Nani Magazine by Burak Yilmaz

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T U M B L R

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EDITORIAL Dear Nani reader, You probably know that platforms like tumblr are full of new great fashion. We took it to our mission to create a magazine about all this fashion on tumblr. We show you the the freshest stuff from cool blogs. Also you get infromed about the most popular Tumblr blogs. And of course, you get in touch with great pictures and interesting interviews which we made with many fashion killas! So lets start our first issue with Frank Ocean, Asap Rocky and Massamba Samuel Lambert.

Enjoy the issue, Burak Yilmaz

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ma単ana ma単ana 2 another africa 3 the classy issue 4 bymz 5 frank ocean 6 asap rocky 7 thathipsterporn 1

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another africa

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The Black Gypsy Meet Sam Lambert

“It’s rude to stare at people!” my mother used to tell me as a child. I know she was right yet in some circumstances, I maintain it’s just simply unavoidable. In fashion invariably we see our world through visual cues and those keen details. Trends and must-have pieces, can make it hard to distinguish who’s refined their own aesthetics : that sensibility that often looks simply suave, and comes from what I can only remark is a true love of fashion. In that rare moment when you spot this character, it registers on an instinctual level. You notice that they stand apart from the crowd, playful yet well-appointed and so I indulge with bout of not so discrete reconnaissance and perhaps even a bit of awkward gawking. Attending Paris’ annual fabric fairs, one individual without fail always catches my eye reminding me guiltily of my mother’s words. How is it that someone could mix both new and old so well, channelling a young Sidney Poitier with the vibe of a Stokely Carmichael all the while looking so current. My curiosity gets the better of me, I must learn his name, it is Sam Lambert. By the number of photos of him floating about on the Internet, I see I am not the only one whose curiosities he has peaked. His sartorial sensibilities and elegance bring to mind Seydou Keïta’s images of Bamako dandies, circa 1950s and 1960s and also to the Asmarinos of Eritrea (sophisticated typically older gentlemen that to this day follow the old Italian sartor of the 1930s). These gentlemen

from west and east Africa have a commonality, one that also rings true to my own Ghanaian heritage – they pay homage to traditional Western tailoring with a essence unique to their locale. Sam echoes this charming gentility of yesteryear, but its his air of contemporaneity that perhaps makes him magnetic. He makes grooming look effortless, a pleasure rather than a must-do reminding me that fashion at its best, is not about chasing trends but rather about projecting that best version of yourself. This past December, I finally put my guilty pleasure to rest when he joined me for a candid conversation and interview. We talked about how he got started in fashion, how we navigate introductions as children of the diaspora to his childhood in Angola, and his most recent project Art Comes First. We spoke about his visit to Soweto with the Sartorialist and ultimately what it takes to have a good sense of style. Meet Sam Lambert.

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Nana Yaa Poku Asare-Boadu | Sam your name at a first glance does not sound very Angolan…? SL | I have a long name which I shorten to Sam Lambert. NAB | I am sure it is not as long as mine, but please tell me.

My full name is Massamba Samuel Lambert but I am also known as Pania chambo for my old folks in Africa. And yours? NAB | It is Nana Yaa Poku Asare-Boadu Emily Sebrena Bediako Takyiwaah Subunu. A mouthful which I have also ‘tried’ to shorten to no avail. SL | Ok you got me, your name is longer than mine, but it’s a great name. NAB | So Sam, at what age did you leave Angola? SL | I left at the age of 13. NAB |When you left, what were your strongest fashion memories of that period? SL | That a good question, I am getting excited. My strongest memory back then was… that I hated wearing suits because my dad made me suits. I have no pictures of me wearing suits from back then, but I have hundreds of my younger brother who now lives in Spain. He had this amazing mohair suit, the way the shoulders were cut, and the way everything was cut… beautiful. So last time when I went to Spain, I stole it. I had one favorite item I wore all the time, a pair of khaki shorts. The thing with them was once they were washed because of the soap they used, they became very dry and very stiff. I loved their dry stiffness. So as soon as they were washed I would find a nice place for them in the sun and I would wait until they dried. They’d be so stiff they would skirt up a bit on the corners when I wore them so I would just start running; I just loved them. So that pair of khakis was really my first falling in love with vintage. I also remember my mother dressing me in dungarees for school, but I hated them. They had too many zips, belts, but-

tons and made noise. I used to actually cry because I didn’t understand why they were so noisy. I wanted something more minimal but with more life in it and those pair of khakis they had life and I just loved them. I would just wear them with no top and a pair of flip-flops and I would just run. NAB |How do you think the memories of this period influence your artistic vision now? SL | I think it was really more the fact that you always follow love for a piece without actually realising what that piece is about. It influenced me in a way that whatever moment in time, whatever I am wearing, I feel at home with it, that would be my common ground. My playing canvas, this is my starting point. It’s like the first picture you put on your mood board. This is what is going to shape the collection, the start of my ideas. Those memories they put me in the mind frame of the first pieces, the fabric that I fall in love with and then I start. NAB | Your world is all about grooming; it’s about finessing your looks and the small details. Tell me the quintessential elements for you in dressing well? SL | You have to be confident. My best friend and my ex girlfriend in Sweden always had this thing about whatever I was into or wanted to start doing, they doubted me. They would say, ‘that’s way too much’. But because of my confidence of approach I pulled it off. So I think the main thing really for me is confidence. NAB | Whenever I see you, there are certain images and thoughts you bring to mind. For example, Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta but also thoughts of the men in my family who all wore suits and took care of themselves. SL | No one ever broke it down the way you broke it down. People always pick different times, sometimes people put me back in America in the super fly days. But you actually mentioned the right things like the Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Eritrean Falasha Jewish men. I became those images without thinking of them – without knowing, it was just me being me. When I first moved to London, not many people I knew noticed the similarities like you just mentioned. It was only the older generation that would say anything. I remember a leather supplier I worked with, he went to Ethiopia to get his leather manufactured. The first time he saw me, he thought I was from a tribe in Ethiopia who look the way I do. It is quite funny when I think of it now. I became those images without thinking about it.

AC N E STUDIOS W W W . AC N E S T U D I O S . C O M

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THE CLASSY ISSUE theclassyissue.com ART DESIGN

america TUMBLR

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bymzk bymzk.tumblr.com ART DESIGN

d端sseldorf mode

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frank ocean

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If Frank Ocean wanted to play you a song, you‘d drive across town in the pouring rain, right? That‘s how we‘ve ended up at Jungle City, a sound studio in Manhattan‘s Chelsea neighborhood. When we walk in, Ocean leading the way, Pharrell Williams turns down the music and greets him warmly. „Here you are,“ the prolific rapper and producer tells him. „You‘ve walked in at the right time.“ „Sweet,“ Ocean replies, picking up Pharrell‘s diamond-studded gold chain that sits—fat as a tow rope— at the edge of the mixing board. Ocean, dressed in a gray Supreme hoodie, jeans, and black Wallabees, smiles as he dons the weighty necklace—it jibes with the new Rolex on his left wrist, the Cartier Juste Un Clou bracelet on his right. In a bit, he‘ll Instagram a bejeweled portrait of himself, but first he unveils three new tracks, stored on his phone, that Pharrell pronounces „crazy, with a lot of comprehensive layers just sort of living harmoniously.“ When Ocean says he worries a rap number called „Blue Whale“ is „risky because I‘m rhyming,“ Pharrell shakes his head.

„That‘s not risky. That thought is dead,“ he says. „It‘s like, ‚You know, I rhyme, too.‘ „ Turning to me, Pharrell says, „I always call him James Taylor. He‘s probably the closest thing to a writer‘s perfect exemplification of the unconscious. All the songs are like movies. All you need to do is close your eyes.“ Now it‘s Pharrell‘s turn to spin a track-in-progress. They listen, bobbing their heads slightly, occasionally both bursting into song. When the room is quiet again, Ocean says the song „feels like a Rubik‘s Cube melodically. You want something emotionally rich on that, you know what I‘m saying? But if I listen to it enough, I could map a way out.“ Before we exit, they agree Ocean will come back later this evening to work on it. Pharrell is attending the first show of Jay-Z‘s eight-night run at the brand-new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, but he says he‘ll come back, too. „Ain‘t no afterparty more important than this.“ „Map a way out“—it‘s a phrase Ocean will use more than once during the next four hours as we talk about his life and especially his last few months. He‘s still just 25, but it feels like he packed ten years‘ worth of living into 2012

alone, releasing a heralded album, Channel Orange, in July and headlining Saturday Night Live‘s season premiere in September. Throughout this period he has also been handling the reverberations of something he revealed on Tumblr just before Channel Orange‘s debut: his memories of an intimate relationship with his first love, a man—a rare admission in the macho world of hip-hop and R&B. It‘s important to Ocean to be the master of his own identity: Last year he changed his name from Lonny Breaux to Christopher Francis Ocean, drawing on Frank Sinatra and the original Ocean‘s 11 film for inspiration. And yet he admits that the failed relationship he mentioned on Tumblr sent him spinning out of control, rocking him even as it improved his musicality, transforming him from a man with skills to a skillful man with something he suddenly was burning to say. What was going through his mind this summer, he tells me, was something like this: „If I‘m going to say this, I‘m going to be better than all you pieces of shit. What you going to say now? You can‘t say, ‚Oh, they‘re only listening to him because he said this.‘ No, they‘re listening to me because I‘m gifted, and this project is brilliant.“ ··· GQ: GQ: You were born in Long Beach, California, but moved to New Orleans at age 5. When is the first time you realized you wanted to write and perform music? Frank Ocean: fo: I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a goto form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio. I would listen to whatever my mom played in the car—the big divas: Whitney, Mariah, Celine, Anita Baker. Then I got exposed to Prince. I think it was „The Beautiful Ones.“ He was screaming at the end. And this lady who was playing it was saying, „Ain‘t no man scream like Prince.“ And I was like, „That‘s fucking awesome.“ GQ: Your dad had left when you were 6, so your mom raised you on her own. Frank Ocean: I haven‘t seen him since. And for a while, you know, we were not middle-class. We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor—got her master‘s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure. He‘d had a really troubled life with crack, heroin, and alcohol and had kids he wasn‘t an ideal parent to. I was his second chance, and he gave it his best shot. My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride.

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HE’S THAT PRETTY MOTHER FUCKER

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A$AP Rocky’s ferociously energetic mix tape Live.Love. A$AP quickly caught fire with hip-hop heads, music bloggers, and nominal tastemakers when he unleashed it on the world via the Internet last fall. In fact, the furor was so great that large numbers of those most standoffish of record-industry gatekeepers—A&R people—soon found themselves frothed up and in a tizzy over the 23-year-old Harlem-bred rapper’s peculiar blend of influences, which include Southern regional hip-hop styles (like the slowed-down, doped-out beats of the Houston subgenre of screw music) and the world of high fashion (who was the last rapper to name-check Rick Owens?). Born Rakim Mayers, Rocky endured the kind of troubled childhood that most kids don’t escape: his father went to jail in connection with selling drugs, his older brother was killed, and Rocky wound up shuffling through shelters with his mother and sister for a time. But Rocky’s single-minded confidence enabled him to not only survive, but thrive with good-humored ease and few hints of bitterness about his past. He is part of a large uptown crew, all of whom use the first name of A$AP, which stands for Always Strive and Prosper. Until recently, he himself was dealing drugs in order to pay his bills, but he just signed a record deal with Polo Grounds Music, a label under the Sony-RCA banner, for a reported $3 million—which, for an artist whose music is rife with the steadfast ambition to uplift and transform reality, should allow him, on some level, to do just that. Despite the grimy, smoky braggadocio of songs like “Purple Swag” and “Peso,” Rocky exudes an infectious positivity. When we sat down to do this interview at a photo studio in a cavernous industrial building in the South Bronx, he was wearing a more traditional hip-hop uniform: black shirt, black jeans, black boots, and a black wool hat accented by gold fronts on his lower teeth. The only hint that he knows his Rei Kawakubo from his Yohji Yamamoto was the logo stitched on the front of his cap: COMMES des FUCKDOWN.

I‘VE BEEN INTO FASHION SINCE BIRTH. I GREW UP IN THE ’HOOD, AND EVERYBODY IN THE ’HOOD WANTS TO COMPENSATE FOR BEING IN POVERTY, SO THEY WANT TO LOOK GOOD.

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THAT HIPSTERporn thathipsterporn.org ART erotic fashion photography america

TUMBLR

america

todos

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norman lagacy nomanlegacy.tumblr.com

fashion

legacy

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yes!

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Best fashion tumblr pages Nani dipped its toes in Tumbrâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fountain of youth, purchasing the user-generated micro-blogging platform for 1.1 billion dollars. In addition to acquiring a veritable Pandoraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s box of animated gifs, porn, and pictures of cats, Yahoo also gets an immeasurable and mottled multiverse of fashion content. Nani scoured the interwebs, separating the wheat from the chaff, to bring you 10 of the best tumblrs.

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Cynthia Rowley Rather than simply shilling designer goods, the Cynthia Rowley tumblr is a charming mélange of artsy curiosities, from snapshots of Northern soul dance parties to Andy Warhol’s rejection letter from the Museum of Modern Art.

www.cy nthiar owley.tu mblr.co m/

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Fashin Pirate Run by the feminist fashion blogger and the Rookiemag contributor Arabelle Sicardi, Fashin Pirate brings a quirky perspective to fashion blogging. Her discursive approach encompasses a vast array of visual culture, from vintage Helmut Newton photographs to quirky personal style selfies to Jenny Holzer aphorisms. www.fa sh in pir ate.tu mblr.co m

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Oscar PR Girl Oscar de la Renta communications director Erika Bearman summed up her soft power when she said, “I am best known for taking the brand’s reputation for outfitting ladies who lunch, to ladies who tweet at lunch.”

www.oh-s o -co co .tu mblr.co m

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Terry‘s Diary Still lifes of peonies, poppers, and portraits of the Rolling Stones co-exist happily on the daddy of sleazebag-chic’s NSFW personal tumblr.

www.ter r ys diar y.co m/

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photography tumblr

text

www.gq.com www.nytimes.com www.interviewmagazine.com

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