Street vendors sue LAPD over Fashion District sidewalk enforcement

About 200 street vendors filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department and a business improvement district Thursday for allegedly seizing and destroying vendors’ carts, dollies and other personal belongings.
The complaint, brought on the vendors’ behalf by the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and other organizations, alleges that the LAPD’s sidewalk enforcement practice is unconstitutional and violates their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures and 14th Amendment right to due process.
“Every day in Los Angeles, street vendors have their hard-earned property illegally confiscated and destroyed,” Cynthia Anderson-Barker, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, said at a news conference in front of the LAPD’s downtown headquarters.
“They are penalized as they struggle to support their families,” she said. “This lawsuit targets unjust law enforcement practices that push these productive members of our community further into poverty.”
Street vending is illegal in Los Angeles, but city leaders are currently weighing whether to legalize and regulate the sidewalk trade.
LAPD spokesman Drake Madison said the department had no immediate comment. A City Attorney’s Office representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kent Smith, executive director of the Fashion District Business Improvement District, said his organization’s primary purpose is to keep the area clean and safe.
“We simply dispose of perishable, contaminated and abandoned property that would otherwise be left in our district without the BID’s assistance,” Smith said. “Our policy is not to confiscate or unlawfully take property from any individual. We do not want to unlawfully seize the property of anyone, including unpermitted vendors.”
However, Smith acknowledged “there can be misunderstandings between reasonable individuals about the process of disposing of trash in the Fashion District.”
The plaintiffs include an ice-cream vendor and the 200-member Union Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes, which organizes street vendors in Los Angeles. They allege that they are repeatedly stopped by the LAPD, sometimes cited and threatened with arrest, and have their property confiscated and destroyed without notice.
“All we ask is that police and security guards stop confiscating our property,” said named plaintiff Aureliano Santiago, the downtown ice-cream vendor. “We are workers, not criminals.”
The plaintiffs also contend that the LAPD is directing and authorizing employees of the Fashion District BID -- which was created and funded in 1996 by the City of Los Angeles -- to seize the property and destroy it.
The business improvement group provides maintenance and safety officers who perform public functions that would otherwise be carried out by the city Bureau of Sanitation and the LAPD.
The district’s security guards “are supposed to protect the security of the area -- not take our property away,” said Santiago, 62.
The vendor estimated that the cart and goods that have been seized each time are worth roughly $300 -- enough to cover bills and other expenses for his family.
“They don’t have value for them -- but for me, they have a lot of value,” he said.
Hundreds of unlicensed vendors crowd the nearly 90-block Fashion District on weekends, selling clothing, food, sometimes counterfeit products and other goods, local business owners say.
Police and many of the area’s store and property owners contend the vendors are creating a hazard for pedestrians and leave litter and food waste on the streets.
Along with having to pay for cleaning the streets, the Fashion District BID says local shops are losing customers and revenues to the unlicensed vendors, who they say pay no taxes.
Last year, police handed out nearly 900 illegal-vending citations citywide, which can result in fines of up to $1,000 each.

The lawsuit comes three years after the city was sued over destroying the belongings of homeless people who allegedly left their items unattended on sidewalks -- a practice ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.

Costume exhibit showcases Americanized evolution of fashion

An Ohio State costume exhibit illustrates the late 20th-century introduction of American influence to the global fashion stage.
The Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection’s American Aesthetics exhibit features the work of American designers Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
The late 20th century was a period when the fashion world experienced a transition from primarily European influence to a more American fashion aesthetic, said Marlise Schoeny, assistant curator for the Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection.
“Even today a lot of people still think that Paris is the center of fashion change. It really is happening globally,” Schoeny said. “I think expanding out into the American market and really building off of American designers was one of the first times that it expanded outside of the French and British purview.”
The transition to an American fashion aesthetic introduced the idea of casual styles of clothing rather than the formal couture ensembles that previously dominated the industry, Schoeny said.
“I think (Beene, Blass and de la Renta) represent this more American ideal of sportswear — clothing that is wearable, clothing that can be worn every day,” Schoeny said. “Certainly it is well-made and high end, but at the same time it’s not so avant-garde that you couldn’t wear it to the office or wear it to a lunch or whatever it is you were doing.”
Beene, Blass and de la Renta’s innovative designs gained recognition throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s that contributed to the trio’s influence on global trends, culminating in each of the three designers being awarded multiple Coty American Fashion Critics Awards intended to promote and celebrate American fashion, Schoeny said.
Gayle Strege, curator of the Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection, said the exhibit shows the evolution of styles across the latter part of the 20th century while also showcasing each designer’s individual contribution and influence on fashion at that time period.
“One of the things that is really interesting about this show, and the fact that it’s spanning these three decades, is looking at the real change in styles,” Strege said. “A lot of the things from the 1960s were sort of very stiff and A-line and minimalist in their design, and then when you get into the ‘70s it’s a little more soft and flowing, and then into the ‘80s there’s just a lot of embellishment and luxury and glamour.”
The exhibit, which features evening wear, day wear, structured jackets and an assortment of little black dresses that range from four to five decades in age, offers visitors an opportunity to recognize the timeless elements of fashion relative to the contemporary styles of today, Strege said.
“I think it’s an interesting thing to come and see just in general the change of aesthetics that was happening in the world at that time period,” Schoeny said. “Anyone who is wearing clothing or buying clothing is vaguely aware of at least trends or what they consciously decide to put on their body, and it’s interesting to go back and look at what was fashionable then and what were sort of the trends that were going on and how people were presenting themselves.”
American Aesthetics will be on display in the Columbia Gas Lounge and Gladys Keller Snowden Gallery in Campbell Hall until April 30. Admission is free.

Mystery of business struggles, bizarre behavior

When Marc Jacobs staged his final show as head designer at Louis Vuitton on Oct. 2, 2013, he was given a standing ovation. He was hailed in the fashion press as the most important and influential American designer of his generation.
So Jacobs announced it was time that he — like Michael Kors and Prada before him — should go public. He was poised to become fashion’s next self-made billionaire, a rarity in a world of luxury fashion conglomerates.
Yet as with much in Marc ­Jacobs’ life, not all was as it seemed: He’d told the press it was his choice to leave Louis Vuitton, yet there were rumblings that he’d been fired. “His contract may not be renewed,” a source told Reuters weeks before.
Meanwhile, two years on, his company has yet to go public.
All is not well in the house of Marc Jacobs.
A profile of Jacobs in last February’s W magazinenoted that the designer wore the same clothes — Adidas training pants and shoes — three days in a row. Last March, it was announced that his diffusion line, Marc by Marc Jacobs — which reportedly made up 70 percent of the company’s business — would close, as would its stand-alone stores.
In April, Adidas filed suit against Jacobs, claiming he’d “intentionally and maliciously” ripped off its iconic three-stripe design. In its filing, the company noted that “this is particularly damaging to people who perceive a defect or lack of quality in Marc Jacobs’ products.”
Jacobs has also fallen out with photographer Juergen Teller, who had shot every Marc Jacobs ad since the very first one, in 1998, which starred Kim Gordon. Teller quit in 2013 over Jacobs’ insistence that Miley Cyrus star in the spring/summer campaign.
“It was our first time disagreeing,” Jacobs told W. “I guess a lot of people had problems with her behavior or something — because they’re all so pure and chaste, right? One thing I don’t tolerate is hypocrisy. Anyway, my attitude was: You don’t want to do it? Fine. Sorry it’s not working for you; but it’s my choice.”
In June, his Marc Jacobs Collection store at the Palais Royale in Paris closed. That same month, he accidentally posted a nude selfie to his 191,000 Instagram followers. “It’s yours to try!” read the caption.
This is Marc Jacobs, at 52 years old.
Future of design
Marc Jacobs’ career began in 1984, when he presented his thesis collection at Parsons School of Design. It was youthful and exuberant, one that ran counter to the ­decade’s brittle, overdone, ­“Dynasty”-infused glamour.
At the presentation was a fashion executive named Robert Duffy. He thought Jacobs could be the future of American fashion, and two days later hired him at the now-defunct label Sketchbook.
“It was what I dreamt of,” Duffy told The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “If I could find a designer who I could really relate to, this would be a tremendous adventure. I was 28 at the time and Marc was 21.”
Later, in commemoration, Duffy had “1984” tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. “It was Robert’s belief in me then — that’s why I’m still here,” Jacobs told Women’s Wear Daily last March. “From those very early days . . . we said, ‘Whatever happens, you and I are partners.’”
In 1985, Jacobs’ debut spring collection won raves from WWD and The New York Times — but even then, he was a heavy drug user. Jacobs was fired within the year.
“Everyone I knew at that time who was 20 to 25 was taking drugs,” Duffy later said. “But at a certain point I stopped, and other people stopped, and Marc wasn’t stopping . . . I just kept thinking, ‘There are a lot of high-functioning drug addicts.’”
It was Duffy who kept Jacobs’ issues quiet, kept him working and, in 1988, helped pull off another coup: Jacobs was tapped as head designer at Perry Ellis, garnering national headlines in the process.
Jacobs’ breakout came in 1992, when he showed his now-infamous “grunge” collection. It was a high-end take on flannel shirts and Converse, meant to reflect the spirit of Nirvana and the kids who thrifted at the Goodwill. Walking in that show was his new favorite model, the waifish Kate Moss, who represented this modern kind of beauty.
That collection was a critical and commercial flop, and Jacobs was fired.
Duffy, once again, cleaned up the mess, working hard to secure an exit package that would help Jacobs fund his own line. “Marc’s way of dealing with these problems was to get high,” Duffy later said. “He wasn’t sitting in the negotiations with the Perry Ellis lawyers. He never even met the Perry Ellis lawyers.”
Duffy had become to Jacobs what Pierre Bergé had been to Yves Saint Laurent: the visionary of commerce, the manager of money, a ballast, a confidant.
Both men have found the comparison apt. “We’ve never been lovers, like Bergé and Saint Laurent,” Jacobs told the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “Although people always thought we were . . . I don’t think without him or without me we could achieve all that we’ve achieved.”
Marc Jacobs International was founded in 1993. Jacobs focused on showing cleaned-up, commercial collections, and in 1997, when LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault was looking for a head designer at Louis Vuitton, he found Jacobs.
Pressure’s on
Jacobs’ appointment was historic, the stress unbearable. Executives were constantly changing their minds about what they wanted in a luxury womenswear line, a first for the 143-year-old house.
“Depending on what day of the week it is,” Jacobs said at the time, “the stuff I make has to preserve the tradition of Vuitton or it has to rock the world.”
His first collection was a flop, but his own line — which by 1998 included the younger, cooler, cheaper Marc by Marc — was thriving.
He’d become the designer of choice for offbeat beauties like Sofia Coppola and Chloë Sevigny. His girls mainlined the ’70s nostalgia of their childhoods, which Marc by Marc re-interpreted season after season and sold right back to them. He toggled the fringe and the mainstream, the high and the low, and in 1998, there was no cooler American fashion label than Marc Jacobs.
By 1999, Marc had a full-blown heroin addiction. Duffy was the only one to help.
“Robert probably cares about me more than anyone else in my life — about my well-being as well as my ability to perform as a designer,” Jacobs told the Journal in 2012. “As soon as he realized [my heroin addiction] he said, ‘I’m not going to sit back and let you kill yourself.’ He went to Mr. ­Arnault and said, ‘Marc needs to get help.’”
Jacobs was resistant to rehab, and Duffy made it clear that his bosses would let him carry on until he OD’d. “These people don’t really love you or care about you,” Duffy told Jacobs. “They want you to work, and if you die, that’s it.”
Jacobs went to rehab. Once clean, he had a renewed sense of purpose, and Duffy set about building an empire. In 2001, they opened three Marc Jacobs stores on Bleecker Street — such was the demand for his stuff. The ­cachet of his brand turned that once-grim West Village block into a mini Gold Coast.
At Vuitton, he collaborated with his hero, artist Stephen Sprouse, on a graffiti-inspired LV-monogrammed bag. It was such an astounding hit that Vuitton — a house that previously specialized in bags — established its first-ever waiting list.
In December of that year, actress Winona Ryder was caught shoplifting, among other items, a $760 Marc Jacobs cashmere sweater. She wore his clothes to court.
“Throughout her trial,” said the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan, “Ryder looked splendid.”
It was the apotheosis of Marc’s fame; the cultural moment was his. Yet in 2007, Jacobs was abusing drugs again, getting thrown off planes, disappearing for days at a time.
It was Duffy who called him out: “Marc,” he said. “I know what’s going on.” As he did in 2001, Duffy encouraged Marc to be open about his issues. “Marc is a gay man who is a drug addict, who hires hookers,” Duffy said in 2008. “Why lie about it?”
As recently as 2012, right before Jacobs’ contract was up at Vuitton, Duffy told the Journal he’d never leave, despite all ­Jacobs had put him through.
“We’ll always need each other,” Duffy said.
‘A bad sign’
Last March, Duffy quietly stepped down.
“That’s always a bad sign,” says veteran retail and trend forecaster David Wolfe. “You can never tell what causes a split like that — it’s like trying to look at the inside of a marriage. It’s going to have a bigger impact than one might think.”
Jacobs and his company declined to comment for this article.
As Duffy exited, LVMH appointed former Givenchy exec Sebastian Suhl as CEO. That same month, Marc by Marc ­Jacobs — just relaunched to great fanfare in 2013 — shut down. Plans for a Madison Avenue flagship, originally slated to open by the end of 2014, have stalled.
Suhl told WWD that moving the brand into malls was “a glaring opportunity” — an enormous repositioning of a label that once thrived on exclusivity.
Fortune magazine reported that compared to luxury brands like Chanel and Victoria Beckham, Marc Jacobs clothes and accessories have little resale value. The man who once monthly churned out $1,000 It Bags no longer generates excitement or desire.
“Young people no longer covet Marc Jacobs as a label,” Wolfe says. “That’s really what’s wrong, and it cannot be repaired.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, I really don’t,” Jacobs told the ­Financial Times in July. “I’ve never been a business person, nor have I ever pretended to understand the first thing about it.”
His hand was bandaged, the reporter wrote, as “the result of an infection brought on by his compulsive nail-biting.”
The high-end Marc Jacobs line has also suffered from a cohesive vision for the clothes — from collection to collection, there is no identifying fingerprint, the kind that marks a Ralph Lauren, a Diane von Furstenberg, a Michael Kors.
Jacobs’ last collection, shown during September Fashion Week, “was so far from anything one would expect from Marc, or buy from Marc,” Wolfe says. “It toggled between dowager Halloween and cutesy talent show. If you’re only as good as your last collection . . . the future looks kind of bleak to me.”
It’s a feeling many Marc Jacobs employees expressed to WWD’s Bridget Foley, who covered Duffy’s June wedding.
“The company’s business is undergoing a great deal of change. Many don’t know what their futures hold,” she wrote. “Many don’t know what their futures hold…[But] several offered variations on a singular thought: ‘We were so lucky to have been a part of something special.’”

Bucks County stylist on plus-size women in fashion: 'It's time to recognize us'

As a plus-size woman, nothing was more frustrating for Chester County's Kim Grigorian than combing through the racks for a bridesmaid’s dress when the time came for her sister's wedding.
"I cried when trying on dresses because nothing looked good," she told PhillyVoice.
Grigorian's reality is that major retailers and even local boutiques aren't making clothes for women like her. If they do, she said, they hide them in separate sections or basements.
Though she has since slimmed down, for health reasons, Grigorian said she once weighed 340 pounds. Yet even as a more hourglass-shaped plus-size model, she has trouble finding clothes that not only fit, but qualify as fashion.
"It's difficult to find fashion that really makes you feel good about wearing it," she explained. "And that's key: Feeling good about wearing it."
Enter "Pink the Runway" creator Crystal Carmen and her co-organizer Laura Mazurek, two local plus-size women working in fashion and changing the dialogue surrounding women sizes 8 and up.
"[Plus-sized women] are a majority, and it's time to recognize us," Mazurek told PhillyVoice. "Make things for us, put us in your ad campaigns. We're a voice and a buying demographic, and the time is now."
To highlight the issue, the duo will host what they tout as the first black-tie, couture fashion show for plus-size women sizes 8 to 22. The show, taking place Oct. 30 at the Le Meridien Hotel, will feature 30 plus-size models (including Grigorian) and styles from national designers and local ones like Ann Luchade, Christine Phillips and Philly Bride.
More than just a fashion show, Mazurek emphasized, the event is a statement of empowerment – a wake-up call for fashionable plus-size women who are often shunned from the couture landscape.
"What’s important to me is inspiring women," said Mazurek, who operates a styling and personal shopping business in Bucks County. "Eliminating size shaming, opening up marketing to include all women. Because not only are we not represented with the clothing in top-tier designers, but we’re in no ad campaigns. And when we do hit Vogue, it’s considered a ‘Special Issue.’
"Some of the things I want to see as a result of the event is for it to not be spotlighted as a special issue -- it just ‘is.'"
According to Houston-based firm Plunkett Research, plus-size is commonly considered between sizes 14 and 32 and plus-sizes women account for 67 percent of the population. Brands like Michael Kors and Gap offer up to about a size 20, but only guarantee the clothing online. That distinction sends the message that designers welcome plus-size customers’ money, but not their presence in stores, Mazurek believes.
She chose Philadelphia for the event because of its status as an "epicenter" of fashion culture on the East Coast. That, and because of the city's momentum, she added, pointing to Market East in particular. Upcoming additions to the city, like the Fashion Outlets of Philadelphia, still have an opportunity to offer a broad range of clothing sizes in stores.
"In about two years, Philadelphia is going to have a facelift," Mazurek predicted. "And with all the development projects -- Jefferson Station, luxury vendors and luxury hotels remodeling and coming to the city -- it’s going to be a destination for luxury, and we want to make sure all women are welcome and represented.”
“I’m tired of going to stores with friends and being the only one who can’t buy anything,” added Carmen.
Lynn Handel, who owns Philly Bride in Old City, told PhillyVoice her bridal boutique is the only in the Philadelphia area to carry plus-size gowns – up to size 20 in-store and size 26 through custom tailoring. The problem, she said, is twofold. Designers assume plus-size women won't buy their wares and will instead opt for, say, David's Bridal. And, more to the root of the problem, plus-size women don't yet feel empowered to step up and demand more options.
"It has to start with plus-sized women -- the buyers," Handel insisted.
In her case, Handel said adjusting her gown options was one of the first moves she made after opening her storefront at 304 Walnut St. last year, at the former Bridals by Danielle.
“I looked at who was coming in the door and looked at these women, and those dresses were not in the store," she said. "The sizes only went up to 14 and I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ Because you know that’s the average-size woman, not a plus-size woman.
“From a common sense perspective, I really wanted my store to represent all women who would be coming in.”

Donna Karan's fashion wisdom, in seven easy pieces

Donna Karan introduced her famous Seven Easy Pieces in 1985 as she was introducing the world to her namesake label. Based on a black bodysuit with simple added pieces such as a wrap skirt, classic trousers or a suede jacket, it was a lot more than a convenient wardrobe: It was a conceptual shift in fashion. Karan was trying to tell working women that clothes should work for them and not the other way around. And that they didn’t need to wear buttoned-up suits to look professional.
It’s a time of great transition for Karan, 67. In the summer, she announced she was stepping down from her signature Donna Karan collection to focus fully on her Urban Zen company and foundation, which designs clothes as well as promotes health care, education and preservation of local culture in countries such as Haiti.
What’s more, she has a memoir out — “My Journey,” a volume chock full of very personal, entertaining anecdotes (like that time Barbra Streisand came in and insisted on taking a sweater that had been determined to be too flammable. They became great friends.) Karan did not know, when writing, that she would have to add a new final chapter about her farewell to her famous label. But, she said, “that’s how my life happens” — beginnings and endings, always at the same time.
Karan sat down to chat with The Associated Press in her sweeping, tranquil Urban Zen space in Greenwich Village. Here are Seven Pieces of Wisdom from a pillar of American fashion.
Fashion is about dressing — and addressing. “When Donna Karan started, I felt there was a really enormous need for women to be addressed as women. Because they were either wearing men’s clothes — suits and ties and shirts, kind of buttoned up — or they were the ladies who lunched, and kind of wearing cocktail dresses. So who was really expressing the working woman? She was just not being addressed.”
Clothes need to work all day and all night — and black is best. “I wanted clothes that could go from the minute I got up in the morning to the minute I went to bed at night. I wanted clothes to go through that whole cycle because I found that I didn’t have time to go home and change. It was like, ‘if I put them all in a suitcase and went off to Europe, what would I pack?’ So jewelry was an important aspect. And I love black. I never get out of it. Black took me from day into night.”
Shoulders never gain weight — so show them! “I remember Women’s Wear Daily really did not like my cold shoulder look — exposed shoulders, covered arms. Just not at all. And then Liza Minnelli decided to come into my closet one day and pick up this discarded dress. Everybody loved the way she looked in it. Next thing, I see Hillary” Clinton, then first lady, “wearing it at the White House. For me, the cold shoulder was so obvious. It is the only place where women never gain weight. You gain weight every other place on your body except on your shoulders.”
It’s great to have fans in high places. One of my dearest friends, Barbra Streisand, wears the clothes magnificently. I’ve dressed her for practically every concert she’s ever done. And I’ve always said that we worked together on it. It was a ‘We,’ not a ‘Me.’ We designed it together. And certainly when I designed her wedding dress, that was the ultimate for me. Her style is fluidity, simplicity, elegance. It was never too much. It was so that she — the woman, the voice — came through. And that’s how I feel about clothing. I always want the person to come through, not the clothes.”
Don’t hide yourself. You know, a woman has a certain point of view about the way she can dress. And what I did was, I threw that a little bit to the side. Like pencil skirts. I love women in pencil skirts. No matter if they’re a little bigger on the bottom, they’re better in a pencil skirt because it narrows them out. Women don’t really understand that: They think the bigger the clothes, the more they hide. Well sometimes, the narrower the clothes, the leaner they look.”
We all need a deadline. Putting on four” Fashion Week “shows a year? It is a lot of work. It’s exhausting. But at the same time, it’s a high. So when you’re in the zone, it’s an adrenaline rush. And then you crash. That’s a guarantee. But I always felt, ‘Oh my gosh,’ if just had one more week, two more weeks, three more weeks. But a deadline is a deadline. And that’s what brought me into the next season. I was always late for the next collection. Most designers need deadlines. You’re still designing as those clothes go onto the runway.
Creativity is great, but fashion needs to produce clothes you can actually wear. “I think it’s much more difficult to work in fashion today than when I started. Fashion is going at warp speed — What’s new? What’s new? —and with the red carpet, and with the communications, everybody sees it so quickly, so fast. There’s so much to handle, and” the clothes “really do take on each person’s individuality, which is the good news of it. But I think we’re also pushing the limit of what a woman can actually wear.”

Twin Shadow’s Rock Fashion Aspirations

George Lewis Jr., who is better known as the musician Twin Shadow, was sitting in the bar at Soho House in Manhattan recently, explaining the different approaches musicians have taken vis-à-vis fashion.
“When I think of Eddie Vedder, I think of a guy who wore cargo shorts and Doc Martens the whole career,” Mr. Lewis said. “Whereas Michael Jackson and David Bowie were these evolving characters. The change in direction sonically matched a change in the look.”
Mr. Lewis, 32, was wearing Doc Martens himself. But it turned out the black boots, which he wore with black shorts over black tights and a vintage Astro Boy T-shirt, were thrown on following an up-all-night party in the company of his girlfriend, the actor-singer-model Zoë Kravitz. His own rock fashion aspirations are aligned with the King of Pop and the Thin White Duke.
Or as he put it, “I’m very concerned with showmanship, presentation and using fashion as a vehicle to heighten the sonic experience.”
Mr. Lewis has an interest not just in stage clothes, but the whole crazy quilt he called “fashiontown.” He was a ubiquitous presence last summer at New York Fashion Week: Men’s, attending so many shows and parties that, as he admitted, “My brain was kind of hurting at the end.”
Last month, he took a break from touring to attend New York Fashion Week, catching the presentation of a designer he admired, Robert Geller, and doing a D.J. set at the Roxy Hotel in TriBeCa.
More than a casual observer, Mr. Lewis has also composed and sometimes performed the music for Public School’s runway shows; collaborated on a film with Michael Bastian, General Motors and Dazed Digital; modeled for a look book for the jewelry designer Nikolai Rose; modeled in a Levi’s campaign this year; and recently scored the soundtrack for a video to promote District Vision, a soon-to-start eyewear line.
Even without his own label, he’s giving Kanye West a run for his money as the music world’s leading fashion dilettante. “I like being on the outskirts of fashiontown,” Mr. Lewis said, in a voice mellow and whispery after his sleep-deprived night. “I like observing and I like being a part of it on a music level.”
Dao-Yi Chow, who along with Maxwell Osborne founded and designs the Public School label, said one of his favorite things about producing the runway shows is working with Mr. Lewis on the music. “We’ll tell him the mood or the attitude,” Mr. Chow said. “He does a great job of picking up on what we’re feeling. So much of what we do is inspired by music and live performance.”
The collaboration dates from the beginning of both Twin Shadow and the fashion label. Mr. Lewis wore a black leather motorcycle jacket in his early photo shoots and music videos, and had styled his hair into a pompadour. Mr. Chow and Mr. Osborne liked Twin Shadow’s moody ’80s-inflected synth pop and the visual imagery inspired their first collection.
“It was sort of like a greaser-slash-rocker look, but there was a bit of emotion to it,” said Mr. Chow, adding that the videos “had the same references we were speaking to.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
Mr. Chow cited another of Mr. Lewis’s wardrobe staples at the time that caught his eye: a really wide-brimmed felted hat like the ones that have since become fixtures atop the heads of every aspiring lady of the canyon in Los Angeles. (Mr. Lewis said he bought the hat at a “really junky junk shop” in Brooklyn.)
When the Public School designers invited Mr. Lewis to their studio, he was taken aback to see magazine photos of himself tacked to their mood board. But a friendship developed, and Mr. Lewis became not just their muse but their music scorer. He has since modeled in Public School’s ad campaigns, too.
From the beginning of his career as Twin Shadow, Mr. Lewis has exhibited his own highly considered visual aesthetic, as well as playful references to fashion iconography. His first official video, for the anti-love song “Slow,” was a take on the banned Calvin Klein commercials from the ’90s, the ones where nubile-looking models stand in a wood-paneled room and submit to leading questions from a pervy off-camera interviewer.
Mr. Lewis plays the sexually exploited model, dressed in jeans, a denim vest and a tight white T-shirt, and the gay-or-straight ambiguity he gives off is reminiscent of early Prince. He came up with the concept, as he does for all his videos and album covers.
“I just really wanted the first image of me to be provocative and edgy,” Mr. Lewis said, recalling how the Calvin Klein ads made him feel weirdly uncomfortable as a kid. “I didn’t want it to be completely throwback, but I did want it to have some dirt to it. We were really in a dingy basement in Long Island. We were really filming on VHS cameras.”
Subsequent videos have shown Mr. Lewis acting out a two-part dystopian biker gang fantasy (he’s into motorcycles) and standing above Los Angeles in a ribbed muscle tee as the black-and-white images of him and the city evoke vintage Herb Ritts. The videos can be a bit melodramatic and campy in a way that fashion people respond to.
Max Vallot, a founder of District Vision, the eyewear line, said Mr. Lewis is different than other musicians he can think of in that “he’s very much at the center” of his visual presentation.
“There are a lot of artists who have cool covers and videos, but most of the time don’t have anything to do with it,” Mr. Vallot said.
Ms. Kravitz, in an email from Paris, wrote: “For George, music and style go hand in hand. When he has an idea musically, it seeps out into all other aspects of his art, clothes, artwork, the live show. It’s all connected.”
Mr. Lewis was born to a Jewish father and a Dominican mother, and raised in a backwater part of Florida. As a child, culture and fashion filtered down to him from his three sisters, he said. Two were modern dancers, while a third was into the theater.
“My sisters used to pretend to be in music videos: They would make up dances and I would be fake-filming them,” Mr. Lewis said. “They almost set the desire point of New York for me.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAdvertisementContinue reading the main story
He did move to New York, living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and scoring music for a dance company before creating Twin Shadow. After nine years, he left for Los Angeles, but his relationship with Ms. Kravitz and his work with Public School and other fashion brands have lately been “pulling me back to New York,” he said.
In the meantime, Twin Shadow is finishing up a tour, and Mr. Lewis is trying to make his stage presentation as compelling as his music. Two days after the interview, he would perform at Terminal 5 in Manhattan dressed in yellow motocross pants and a single motorcycle-gloved hand made by Troy Lee Designs. When Twin Shadow played “The Late Late Show With James Corden” recently, he donned a red beanie in a sartorial tribute to the “Let’s Get It On” era Marvin Gaye.
Mr. Lewis said he wanted to pay respects to a musician who is underappreciated for his style. “My friends and I were just talking about this footage where he’s in a rehearsal and wearing a track suit and sneakers,” he said of Mr. Gaye. “He’s doing the entire rehearsal lying on the couch. Casual is his whole entire fashion vibe.”
During both performances, Mr. Lewis wore his black motorcycle jacket, which he had with him during the interview, despite the day’s warm temperature. Made by the brand Lair, it has become his foundational garment (asked to describe her boyfriend’s personal style, Ms. Kravitz wrote simply: “Leather. Jacket.”) and never leaves him.
“I’m a loser of things,” he said. “I’ll have 20 iPhones by the time the tour is over. But this is the one thing. That’s why it’s with me right now.”
Some elements of rock fashion need never evolve.

Made In Chelsea star and entrepreneur on building a fashion brand

Oliver Proudlock is best-known for appearing in Channel 4 reality TV programme Made In Chelsea. He is also an entrepreneur, running clothing and lifestyle businessSerge DeNimes. After starting up as a one-man band, Proudlock now has a team of four in his London office. Last week, in support of the Small Business Saturday campaign, he took part in a roundtable discussion with five small business owners from the fashion and jewellery sectors.
What inspired you to start the business?
I was always very interested in art and fashion. At school I spent the majority of my time in the art school painting. Then I went to Newcastle University, where I studied fine art for four years. I love art and painting but it can be quite lonely sometimes. And the thing I love about fashion is it’s very social and interactive.
I decided to move from art to fashion – it was a very scary move. So I started with a product I was really familiar with – T-shirts. I wanted to create the best T-shirt I could. At the moment graphic T-shirts are massively on trend.
You founded the business in 2011, just before Made In Chelsea producers got in touch. What impact did this have?
When I was deciding whether or not to do the show, one of the key things was how I was going to be perceived, because you never know with reality TV. So, how it would affect my brand, whether it would have a positive or negative effect, open doors or close doors? It obviously gave me a platform and a following, which helped me push my brand. For me [the business] was always my main passion. I love the show but it’s all about my brand.
How important is social media, and which channels work best?
So much is built on social media. We are doing a big push on that now, as well as marketing. For us, Instagram is the most beneficial. And for me personally as well. Maybe three to four years ago it was Twitter. People like to see imagery, they are too impatient to read however many characters it is on Twitter.
How is the business doing?
The brand has developed in size and we have increased the range. Having started with T-shirts – a core collection of eight – we are now doing a lot more denim and working with wool and various other materials.
Each year we are doubling in size. We are now in 27 stores in the UK. I want to double that within the next two years. In the next five years I want to be wholesaling around the world, in America, Australia, and Asia.
Has your sense of style changed since being in the public eye?
No.
What’s a typical day like?
It depends upon the time of year. We are in that transition period now where we have just launched our autumn/winter collection and we are focusing on designing our spring/summer collection.
Who is your target audience?
Anyone from 17 to late 20s – style-conscious, young, creative individuals who aren’t scared to step outside of the mould.
How are you involved in the Small Business Saturday campaign?
I have been involved over the last two years as a small business. To promote small business on one day and get everyone to notice and help small businesses is an amazing thing. I spread the word through my social media handles as much as I can.
What have you learned since starting up?
When you are setting up a small business you have to have faith in yourself and the project and the product you are creating. If you don’t believe in it, noone else will. The key for any small business is being surrounded by a good team and like-minded people.

Gregg Zaun on Jays in the playoffs, Don Cherry, fashion sense

Gregg Zaun was seated at a glass-top boardroom table inside the labyrinthine Rogers Communications campus at the base of Mount Pleasant Road, and he was eager to begin: “I think there’s a large segment of baseball fans out there, maybe even Blue Jays fans, who feel that I’m a ‘negative Nancy,’ that I’m some bitter, disgruntled ex-player.”
Now 44, he has been an ex-player for five years, having retired after 16 years as a journeyman catcher around the major leagues. He won a World Series title with the Florida Marlins, but his longest stretch with any one team was the five years spent in Toronto, where he now works as an analyst with Rogers Sportsnet — an analyst known for his polarizing opinions.
“If you know me and if you spend a good bit of time around me,” Zaun said, “I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky guy.”
That being said, he added, “nothing irritates me more than poorly played baseball.”
Nothing?
“Well,” he said, “maybe the pedestrians here in Toronto.”
Pedestrians and cyclists cause “90 per cent” of the traffic backup in the city, Zaun said, pointing to his upbringing in Glendale, Calif. — near the traffic vortex of Los Angeles — as his qualification on the matter.
“I fancy myself a bit of a traffic whisperer,” he said. “I have major solutions for the mayor, if he would take a meeting with me.”
Instead of the mayor, Zaun met the Toronto Star, talking about a boy named Schleprock, flat tax and a cherished autograph from a guitar legend.
What was I going to buy if I walked into Jewel City Glass, in Glendale, Calif.?
You should definitely buy a shower door. No doubt. We built, probably, the best shower doors in the world at that time, when my parents were running that glass company. I like to give my mom full credit for the frameless shower door. She was putting frameless shower doors in the homes of Hollywood stars like Jeff Goldblum back in the early-to-mid ‘80s. Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli were clients of my parents.
How strong was the lure of the glass business?
It had zero lure for me, at all, whatsoever. In fact, my dad celebrated the day I was drafted because he knew I wasn’t going to be a potential person to take over the business. I had earned the nickname Schleprock around the building because I used to do some pretty dumb things. I broke a lot of stuff. I cost my dad, probably, more money the year I was 16 years old than I actually saved him by being his employee for nothing.
According to a report in The Los Angeles Times, in 1988, a burglary at Jewel City Glass ultimately led police to uncover a massive auto theft ring. What was stolen?
It probably would have been a car. My dad, at that time, was a reserve police officer. They picked on the wrong guy.
Your dad sold the business and became a rookie on the Glendale police force at 50. What career did your mom start to pursue as an empty-nester?
She went back to trying to be a professional golfer. My mom started playing golf when she was 19, as a way to get out of the house and try to get back in shape from having me . . . My mom’s always been a single-digit handicapper since I’ve been aware of her golf. Now, she’s slowed down a little bit because of the Parkinson’s disease, but she’s a darn good golfer.
How many strokes do get when you two play?
Oh, man. I don’t get any, anymore. My mom knows there’s every possibility I could shoot 78 or 79 as easily as I could shoot 109 — it just depends on whether the drivers are straight that day. And she’s ruthless. She doesn’t give me anything. She’s never given me strokes, not on the golf course or in life.
Speaking of police, why did you say this, as a member of the Milwaukee Brewers, in 2010: “I would characterize myself as a bit of a policeman.”
I felt like my job as a veteran player was to inform and educate and police the clubhouse. I’ve always seen the veteran players in the clubhouse do that. I felt like I’d been around long enough to where my tenure as a Major League Baseball player afforded me a certain amount of respect. At the same time, I didn’t want to see the kids make the same dumb mistakes in the clubhouse that I did as a youngster.
You have spoken of how, when you were breaking in with the Baltimore Orioles, Cal Ripken “worked” you over physically: In retrospect, was that initiation, or was it bullying?
It’s not bullying. I chose some poor words, speaking casually as I do most of the time. We live in a world now where those kinds of things are never acceptable. The word hazing strikes a chord. Bullying is something that strikes a chord. I’m 100 per cent against it . . . Cal’s a fun guy. He’s a big kid at heart; he loves to wrestle, he likes to play games. He’s a very competitive guy. He loves to play basketball against his teammates. He likes to wrestle. He’s very hands on, you know, and I stepped over the line a couple of times.
What do you think Cal would have done if a teammate had written “this is a sinking ship” on a board inside the clubhouse, as someone did when you were with the Blue Jays, in 2006?
I don’t think that sort of thing would have ever been allowed to take place. There wouldn’t have been the opportunity for that to happen.
Were you acting like a policeman when, as a Sportsnet analyst, you were highly critical of Blue Jays catcher J.P. Arencibia two years ago?
Not so much as I was asking as a policeman. There were a number of things about his situation that irritated me. One, he stopped asking questions. He followed me around like a puppy dog his first year in a big-league camp, and we did — Ernie Whitt, me, any other guys who were there. And he was shaping up to be a pretty darned good defensive catcher. I had such warm feelings for him as a person . . . He stopped asking questions when he got to the big leagues, and had developed the attitude of he knows it all, he’s got it all figured out. I represent my comments as extremely fair.
Blue Jays manager John Gibbons took exception to the criticism in part because he said you had not dropped by the clubhouse to discuss the matter, saying “people view that as gutless.” Do you have any regrets?
No. Because the whole notion of me dropping by the clubhouse to talk about that stuff is ridiculous. We’re not talking about 1952, when the only contact journalists had with the players was face-to-face on the field. I sit in exactly the same space every day. If somebody needs to find me, I have email, I have a cell phone, I have Twitter, I have Facebook, I have Instagram. We don’t live in an age where I have to physically go down to sit there.
What do you think when people call you “Zaun Cherry?”
[Chuckles] I think it’s flattering, because they’re drawing a comparison to a sports icon in this country. I know what the comparisons are for; the easy one would be the wardrobe. But then again, I don’t think my suits or my choices in fashion are nearly as flamboyant as Don’s. I love what he does. I think it’s fantastic, because it’s an attention grabber. You know, when “Coach’s Corner” comes on, one of two things is going to happen, if not both — you’re going to be entertained by what he’s got on, and you’re probably going to be polarized by his comments.
How do you pick your suits?
We try to stay somewhat connected with what’s happening, fashion-wise, as far as the tailoring goes, as far as the colours. At the end of the day, I’ve made some choices where I’ve said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’
How much of a challenge is it to be a baseball commentator in hockey country?
I find it to be pretty easy, to be honest with you. I find that I’m lent an additional amount of credibility because there are people who defer to my experience automatically, because I played the game so long, and now I’ve been doing the broadcasting so long. And I think they find me to be quite honest and up front. I don’t try to sell them a bill of goods. You get a lot of attention, because there aren’t a whole lot of places to go for that information in this country, whereas you can turn on a number of different entities, (such) as hockey.
Canada is only days from a federal election. We know Don Cherry would lean conservative: Where would Gregg Zaun lean?
I’m very conservative when it comes to finances, but I’m a little bit more liberal when it comes to social. I would always lean to whatever candidate was going to make it as fair for everyone financially as possible. I’m a big believer in flat tax. I believe that everybody should be taxed the same percentage of their income. I don’t think the people who work hard and are successful in their lives should be taxed at a higher rate.
How far are you from becoming a Canadian citizen?
I’m eligible to apply right now. I’ve been a permanent resident long enough. I actually became eligible on Canada Day this year. But I’m still talking with attorneys and accountants on whether or not that’s going to be a beneficial thing for me or not . . . I’m married to a Canadian woman, and I have a half-Canadian, half-American daughter. Whatever it is, I’m not going anywhere.
You interviewed the guitarist Slash for MuchMusic in 2005, and you asked him whether he thought Guns N’ Roses would release “Chinese Democracy” before the Blue Jays won the World Series. Did Slash lie to you?
That was one of the funner days I’ve had in my career. I have a signed guitar by Slash that is just one of the most epic autographs you’ve ever seen. He doesn’t just sign his name, he draws pictures. It’s pretty amazing.
As a former player, what has it been like to watch the Blue Jays climb back into the playoffs?
Absolutely amazing. I’m tickled to death for Alex Anthopoulos and the fans. This guy stuck his neck out and made the moves. He put his stamp on the organization. Right, wrong or indifferent, as a player and as a fan, you just want to see somebody take a stand and make their mark on the organization.
With more and more viewers tuning in to watch, what have you learned about the power your voice can carry on the airwaves?
The whole notion that over a million people would tune in to see our pregame show, and then two million for the game, in a country that’s got 38 (million)? That’s pretty powerful. I’m starting to experience the power of it in public. It’s difficult for me to go out in public and not feel the barrage of Blue Jays questions . . . I also find that the level of the questions is getting a heck of a lot more intelligent as we go along. These Blue Jays fans are educated.
On that power, three years ago, why did you post, then remove from Twitter, messages in which you referred to being in a shoe store where there was “so much estrogen,” and also that women in one Toronto bar were “tubby, unfortunately man-ish, and super stuck up”?
Well, we all make mistakes. [Pauses] I can speak to the bar. There was a situation where a group of female friends of mine were being treated disrespectfully by some young bar patrons, and instead of having a face-to-face altercation with these people — or, the smart thing would have been to just have security remove them — I reacted. And I reacted in public. It’s something that I regret doing. I didn’t think the way they were treating my friends was nice or fair, and I reacted in probably an immature way. The estrogen comment? I thought I was making a joke . . . But I’ve realized that social media, it’s not for comedy, I’m not a comedian.

Empire: how Cookie's wardrobe has redefined fashion on TV

Alexis Carrington. Carrie Bradshaw. Cookie Lyon? Television loves its fashion plates. And as the medium’s most legendary classics Dynasty and Sex and the City prove, a fierce dress or the right shoe can serve just as much drama as any plot twist or character. But rarely – if ever? – have we seen the primetime sartorial agenda-setting come from a smack-talking woman, freshly sprung from prison, in fur, body-clinging leopard print and stilettos.
And yet here Cookie is, putting a final nail in the coffin of casual wear and steering us all toward maximalist bling, mega-high heels and makeup. In one short record-breaking television season, she became the embodiment (and one of the drivers) of a moment.
That Empire, a hip-hop drama that became the fastest growing show since House a decade ago, has influenced fashion is inarguable. Taraji P Henson, who stars as the show’s infinitely quotable convict-turned-music-mogul, Cookie, and the rest of the cast have appeared on the covers and the pages of some of fashion’s most important magazines. Meanwhile, Cookie’s trademark look – flashy, outsize outerwear, body-con, freakum dresses and sky-high ponytails – have trickled onto the catwalk.
When bold, shaggy coats began trending during the autumn/winter 16 shows last February, it was Cookie who many editors attributed the reference to. And when Marc Jacobs sent out a party invite in August demanding guests wear, “fur coats over lingerie, lipgloss … sequins, sky-high stilettos … cowl neckline halters” and “no flat shoes, no matte surfaces, no natural looks,” he could have been describing Cookie’s entire season one wardrobe.
Now, as Empire kicks off its second series in the UK, the jury is still out about whether or not Cookie will finally gain control of the record label she helped found with her ex-husband, Terence Howard’s Lucious Lyon. But what’s clear is this: her fashion credibility is officially set in stone.
For proof, look no further than the first 10 minutes of last night’s episode, complete with a cameo from André Leon Talley, and one of the purest examples of shade to ever grace the screen: When he bumps into Cookie during a “Free Lucious” concert, Talley takes one look at her heavily embellished designer dress and observes, “Gucci … last season.” It’s a fashion moment and a joke that Empire is in on.
Its wardrobe, led by costume designer Paolo Nieddu, is the antidote to normcoreand trades on all of the hallmarks that made 90s hip-hop fashion so great: the over-the-top displays of wealth, the shiny bling, the thick gold chains, the box-fresh kicks. This is a throwback to the era of Puffy, Lil Kim and Hype Williams, when clothes would shout luxury designer names, never whisper. And it’s a mood that is catching on with viewers: American television network Fox has started a blog called Cookie’s Closet, which features shoppable entries listing out designer pieces (Fendi! Michael Kors! Giusseppe Zanotti! Phillip Lim!) Cookie wears in each episode. It’s the sort of thing one could imagine Carrie Bradshaw lovers scrolling through if her show had aired during the prime of the internet age. And, in a way, Empire is picking up where SATC left off, with all the camp glamour, conspicuous consumption and, yes, sex.
So what will be the Manolo Blahniks of Empire? Only season two will tell.

JIDENNA ON RECYCLING THE PAST, TECHNOLOGY IN FASHION, AND SEX MAGIC

Jidenna Theodore Mobisson is an unlikely pop star -- a 30-year-old Nigerian-American intellectual with a meticulous look drawing on everything from industrial-age suits to West African fractal designs to modern slimmer cuts. But he's become a sensation thanks to "Classic Man," his first single on Janelle Monaé's Wondaland Records.
The song samples and expands on Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" as a form of reclaiming the original Bay Area hyphy sound -- or, as Jidenna puts it, "taking a piece from the past and modernizing it." What makes Jidenna so magnetic is the way he consciously embodies the presence of the past even beyond his own art, taking broader cues from the 19th century. We got on the phone with Jidenna to talk about recycling history, how to understand the repetition of activist movements, and the power of healing sex magic.
The theme of this issue is "Nowstalgia," and we're talking about how the past has come back into the present. That's something that seems important to you. How do you see the importance of remembering the past in making the present both musically and in fashion?
I think it's important to understand where you came from to understand where you're going. What I see across the board in the millenial generation is a recycling of the past. We have more access to the music, more access to fashion, to images, probably more than any other human beings in history. Because we're taking in so much, we start dressing like a bit of the '90s, a bit of the '60s, a bit of the '70s, and a bit of the '20s.
With myself specifically, I'm particularly informed by the Jim Crow era. When I really started looking at the statistics of incarceration rates, and the effects of the war on drugs, it was a very racialized and class-driven history. I was appalled, in the same way a lot of people are. I wanted to dress in a fashion that resembled the old Jim Crow, so that it shed light on the new Jim Crow era we're currently in today. The New Jim Crow, of course, has been coined by Michelle Alexander's book, which I read when it came out.
As far as fashion, that's one of the main inspirations for myself. It had less to do with politics, respectability, and class, so much as it did with being a symbol of the times. I think it's important to dress according to the fashion of the times, and the fashion of the event, and that's what I'm doing, in essence.
As far as music, I'm inspired by a bunch of eras. Just like everybody in our generation, I think we create a gumbo pot of music. We're not just hip-hop, we're not just rock, we're not "just" anything, specifically. So, in that way I stand in solidarity with a lot of the millenial generation's pace of music. "Classic Man" is both contemporary and draws back to kind of the classic eras of sound. If you listen to the actual music, it's reminiscent of the Bay area's hyphy movement, which is over ten years old now. It also has a bounce that people felt in the '80s when they were dancing, but the vocals have a classic reverb sound that I think a lot of people don't use today on the radio. So it stood out on the radio, to have this kind of bigger, timeless reverberation on the vocals.
I think, to kind of reel it back, the core of the art that I create is all about taking a piece of the past and modernizing it. If it's the 808s of today, the technology that created the really thick and booming sound, you combine that with the reverb on the vocals of yesterday. You take a suit, or the suspenders of today and you combine it with some of the trends that you see in fashion, like the West African fractal designs of the wax prints I wear as ties or pocket squares, or that I put on the lapel of my blazer, that's very new. That wasn't done in the '20s. Also the suits are way more tapered and tailed to the point where the ankles reveal the socks. These are modern designs, but definitely reminiscent of the past.
You talked about how all this culture and these different times kind of exist at once. Do you see any problems with that, in terms figuring out what the future looks like -- and what would it mean to make something new, keeping in mind this long, relatively permanent memory of everything that's happened before?
I think that there are definitely changes with our generation as far as how we move forward and create something that's new. But the idea of recycling is not a new concept whatsoever.
I'm in Chicago now looking at skyscrapers all over the city, and I'm thinking of what was used to make some of these skyscrapers. There's one next to me made of bricks, there's another one that's made of some sort of glass, or fiberglass, and they're from different time periods. But the architects use the same rectangular model that's been used for the entire 20th century. But one chose to use brick, which have been used for thousands of years. Another one used glass which is relatively new, not older than a hundred years. So they recycled. And these skyscrapers look alike. So what do you do to create something new?
Once you recycle enough, you find some element that a lot of the time technology brings, and that's when you find something new. If you look at music, music stays the same in an era and genre until technology pushes it forward. If you look at rock and roll, it was the amplifier and the electric guitar that Jimi Hendrix -- to name one of the legends -- was really able to really master. He was able to master the idea of feedback on an amplifier, such that he created a new sound that had never been heard in rock and roll. He pushed that forward. The Beatles pushed that forward.
Over human history, we recycle, we recycle, we find things fascinating, and then our interactions with technology produces something we've never seen before. I think our generation's duty is to -- as things like Google Glass and whatever competitors, smartphones, as technology that you wear -- that, rather than looking at a screen all the time, allows you to actually interact with other people -- as that technology develops, we'll have forms of fashion that we've never seen before.
I saw a runway show with people wearing solar panels. Although it's ridiculous now, I bet you in ten years it won't be so ridiculous if those panels are charging your phone -- and that's a very primitive vision. I think it will go further than that, as we continue to become cyborgs, which I think is inevitable. We'll be changing what we wear, how we dress, how we walk. We may be on Segways, who knows. But I do think technology is the catalyst for really creating something new.
That's not to say that it all comes from robots or machines. It's the ingenuity of humanity. And a lot of times it's not the even ones with the access that create something new, it's the ones who have to create based off necessity. Hip hop was created from people who did not have access to studios, so they went into their parents' basements, dug out old vinyls, and resampled them in a way that hadn't been heard before, and used a vocal rhythm that was not common in the time. They created a whole generation and an economy that we call hip-hop culture today.
To sum up, I think it's a combination of natural human ingenuity, the creativity that stems from necessity, and then the interaction of humans, and the new technology that we create. That's what will create something brand new, both in music and in fashion.
Do you think that the emphasis on functionality or utility has any dampening effect on the expressiveness or aesthetic value of either fashion or music?
We need to use any new device as a tool. We use the tool, we don't let it use us. That's a core value that I think we as a society and world have to reconcile with right now. Because our technology is moving faster than some of our social values are.
That's the concern you see in a lot of elders and even people in our generation, who are like, "Man, Facebook is ruining everything! And our phones --" I see what people are saying, but it's really like, are we going put in place some sort of value system? Religion, politics, and all the things that are supposed to kind of keep our moral compass going in the right direction -- right now, we question all of them, and we question everything.
We question it because we see entertainers, we see guys like Donald Trump running for president and artists saying they're gonna run. It makes us question politics and religion, at least in the millenial generation, there's a large amount of us saying, "No, we're not religious -- maybe we're spiritual, but we don't believe in any one religion." We're a very kind of individualistic generation. But I think at the end of the day, humans are social beings, and we will need to start forming value systems that don't shy away from technological developments, but embrace them. We need to marry them with humanity as opposed to trying to either divorce them from humanity or letting them run our social interactions with each other.
Do you think that's something history can help with? There's this tendency to think about the Civil Rights Movement in talking about the way current activist movements exist. What role do you see history playing in forming those new value systems?
I think that history is a spiral; it's not linear, or a circle. It's ever evolving and moving forward. What's tough about this is how much access we have -- the internet is almost like a wormhole for us. It changed everything. There have been times where everything changed, like the industrial revolution. But we've moved further than the Civil Rights Movement, for sure. It's great to see some of the social changes going on, like if you look at the Supreme Court's decision on [same sex] marriage and the Black Lives Matter movements. That's great. Those are huge, huge, huge accomplishments that we've seen in our times, and the civil rights movements have been a huge inspiration.
But in terms of the present matter that we're talking about, we have to look a little further back. That's why I study the 1800s so heavily -- not just for fashion, but also in looking for a time when the world was confused about morality, and confused about how to use technology.
So in the 1800s you have both the battle for either preserving slavery or getting rid of it, and the industrial revolution, in the same century. It reminds me of these times where we have so much conflict in our society, especially in America, because of the whole melting pot thing we've got going on here. We're still trying to figure out how to make that melting pot a true fruit salad where people can preserve individuality and communities can be preserved, where you don't lose your own identity, but you still have a communal identity with your city, your state, your neighborhood.
I don't have a direct answer for this question because I haven't found a time that's very comparable to the internet, but what I can say is that the internet helps you travel through space. And pretty soon, if we start using evacuated tube technology that helps you travel to China within a couple hours, or travel to another country that's not on your continent in 45 minutes -- that, combined with the advances of the internet, will change the way people interact so much that the world will truly become a village. I do believe the world will become more localized. People will actually care about who their neighbors are more. There will be a natural cultural diffusion that happens, and that has happened before -- with railroads, ships, explorers going around the world.
Anytime you see those huge leaps in the use of technology, you first see some conflicts -- namely some war -- but I believe that, at the end of the day, humans actually care about each other, and we'll see cultural exchange happening. My hope is that with the internet and the world becoming more interconnected, or realizing it's become more interconnected, we will start to become a more harmonious earth. I believe that's happening, but we don't necessarily see it.
You talk about the 19th century having very similar problems to today. Is there someone you see from that period as having an approach to those problems that you try to emulate?
There was a man named Paschal Beverly Randolph. I wouldn't say that he had any solutions to the time, but he embraced the kind of hodgepodge nature of the 19th century. In fact, I got a lot of fashion from him, even if you look at his image.
He self-described as a free mulatto man and an abolitionist in a time when slavery was still rampant. He traveled to Europe from New York -- I don't know how he got there -- and studied the occult faiths, because he didn't believe the fundamental Judeo-Christian religions were everything in the world. He wanted to further explore beyond the field of right and wrong. And then he came back with that and became one of the chief facilitators of the occult, nontraditional religions in America.
Then he became a sex magician, which was basically couples therapy at a time when that wasn't popular. He would invite couples up, and and help them find orgasms between each other. Like, there was a story I read where he would have them make love and, at the point of climax, he would have them say whatever their desire was in life -- let's say it was money, or harmony within their family -- and they would say it at the point of climax. They called it sex magic, because his followers believed these things would happen, because sex was what you used to give birth. His claim was that it would "give birth" to the desires these people had.
He was also a novelist -- he lived a very full life in a time when men who looked like him, people of color, were not freely traveling everywhere in the world. He pushed the boundaries, and I love studying him, mainly because my goal right now is just to learn as much as I can. Any different subject that I can get my hands on, I want to soak in, because I really care about understanding the time that we're in, and I think he did too.
He didn't necessarily solve any one particular issue, but he did what millenials do, which is embrace the times. He recycled, he pushed and learned about the new trends of the time, and he wrote about it and he created. That, for me, is what we do in general; everybody in our generation is a photographer because of our phones, everybody is some sort of creative, everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. He reminded me of these times now. He was definitely one of the guys who stood out, and history doesn't write about him often.
"Healing sex magician" sounds like a really good description of the ideal artist.
Right? The ideal rock and roll star, superstar: healing sex magician. Yeah, man. He was cool.