instinct and amateur market research. Mollin truly thinks like a businessman in that he profits off his opportunity and growing knowledge. “There’s a difference between what price to list things at and how much to actually accept as an offer,” he said. “If you can figure out how to do it and make money at it, you should.” When asked if his resale vision is addictive, his response is without discomfort or hesitation: “I see price tags on everything.” FRINGE
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High Fashion Swatches Culture WRITTEN BY Jendayi Omowale When one thinks of high fashion, it’s natural to imagine the flamboyance in design and textile that is a hallmark of old, European, luxury fashion houses. You might think of a handembroidered couture dress with inset jewels or a glamorous, skin-tight dress worn by Rihanna at the Met Gala. What you likely don’t imagine is a firetruck-red shoulder bag emblazoned with the word “Supreme” priced at over $2,000. Streetwear, a style of fashion characterized by its eccentricity, is currently dominating the fashion industry. Clothes emblazoned with block logos, oversized jackets, baggy pants, sweatpants, tracksuits and hoodies are trademarks of brands like Vetements, Bape and the aforementioned Supreme, which had a historic collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Streetwear is slowly infiltrating circles of traditional, high fashion brands. But what is streetwear, and how did this style of fashion that relies o minimalist silhouettes with a rather eccentric color and design palette, come to dominate the fashion sphere? “It certainly came from African-American culture, I would mostly say,” said Ben Copperwheat, an adjunct instructor teaching courses in Fashion at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. “From hip-hop, probably the birth of hip-hop, during the late ’70s, early ’80s, and it really kind of moved out from there.” Along with designing for fashion titans like Calvin Klein and Gucci, Copperwheat’s pieces have been worn by none other than upcoming fashion icon, Blue Ivy. Kaylee Warren, Alexa Epstein and Cheryle Chong, students on the staff of NYU’s Embodied Magazine, reached the same conclusion as Copperwheat that streetwear originated and borrowed from elements of black culture. “You have brands like Vetements, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Supreme, the list goes on of whitemale brand corporations literally sourcing and drawing from communities of color … and appropriating them and reworking them to where they suddenly seem more desirable and trendy,” said Warren, an editor at embodied and a Gallatin sophomore whose concentration is Fashion Journalism. “In turn, [those brands] are kind of gentrifying streetwear and clothes people wore for expression and for just means of clothing themselves.” Steinhardt Adjunct Faculty in Graduate Costume Studies Daniel James Cole said the concept of streetwear as a style of fashion is much older than hip-hop, and can be traced back to the Middle Ages. “Streetwear, even though we say ‘streetwear,’ is a very old phenomenon and often most of history, streetwear ended up being a lower
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class’s copying of upper class styles,” Cole said. Many black designers and fashion influences have pondered the origins of streetwear as well. Hypebeast UK’s Editor Jason Dike and Hood By Air’s Shayne Oliver are one of the many fashion designers and influencers who argue that streetwear has undeniable racial undertones. If there is an argument by many for streetwear borrowing heavily from black culture, what is the line between appreciation and appropriation in the growing fashion trend? Epstein and Chong both said that high fashion brands can avoid cultural appropriation if they have black creatives at the helm. “I think the best solution to that is to diversify your staff, especially these big fashion houses and that’s why what’s happening with Louis Vuitton is like a good step forward,” said Gallatin junior Epstein, who studies Fashion and Museum Curation. “If you have people of color in your office, as a main part of the business that you’re running, people are going to say like wait — maybe we shouldn’t do this, that’s not a great idea.” Black culture is not the only source of inspiration for streetwear brands, with many designs using Japanese and Chinese characters for sheer aesthetic value and appeal. Kevin Wang and Sasa Li — the directors behind the creative collective, Shock and Awe — were inspired by the rampant cultural appropriation of East Asian culture to create a collection through their clothing brand, The Kimono Kid, that mocks that very phenomenon. “I don’t think it’s so much just the characters anymore, it’s just this whole adopting of Japanese culture,” Chong said. She also pointed out the widespread adoption of cheongsam, a traditional Chinese garment, as a case of appropriation. “As a kid I would wear cheongsams for every Chinese New Year,” Chong said. “I would have to go out in public in them and always feel really embarrassed to do that because I would be visibly othered. Like, ‘Oh yeah that girl’s Chinese,’ and I would be not proud of it. To see white girls basically wearing cheongsams in the street, unaware of the experiences of Chinese-Americans growing up, it feels distasteful to me.” Chong also said that the opinions other East Asians often differ in that East Asians would likely not see a problem with other races using aspects of their culture, due to different experiences of East Asians living in Asia versus East Asians living in other parts of the world. Cole argued that the utilization of the cheongsam by Western fashion shouldn’t be seen as cultural appropriation at all. “That has been worn by black, white, non-Asian
people, since it developed in Shanghai in the ’20s, that dress is part of the global repertoire of clothing,” Cole said. Cole said that he finds cultural appropriation of people of color by other people of color to be a phenomenon that often goes ignored in discussions of cultural borrowing. “If a people who have been settler-colonized by the Europeans are now appropriating another culture — who has also been settler-colonized,” he said. “And there might be something flawed in one’s reasoning, if you’re saying that’s OK because we don’t have a European or even a hegemonic or a settler-colonizing culture involved or being the ones doing the appropriation.” Can streetwear be saved from the expensive hands of high fashion? Warren thinks so. “I feel like streetwear is about what you can do with what you can find and kind of asserting a certain kind of vibrancy and creativity that only that person can possess, which is sort of more like a streetwear attitude,” Warren said. “And so while many streetwear labels, clothing are being gentrified, I still find that these companies who do appropriate these clothings won’t have much sustainability, because streetwear is an attitude and if you just don’t have it, then you don’t have it, and you don’t really survive.”
THE LIST GOES ON OF WHITE-MALE BRAND CORPORATIONS LITERALLY SOURCING AND DRAWING FROM COMMUNITIES OF COLOR … AND APPROPRIATING THEM AND REWORKING THEM TO WHERE THEY SUDDENLY SEEM MORE DESIRABLE AND TRENDY. KAYLEE WARREN
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GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER GAME OVER
ISSUE EDITOR Thomas Chou
ADVISING EDITORIAL ADVISER
MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Echo Chen DEPUTY Sam Cheng DEPUTY PHOTO Katie Peurrung VIDEO Julia Saliba Jemima McEvoy Sayer Devlin DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR Pamela Jew ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Veronica Liow CREATIVE DIRECTOR Rachel Buigas-Lopez EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITOR
WRITERS Amanda Burkett Faith Marnecheck Jendayi Omowale
Nancy Healy Rachel Holliday Smith
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
ADVERTISING Rhea Nayak Brian Christensen Zapiecki CIRCULATIONS MANAGER Allison Lambdin UNIVERSITY SALES MANAGER Makena Mueller CREATIVE DIRECTOR, W MEDIA GROUP Grace Rogers CONTENT SPECIALIST, W MEDIA GROUP Alex Hanson SALES ASSOCIATE Apoorva Nori BUSINESS MANAGER SALES MANAGER
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