You also make accessible and relatively affordable clothes compared to brands that co-opt up-cycle wear or elevated sourced wear and charge nearly $1,000 for one piece. What's the intention behind that and your relationship with clothes that range in price?
I have a funny story. So I'm from Buffalo, New York. I grew up on Ralph Lauren, Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger, and LL Bean. The first piece of designer clothing I wanted were these blue wash Tommy Hilfiger jeans with the Tommy embroidered patch on the belt loop on the back. I might have been 12 years old. They were 90 bucks, and my mom was like, 'We'll put them on layaway.' So it took a month to pay it off. I finally got these jeans and wore them to church the next day with a red plaid Levi's button-down, tucked into the jeans, and some Nikes. I was in church for the entire day walking around making sure everybody saw my jeans. I was so happy to be able to take part in that conversation. But that's why Ralph Lauren is everywhere; Ralph Lauren doesn't price you out of the conversation and the quality of their clothes doesn’t change. I was talking to my friend NEZ. We kind of were around for the first streetwear boom, pre-Hypebeast when we were in college. And out of all those brands, we were buying, all those T-shirts and all that shit, we look in our closet now. It's mainly either Carhartt, Ralph Lauren, vintage, or my samples. These clothes last forever, and they outlive their price point, you know what I mean? It's added value. And so that's also something that I'm working on. There's a great Black painter, Kerry James Marshall, and he said, "what it means to be a contemporary artist is that you not only have to create value, you have to educate and add value to everything that you do." And so if I can make a product that people can afford, but when they get it, they feel like they're lucky even to have it because it'll outlast how much it costs. I think that's a way of adding value to people's lives. And getting them to understand the quality, thought, and consideration that goes into designing these clothes. Because I do want to have this dialogue with my customer about the way that I think and view the world and how things function. I just don't want to create a product that's so astronomically expensive that they like it, it looks cool on the internet, but they can't see themselves in it in real life.
Your outlook is extremely expansive and allows you to explore the intersections of different modes of design and art. Aside from fashion, where do you see these explorations taking you?
The thing that I love about fashion is that you can have 10 different conversations to express one idea. Photography, typography, graphic design, set design, music, etc. I think that's why I gravitate towards fashion so much because the garment is just the first step. Virgil, rest in peace; he said, "I can either design this cup, or I can design the room that cup is in." And for me, I want to design that room as well. I do want to use this as a platform to be able to extend into other forms of expression. I have a lot of ideas about furniture design and home goods, especially because a lot of the brands that I love and grew up with, they're not only in your closet, they're in your living room, they're in your bathroom, and everything is apart of this ecosystem. I love film and during shutdown, I was watching every movie that I told myself I was going to watch over the past few years. So I'm watching all these Japanese filmmakers, and I'm watching these Russian and German filmmakers and just seeing their perspectives, and I want to be able to do this too. I think it would be only natural that I begin to break out and work in these mediums. If I can tie them all into this platform that I'm trying to create with this namesake label, I think that I'll achieve my mark.
Definitely. On your Instagram, you have a photo of a statue that's a female figure, and it ties into the aesthetic of the brand and speaks to the shapes and silhouettes of your clothing.
Yeah, Jacob Epstein is one of my favorite sculptors. The sculpture you’re referring to is “Female Figure in Flenite, 1913”.
In that same year, he also made a sculpture called the Rock Drill with Torso. This is made over 100 years ago and when you look at it now, it looks like it was made 200 years from now. I don't know if you're a Star Wars fan or if you've seen Star Wars, but it's what the drones are designed after. So when I saw it, I was like, this looks so cool. But it looks so familiar. I'm always looking at statues for shape and form. And the last photoshoot that I did was really trying to tap into that energy, that spirit of being statuesque, but also using a body that's flesh and bone, posing in certain ways that exude strength, that exude vulnerability.