Trust Exercise
JON wears Twill Dunce Cap, Embroidered Uniform Denim Trouser, Knit Pelle Cardigan and Monogram Frequency Case ANONYMOUS CLUB, Shoes AIRPUMPS, SHAYNE OLIVER
I felt like what I was getting from her was this epiphany. A dissolving of opposites. Like “being peaceful is just as reckless as being controversial”. It felt like she gets bumped into a lot by people looking for refuge and rehab. Which was weird to see someone that created a space where people are supposed to be so free, that they also needed to be so fiercely protective of. That interaction made the experience way more elite than I thought it would be.
That's like Anonymous Club. Being in the club can be an extreme sport too; the music is loud, you’re trying to interact with people. Sometimes you can't really see. The desert was very different from the Club Couture at Boiler Room, we were actually very comfortable in that club. The collection was shot in an environment that was completely new for everyone. It was hard but that was the point; Anonymous Club teaming up and getting closer, like a trust exercise.
People get themselves really educated because it's therapeutic to gain mastery, become masters of things. It's self teaching, self therapy; when you are over-educating yourself to become the master of your own (thing). We’ve done that for so long. Being, like the head bitch in charge. Anonymous Club to me is letting that shit go. And, that's what this collection is beginning to do. I like this idea of me, for instance, not being present at Anonymous Club parties. Like being the observer and not like going into the party and pushing all of my issues onto people, which GHE20G0TH1K was a lot of.
Our goal is to have fun in the spaces that we're normally not able to have fun in without blacking out. Sometimes in those spaces you like psychically black out from the trauma of being so open in the public about your process. We actually want people to understand thoroughly where we are coming from. Sometimes there's this racist thing that happens where black people that makes us over analyze or over explain ourselves and they have to create all of these through lines about what they're doing. There's not enough time in the day for that. You never hear people call Margiela “white fashion”. These are not categories that are being created. What is being created is the conversation of “the Antwerp Six” or “anti-fashion.”
That's really important to us; the idea of Anonymous Club and contemporary queerness. There is something very peculiar about the way that people think about queer people's actual lives. It would be nice not having to constantly show up for ourselves and be like “we’re here”. That's so exhausting. It’s like “We don't need you to be our savior, we just need you to respect our lives.”
I'm just hoping that, through the system that we’ve created in the past and the system we can build now, that people understand its a fucking social project. Because that's exactly how it was in the beginning, that's what Anonymous is. The crew share and exchange ideas, and communicate them like we’re playing telephone. It’s a game of trust with a lot of give, a horizontal structure. The Anonymous process is the result of these interactions, they have a looseness to them; a group of boys hanging out in a fucked up way but still mushy.
