Employees of the Month

BRYAN DERBALLA Bryan grew up skateboarding in Asheville, North Carolina. They call it the San Francisco of the South, which is fitting because his mom is a lesbian. He went to school in Berkeley, mostly so he could skateboard in the actual San Francisco. After college he started Lovebryan.com, a blog that details the visual exploits of camera fiends Sandy Kim, Danilo Parra, Mike Belleme, and others. Then photojournalists started photoblogging and bloggers started getting journalism gigs, and now Bryan’s an officially credentialed member of the media who shoots for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. For this issue, he shot the cover and a spread of deviant doggies getting dirty in a miniature red-light district. See DOGGY DISTRICT JENNI AVINS Jenni used to work in fashion production, which meant running around factories on behalf of designers in Peru, Madagascar, and the New York City garment district. This experience made her think fashion’s most compelling characters work waaaaay behind the scenes, so she stopped making clothes and started making videos and writing stories for magazines like New York, Marie Claire, and Dossier and her own website, closettour.com. Jenni lives in Brooklyn with her fish, Rick, and shortly after accepting her assignment for this month’s issue—to attempt to make a vest by hand out of a living, breathing fox—she dreamed she was drowning. See FREE-RANGE FUR LYNN YAEGER Lynn started her career at the Village Voice, where she reported on fashion and politics and the intersections between the two, eventually moving on to write about those subjects for the likes of Vogue, T, and the New York Times Magazine. This might seem like an odd pairing of topics considering most politicians dress like Ken dolls or asexual pantsuited aliens, and most lefties regard fashion as just another bourgeois-manufactured opiate of the masses, but, hey, what’s life without contradictions? Can’t you spend the morning at Occupy Wall Street and the afternoon at Bergdorf Goodman? Fuck yes, you can, because this is America. That’s why, for this issue, Lynn surveyed the connections between revolutionary political movements and fashion trends. See LOOKS LIKE A LEFTY MICHAEL BADER Michael grew up as a photography-obsessed kid in Munich, and unlike some kids, he didn’t outgrow his obsession. He worked his way through school shooting for fashion magazines like Futureclaw, Regia, and Kinki, and finally finished his studies last year. These days he uses a large-format camera and never Photoshops his images. Michael told us that he wants his photos to “resemble paintings and include a sense of mystery and beauty and try to capture emotion, mystique, and soul.” Michael is also one of the maybe three people in the history of VICE who’ve sent a completed and unsolicited fashion shoot that wound up in the magazine. But we beg of you, photographers: Please do not let that encourage you. See FLIM FLAM  KRISTOF WICKMAN Kristof is the extremely talented sculptor who built the aforementioned miniature red-light district for doggies—which included a strip club (Humps) and a garbage-strewn alley. Unlike the first few prudes we talked to, Kristof didn’t bat an eye when we described the scenes of canine carnality we were aiming to document and quickly enlisted the help of a few friends to fire up the glue guns. Googling doggie S&M during one particularly heated work session almost tore the team apart. But they are pros and played “Purple Rain” on repeat until everything was OK again. See DOGGY DISTRICT