DAVID BOWIE STILL GOT IT

David Bowie is one of those people who you’d imagine would look amazing wearing anything – a rubber ring, some gloves and some toothpaste, for example. But apparently as a gawky 17-year-old boy, things were different. Bowie was allegedly the founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, (it’s not exactly as cool as S.C.U.M is it?) complaining “It’s not nice when people call you darling and that.” Still, people kept calling him darling, and he stopped minding so much, and now the V&A are exhibiting his stage costumes alongside a retrospective of his career including handwritten lyrics, drawings, photos, his instruments and set designs. It opens today and as with almost all V&A exhibits, it’s looks great.

MARY BENSON

We love Mary Benson and her glitterball jackets, so we caught up with her to discuss the latest collection. Rave totally isn't dead.

VICE: What inspired this collection?
Mary Benson: I was influenced by Pre-Rapaelites and the illuminated decorations of stained glass windows. I wanted to use these in my print designs using holographics, metallics neons and pastel colours and just mess it up make it a bit mad really have fun with it. I really wanted to make a jacket with Yorkshire on the back. I've been wanting one for ages and it worked with this collection because of the scrolls. The whole idea is to have them personalised so people can order one with their name on - or can just rep where they are from!!

Who would you like to see wearing your clothes?
Kelis, Gwen Stefani, Mariah!! would be ace to make a christening outfit for Kanye and his new baby. But might not be appropriate actually!!

So... What are the metallic bits made of?
Secret recipe!! !!

What song best sums up this collection?
100%..... Mariah Carey ft. O.D.B - Fantasy
Listened to this tune about 300 times while making the collection! Still not sick of it!

Thanks Mary!

ABERCROMBIE & FITCH LOVE TOPLESS MODELS (OBVIOUSLY)

Abercrombie are celebrating, or have been for a while now, the array of hunks they travel all over the world to collect. You may know them as the horribly embarassing ever smiling guys that smell like the inside of a West End club toilet, but apparently being selected as a "Greeter" is actually something of a big deal, in the tiny, irrelevant circles that Abercrombie and Fitch move in, anyway. Scooping up dull, smiley, ripped guys from SU bars and fraternity vs. sorority beach volleyball games (or whatever they do), they’ve created a web series delving into the lives of their floor and door models. If you want to laugh and feel a bit sick at the same time, watch the vid. It's a bank holiday, I bet you watch this hungover on Monday, it's like 100 cruel and hilarious treats, blended into one short video.

ALL SAINTS MADE A FILM ABOUT NASHVILLE

AllSaints Film - New Music City from AllSaints on Vimeo.

This week All Saints launched New Music City, a documentary about the Nashville music scene, produced with none other than Kings of Leon, in conjunction with their independent record label Serpents and Snakes. The film (watch it, then I won't have to describe it, dumbs) features exclusive footage from the All Saints stage at SWSX, which will make you wish even more that you'd been there. To celebrate, the Earlham Street branch of the store is playing host to a whole bunch of cinema seats ripped straight out of a theatre in NAshville (Buffalo 66 style) and has been screening the film around the clock since its launch of Tuesday. All of the film releases can be viewed here.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @BertieBrandes

Previously – Pristine Trainers Won't Fare Well in Your Disgusting Handbag

PHOTOS: ANNA RYON
STYLING: LOLA CHATTERTON

Hair and Make-up: Xabier Celaya
Fashion Assistant: Olivia Pigeon
Models: Ayesha, Nikoline, Rosie, Daniela, Anna, Lanre and Melissa

Click through to the next page to see more pictures.

River Island top, earrings and bracelet, Nike shorts

River Island top, Franklin and Marshall shorts

Lacoste L!ve polo shirt, Nike shorts, ASOS leggings; River Island top, H&M shorts

H&M top and bra, Franklin and Marshall shorts, vintage trainers, Lacoste L!ve socks

H&M top, Nike leggings, vintage socks and slippers, Reebok dumbbells

Franklin & Marshall shorts, vintage socks

Nike bra, American Apparel shorts, G-Shock watch

More fashion from VICE:

Beware The Lizzies

Phlo Finister XO

Wavy Spice

PHOTOS BY LEONN WARD
STYLIST: JOHN WILLIAM

Photo Assistant: Joe Tovey Frost
Stylist Assistant: Olivia Pigeon
Hair: Marc Ramos
Makeup: Theresa Davies
Models: Christie at Nevs, Kyra, Lonnie, and
Shaneke at FM, Orla at M+P Models

Special thanks to Tollington Park Studios

Click through to the next page to see more pictures.

Tamzin Lillywhite bra,Topshop mesh top, River Island trousers, Nike trainers, Atsuko Kudo hat and socks

Vintage mesh top, Atsuko Kudo bra and gloves, Topshop skirt

Money jacket, Atsuko Kudo shirt, Louise Gray skirt, Kickers shoes, Emilio Cavallini socks, vintage eye patch

I.D. Sarrieri underwear, Emilio Cavallini socks, Atsuko Kudo gloves, vintage mask

Passarella Death Squad x Boxfresh jacket, Meat top, I.D. Sarrieri skirt, Ann Summers tights, Dr. Martens shoes and bags, vintage gloves

Atsuko Kudo cape

Lacoste top, Meat skirt, Emilio Cavallini tights, Pro Power boxing gloves

More fashion from VICE:

Summer Dressing 101

Phlo Finister XO

Garbage Girls

MAYBE THE BEST AIR MAX OF ALL TIME

I know having white trainers is stupid because you'll never wear them. Either it's raining and you're scared they'll get stained, or it's sunny and you're scared they'll get grass stains when you're frolicking. Or whatever, there are loads of reasons why buying beautiful pristine white trainers is a stupid idea, but why would you listen to any of those reasons when the trainers in question are as stupid-hot as these. As part of a collaboration with APC, Nike have designed four exclusive shoes including two pairs of Air Max, which, retailing at £120 each, have just rocketed to the top of my wish list.
 

YOUR HANDBAG IS DISGUSTING

Photo by Anna Curteis

No I don't mean it's ugly, although it probably is that as well. Actually I mean it's literally crawling with bacteria. Ew. Not so great for possibly every woman reading this, your hand bag is apparently dirtier than a toilet seat. Thinking about it, judging by the amount of last minute trips to a basement pub’s weirdly flooded toilets to brush up on your lippy, it makes quite a lot of sense. And also with the never clearing it out and finding receipts from “Abacus Bar” for £15 three weeks ago (?). The study carried out by Initial Washrooms Hygiene confirms that your bag, as well as a lot of things, like workplace countertops and draining boards, is very dirty. The researchers suggest women should wash their hands regularly and try to hang their bag up in bathrooms rather than sling them on the floor. Although personally, I wouldn’t bother, clean freaks are 100 percent annoying.

VERSACE VERSUS X JW ANDERSON

Image via Versace

Finally Donatella let the first collection of Versus designed by JW Anderson loose on the world, in a runway show in New York this week. The clothes, were both an homage to sexy slick Versace, and woven through with that unmistakable Britishness Anderson's clothes have always embodied. Boys in tiaras recalled a Meadham Kirchhoff-esque playfulness, while full on PVC skirt suits, and branded Versace stickers reminded everyone that glamour was still the by-word of the house. Gold safety pins holding the side slit of black mini skirt together, or the sleeves of a dress on, were such an obvious and totally stealable addition that you wonder whether Anderson is secretly hoping for a whole load of DIY versions to appear on the street. There's no better compliment for young designers at big fashion houses than having their ideas ripped off by the best dressed, least wealthy people on the street. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

SELFRIDGES ANNOUNCE "DRIVE-THRU" LUXURY SHOPPING

Photo via

In a bid to enhance their already super-enhanced shopping experience, Selfridges are launching a new “drive-thru” concept in their store in January, where customers can select products online and then pick them up in a Burger King lobby-esque (well probably not quite) reception area. While high-end retailers like Net-a-Porter and Browns mastered the luxury shopping experience online yonks ago, Selfridges are still better known for their in store events and fancy shop windows. The decision to change up the experience is apparently in response to many large retailers such as Amazon and Wal-Mart creating “Locker” concepts where you can store and pick up the stuff you ordered online. As exciting as the thought of shiny glamorous people driving their white convertibles through Selfridges to pick up their advance order Prada is, it will probably end up being more like Argos.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Previously – This Week It's Fashionable to Be a Bad Bitch

It’s May, you wrote your dissertation with (a lot) of help from JSTOR (how many references are too many references?), you made it through the endlessly Instagrammable 20-hour library sessions and you’ve convinced yourself that, because you crammed nine semesters of work into three weeks, you deserve the educational trophy of a useless degree. Congratulations, you’re a graduate. It all goes uphill from here – you’ll be fighting off the job offers and invites to members clubs before the week is up, believe me.

However, there are some sacrifices you’ll have to make now that the council won’t cut you a break on your taxes. Don't worry, they're just aesthetic sacrifices – you don't have to give up having a fun, fulfilling life for another few years – because now you're an adult and you don’t live in a “student hub”, dressing like Macklemore after a Salvation Army raid isn’t going to garner you any respect. To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of things you really need to stop wearing now that you’re a graduate. I’m not kidding around. I’m deadly fucking serious. Stop.

FJALLRAVEN BACKPACKS

These used to be the bag of choice for young, good-looking graphic designers with stupidly attractive Swedish girl/boyfriends and a habit of showering at least three times a day. Then a fine art student in Peckham realised they came in black and only cost £40 and suddenly the Fjallraven backpack became the uniform carry-all for portfolios, grinders and weed print socks city-wide. They are the Jansport of higher education, with less tippex and more loose rolling tabacco. Throw it away unless you are Drew Barrymore trying to get kissed; no-one will hire you.

DISCO PANTS

I know they make your ass look phenomenal, but this madness needs to stop. Whoever came up with the concept of metallic, high-waisted, skin-tight jeggings woven from pure static electricity clearly wasn't thinking about the 23-year-old job seekers of the world. These only work if your body is so bendy and teenage that you still look good gurning at an SU Bar, kneeling in vomit, trying to eat a lipstick. On a sober adult they are, unfortunately, the sartorial equivalent of FOMO.


BERETS

Slap Her... She’s French was a great movie, and Madeleine was a style icon for us all. But wearing a beret once you are no longer a higher education prick makes you look like an off-duty “sandwich artist”, a Spanish supply teacher or someone who goes to festivals purely for the “acrobatic art theatrics” and “bibliotherapy”.


LEATHER SATCHEL BAGS

Okay, I know we’ve already ruled out one form of bag and you need somewhere to keep your CVs, but leatherwear is a whole different ball game. Everybody knows that the only time wearing an across-the-body charity shop leather bag is necessary is when you’re planning on getting so pilled up that the prospect of keeping a bag on one shoulder alone is as daunting as the thought of traipsing round Camden Lock with your dad and his weird stepchildren on a comedown.

Now that you are no longer able to leave the house stinking of snakebite without getting your ass fired, you are equally not able to laud your drug use so brazenly in the face of your peers and employers as to wear a leather handbag. Sorry, you’ll have to find somewhere else to store your loose gum and mini hairbrush.

SUSPENDER TIGHTS

These are tights, with suspenders, printed on. You’re not 17 and you don’t need to be frightened of engaging with your sexuality; if you want to go out wearing suspenders, man the fuck up and do it. There’s nothing worse than half-arsing something, and considering you just half-arsed the last three years of your life, it’s time to do yourself a favour and commit, FFS.


CHILDREN’S CLOTHES

Hopefully you’ve realised by now that there’s a subtle difference between dressing as an individual and picking up the first thing you see in a charity shop that has Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it. Unfortunately, university is a weird place where people are lonely enough to try currying your favour by complimenting your zebra print anorak intended for a seven-year-old, your cropped pyjama trousers and your Hi-Tec trainers. So it sometimes takes a little while to get out of that horrible, infantile mindset. 

Take a step out of that dream world where getting 71 in an essay matters to anyone and you can get a bucket of beers for £10. This is reality, you are an adult, you can’t afford to live in the city and your parents are not proud of you. Feel the yoke of failure bearing down upon your shoulders and throw away that Minnie Mouse beanie.


SHEEPSKIN COAT

When you bought it, it screamed, “Bad-boy romantic from the wrong side of the tracks with a penchant for literature and a weakness for girls in breton stripes." It probably helped you win over your first true love during freshers week (the one you thought you’d marry but broke up with three months after finishing uni) and kept you warm on the nights you slept rough in Berlin with a group of artists who make sculptures out of shopping trolleys and firewood. Now it will destine you for a future in “freelance” music PR, a one-time management gig and an underage girlfriend for the rest of time.


AZTEC PRINT / TIE-DYE

Never again.

All images sourced by Anna Curteis.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Still don't get it? Read these:

How to Be Happy, Young and Jobless

The VICE Guide to Adulthood

A Girl's Guide to Falling Apart with Dignity

Constance, 21, Montreal - American Apparel shirt and underwear

VICE: What do you do for a living?
I quit school, but I do acting classes and I’m trying to build my portfolio. I also work coat check at an art space.

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
It's been messy since forever, but my mom used to tell me to clean it. Now that I live with my daddy, he's very easy going.

How far in advance do you plan to clean?
Everyday I tell myself I'm going to do it.

Do you collect anything?
I don't collect anything in particular, but I love shoes and sunglasses.

Do you ever throw anything out?
I’m always filling bags of clothes I don't want any more, but I never do it. I still have bags in my closet. I just feel bad about getting rid of stuff.

Were you messy as a kid?
Yes I was messy, but my mom would make me clean it.

What do your friends think of your mess?
I only bring my best friends over and they think it’s funny. There’s no room to walk and they have to jump over my clothes. If other people come over I keep the door shut.

What would your parents say about your place?
I live with my dad so the apartment is clean, except my room. But I guess he's sick of fighting with me over it, so I just close the door.

Would you consider yourself organised in other aspects of your life?
Yes, when it comes to work and acting I’m really organised! Since I bought an agenda, my life is going much better.

What is your favourite item that you own? Are you ever worried you could lose it in the mess?
My favourite thing is a stuffed animal cow, but it's always in my bed. He doesn't get hurt if he falls down because there are clothes everywhere.

Basia, 21, Montreal – Sean John Sweater

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
It usually stays the same. I find it easier to find things when they are on the floor. If I put anything away, I can't ever find it. But if I throw it on the floor, I remember the last spot I saw it.

Do you bring lovers into your place? Do they ever remark on the mess?
I think people are more perplexed by the amount of things I own in general. I have been hoarding shit my whole life, but now that I am older I finally have most of it in one place. It has made up for all those years of having it all hid away in storage. I like having everything out in the open where I see all of my things living happily together.

Do you collect anything?
Batteries (used), Gatorade, cameras, dead animal art. I live right behind a Salvation Army so I go everyday and buy whatever random crap is cute or interesting. I don’t really shop at real clothing stores because the Salvation Army is so cheap and you can always find one-of-a-kind items there. I don’t really want anyone else to own what I own. 

Were you messy as a kid?
I was the same as a kid, I just lived in an ocean of clothing. My parents did make me clean my room, but it usually took weeks or I would have to clean the morning my cleaning lady was coming. They would usually just put a sign on my door for the cleaning lady saying “DON’T WORRY YOU DON’T HAVE TO CLEAN THIS ROOM IT’S GROSS.”

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
They don’t really care, I think they are happy I moved out because I was so messy, and most of the shit I own is theirs anyway. They sold their cottage, so I got most of the furniture and paraphernalia.

Asia, 25, Toronto - Marc Jacobs sweater, vintage shirt.

What do you do for a living?
I’m an artist.

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
The mess has a tendency to ebb and flow, depending on my mood. This is actually pretty tidy. I'm having a good week so far.

How far in advance do you plan to clean?
Sometimes when I come home drunk I clean, but by the time I wake up, it's a mess again. I'm not sure how it happens. I don't plan to live in a clean place until I can afford a French maid, so no, I don't procrastinate.

Do you bring lovers into your place, and what do they think of the mess?
I bring boys home sometimes. If they complain I punish them.

Do you collect anything?
Yes. Rare and precious jewels. I accept donations.

Were you messy as a kid?
I've always been messy. My mom never cared, but it grossed my brother out because he's a Virgo. My mom still doesn't care that I live this way. My brother never comes over. I don't mind though because he's got cable at his place and pretty much always has food.

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
I make sure to look clean and pretty when I leave the house and I'm usually tidy when I make art.

What is your favourite item that you own, and are you worried about losing it in the mess?
My favourite item is a secret. I don't want to say whether it's hidden or not because I don't want people snooping around when they come over.

Elaine, 25, Montreal – Vintage top.

How far in advance do you plan to clean your room?
I never plan it. It just happens if something is getting stinky, or if I'm high and I feel like getting shit done. The only thing I do regularly is the kitty litter, and I had to train myself to do it, because I really love my cats. 

Do you collect anything?
Yes: toys of all kind, pastel clothes, plushies, platform shoes, jewellery, stationery, vintage porn, cat-related stuff, vintage Halloween things. Toys include: My little pony first gen, Barbies, sex toys, sex crystals and vinyl toys like Friends With You. I like playing, and I think my mess is inherently tied with playfulness. I have some sort of hoarding problem, I guess, but I enjoy being surrounded by cute things, and I like them all around, finding them spontaneously where they shouldn't be. 

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
They never really come here. My dad is pretty judgmental, although he is really messy too. He told me a couple of times that, "I should clean up so I can get a boyfriend who will stay." I guess I'm like the feminist anti-housewife. My mom doesn't judge me, she likes that I don't fit in the norm.

What is your favourite item that you own? Do you ever feel like you could lose it in your mess, so you hide it somewhere special?
Actually I have a hidden treasure box in my wardrobe. Inside there's a few pictures from my childhood, little things from a dead friend, a diary I wrote few years ago and hair I received in a letter from my boyfriend when we were living in different cities. Besides that, if I want stuff to be easy to access, it is usually on my desk, in my bedroom – things like sex toys or lube, let's say. The only things I ever lose are money or drugs, and I'm just really happy when I randomly find them again.

Hannah, 24, Toronto - American Apparel top.

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
Too long.

How far in advance do you plan to clean?
I find I have to wait till the mood strikes me. Usually happens when I'm stoned and I've watched all the new episodes of my favourite TV shows, but I still don't want to do my homework, so I clean. But yeah, I procrastinate everything. Whether I'm procrastinating studying by cleaning or vice versa.

Do you bring lovers into your place, and what do they think of the mess?
Sometimes I'll warn people before they come over but I try not to apologise for it. Usually people say they don't give a shit. But then they do give a shit when they're in the bathroom and there's no toilet paper.

Do you collect anything?
I collect knick-knacks and things I believe to be sentimental. For some reason I can’t bring myself to throw out batteries, I always think there will still be a little juice in them.

Were you messy as a kid?
I was a pretty messy kid. Every once in a while my parents would make me clean my room and once I got into cleaning I kind of enjoyed it, but I still never did it. I remember one time hiding all my dirty laundry in my toy trunk because I was too lazy to put it in the hamper down the hall. I got in shit for that one.

What is your favourite item that you own and are you worried about losing it in the mess?
I have a green stuffed worm thing my mom made but that usually just stays in my bed. I also have the head of a Barbie my sister and I used to play with a TON, which I usually try to keep safely perched on something.

Lara, 27, Toronto - Vintage shirt.

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
This is the worst it has been in a long time.

How far in advance do you plan to clean? Do you procrastinate?
Oh, I procrastinate cleaning all the time, and never plan in advance. If I need to be inspired to clean I watch Hoarders. It helps a lot.

Do you collect anything?
I collect elephant statues, vintage horror posters/lobby cards, rocks, and beach treasures like glass bits, bones and driftwood. And of course all the standards: movies, books, records. As a child I had a large collection of chipmunk postcards from places I went camping.

Were you messy as a kid?
I’ve always had a cluttered room. I don't remember my parents making me clean it that much. My mom says a clean house means a misspent life.

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
They would probably just see my empty wine bottles and say, "Oh Lara, I hope you aren't wasting all your money on alcohol."

Would you consider yourself organised in other aspects of your life?
I like to be organised in a visual way with certain things. My books and movies are organised by colour, all my T-shirts are folded and stacked perfectly neat, also arranged by colour. In a work setting I am definitely not slobby like I am in my personal space! 

What is your favourite thing that you own? Do you ever feel like you could lose it in the mess?
My favourite thing is a black onyx ring that was on my grandmother's finger in her coffin. I would never lose it. I wear it every day and always make sure I know where it is when I take it off. For someone so messy, I rarely lose things.

Madeline, 24, Montreal - Vintage top.

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
For as long as I can remember, it’s always messy. My parents never used to make me clean my room or make my bed. I was a spoilt little brat in that way. So I guess bad habits, or no habits carried over. My big sister is the same way.

Do you bring lovers into your place? Do they ever remark on the mess?
Not very often, but no – I would kick them out, fuck that.

Do you collect anything?
Lots of old shit. I get really into collecting certain things, comic books, little trinkets, statues, suitcases and other useless crap. Now that I think of it, I guess it really adds to the mess. 

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
Oh god… hopefully they’ll never see it. They might ask me if I was doing OK, or if I needed some money or something.

Would you consider yourself organised in other aspects of your life? 
I guess so, I just got a computer for the first time a little while ago, so that’s helped me a lot with school.

Do you ever feel like you could lose one of your favourite things in your mess, so you hide it somewhere special?
I don’t really have one. I’ve definitely lost shit before and wondered where it’s gone. But then I always end up finding it again in some obscure place, that’s half the fun for me.

Rita, 29, Toronto - American Apparel undershirt, Rita Liefhebber overshirt.

What do you do for a living?
I make hand-dyed/hand knit pieces under my fashion label.

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
It’s always been messy but it’s gotten worse. This past year has been nuts for me and when I get home I just crash.

How far in advance do you plan to clean?
I don't because I'm a master procrastinator. I wish I could get paid for it I'm so good.

Do you bring lovers into your place?
I have one lover and he has accepted this as an extension of me. Deep down I know he loves it.

Do you collect anything?
Water bottles. I have one from two summers ago beside my bed.

Were you messy as a kid?
Yes, I guess I haven't grown out of my rebellious stage.

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
I think they'd dig it. It's cosy. It would probably root up memories of our summer camping trips.

Would you consider yourself organised in other aspects of your life?
My studio has a light, airy feeling with a few dyed splats. I can't be creative with lots of stuff but this room is just for snoozing.

What is your favourite thing you own?
One of my hand dyed shirts I love them all equally like children. They are hung neatly on a rack in another room.

Tess, 22, Toronto - Opening Ceremony.

What do you do for a living?
I am a musician and a photographer. I went to school. I don't any more. 

How long has your bedroom been this messy?
Forever.

How far in advance do you plan to clean? Do you procrastinate?
I don't have a lot of free time.

Do you bring lovers into your place what do they think of the mess?
No comment. 

Do you collect anything?
Records and clothes and jewellery and books. 

Were you messy as a kid?
It was maybe worse than now. My parents tried to get me to clean my room, but I was very defiant. 

What would your parents say about your apartment now?
They would be horrified. 

Would you consider yourself organised in other aspects of your life?
I'm totally organised with my life. That's the funny thing.

What is your favourite item that you own and are you worried about losing it in the mess?
I’ve got a few special rings. Possessions don't really matter. 

More from VICE:

Hoard O' Plenty

Bless This Mess

As I'm sure you'll know by now, plastic surgery is a pretty big deal in South Korea. Remember last week when those photos popped up of all the South Korean beauty pageant contestants who looked exactly the same? Everyone was all, "Hey, those guys sure do love their surgery," with a brief chuckle, before moving on to autotuned Charles Ramsey videos and forgetting about the whole thing. Then, of course, the internet lost its shit in a monsoon of moral outrage and started to scrutinise why Korean girls are trying to look more Western and how awful that all is.      

I decided to call up my girl Sparkles (not her real name), who recently returned to live in her home city of Seoul, to find out what the reaction there was like to all this commotion. Turns out the plastic surgery trend has already become a running joke, with girls laughing about the fact they probably all have the same doctor and teasing each other about not having their eyelids torn apart enough.  

She also told me something else slightly worrying; that parents are pressuring their daughters into having cosmetic procedures. It all starts to get a little dark when weapons-grade stage mums are guilt-tripping their daughters into splicing up their faces and irreversibly changing them forever. Anyway, here's that chat.

A plastic surgery advert on the side of a bus in South Korea. (Image via)

VICE: What's the surgery scene like nowadays?
We have trends, like to tear the inner corner of the eye so it's more almond shaped. Or, for a while, it was liposuction and putting that fat into your forehead. It's hard to say if they're conforming to a Western ideal of beauty, though – no one will take a photo of a caucasian celebrity to the surgeon and ask for that. That idea may have started off only because white people generally have taller noses and larger eyes, so it's easy to describe it as a Western "look", but no one in Korea will say they want to look Western. In Korea, we call doing your eyes and nose the "basics" – they're the standard procedures.

That sounds like you're ordering a burger; "I'll just get the basics, thanks."
Yeah. Like, "Oh, you haven't even gotten plastic surgery yet? You should get the basics!" That's nothing. So many people do it that it's got to the point where people say things like, "But you only got your eyes and your nose done, it's not a big deal." 

Do you have friends who have had plastic surgery?
I don't think I have a single friend who hasn't had some kind of procedure done. Everyone has something. Normally they pay for it themselves, but there are a lot of mothers who will pay for their daughters. Everyone is getting prettier and prettier and some parents don't want their child to be the "ugly" one. It's like in the 90s if you got a discman because your parents didn't want you to be the only kid at school without one.

Why did you decide to have surgery yourself?
It wasn't my idea; my mum kept saying, "It's not that big of a deal, just close your eyes, go to sleep and it's done. You wake up and it's with you for the rest of your life." She started saying that when I was in high school. She wanted me to get my nose done because she wanted that transition time before uni.

A South Korean surgeon showing before and after plastic surgery photos. (Image via)

Why did she want you to do it?
The main reason was – and this is true – that, in society, there's an idea that the prettier you are, the more benefits you get. People tend to be more inclined towards attractive people when they make decisions, like with jobs. That's the standard of beauty here, so everyone wants to be that way – the culture has made it normal. A lot of people don't think too deeply about it. They're like, "Oh I wish my eyes were bigger – OK, I'll go get it done." 

Do you notice these benefits now that your face has changed?
I personally – not only in Korea, but while travelling – have noticed that people are nicer to me. I feel that I can get away with more.

You're going to rob a bank, aren't you?
No, I'm not saying I take advantage of it, but I feel like the way people treat me is different. It makes me feel like people were right; I read somewhere that, psychologically, people trust prettier people more.

Was it weird seeing your face for the first time?
I was on pain meds and sleeping medication for a week when I had my nose done, so I literally just slept. When I first saw

it, it was really weird. I thought it looked too tall, I didn't like it and I didn't think it suited my face. When I got used to seeing myself with my new nose, though, it was that feeling like when you go shopping and get the perfect outfit and you're happy that it's yours and you can't wait to wear it. It's that feeling times a million – just so amplified.

And your dad wanted you to get your ears done too, right?
Yeah, one was smaller than the other. He was very emotional about the fact that I would one day feel self-conscious at my wedding when I put my hair up. So weird.

A plastic surgeon in South Korea checking his nose job handiwork. (Image via)

Have you had anything else done?
I've had my eyes done, and that's really freaky because you have to stay awake. They use local anaesthetic on your eyelids and below your eyes. It was horrible because you can feel something going through your skin, like when they're tugging thread through it. I was covered in sweat because I was so nervous. I had it done at the same time as my nose, but it didn't heal well, so I got it done again. Initially it was my mum who wanted me to do that.

Were you scared before surgery?
I was mostly worried that people would be able to tell. I kept saying to the doctor, "Please can you do my nose as natural as possible?" And he sort of got annoyed at me and was like, "Why don't you just not do it then? Why would you get surgery if you don't want anyone to know?" His consultant told me not to worry and that humans are creatures of adaptation, which is true; I can't imagine my face before. It was meant to be eyes first then nose, but since I was so scared they just put me to sleep and did my nose first.

Do you ever look at old photos of yourself?
It's shit. Like I said, I can't even imagine my old face. Around the house, that's also a very lighthearted joke in our family. I'll say I have to set the photos on fire and my dad will throw me a lighter. The pre-surgery photos I've kept on Facebook aren't close-ups or in focus. At first I didn't care, but then I started making new friends, so I thought I should delete them. If someone asks me if I've had my nose done, I won't lie, but I'm not gonna be like, "Hi, I'm Sparkles, I got my nose done," you know? It's not a very common topic socially – people are more interested in which procedures you had done and where.

Are you more confident?
Definitely. The exciting thing was that I could change my hair for the first time. I always had long and wavy hair because different facial types suit different hair, so when I got it done I cut it all off. Also, with single eyelids it's very hard to wear make up; eyelashes look shorter and eyeliner and eyeshadow aren't visible. Now that I've got double eyelids I can do so much. It's fun!

Great. Thanks, Sparkles!

Follow Camille on Twitter: @CamStanden

More from South Korea:

Are South Koreans Committing More Sex Crimes Because of a Porn Ban?

Fear And Loathing In The World Of Korean E-Sports

Watch - Fashion Week Internationale: Seoul Fashion Week

BROOKE CANDY HAS A NEW VIDEO AGAIN, AND IT'S AMAZING AGAIN

Okay, I know I put Brooke Candy in literally every FTR ever, but what can I say – the girl knows how to dress. Plus, her new single is called "Pussy Make The Rules", which is amazing, even just purely on the basis that saying it out loud makes you sound slightly illiterate and also totally bad-ass.

Interestingly, this video has more than a few similarities to Gaga's "Bad Romance". I'm not sure if that's intentional or not – Candy has been pretty vocal about Gaga ripping her off in the past. But if this is Brooke attacking Gaga's imitation through imitation, she needs to be careful, because it appears she's got problems of her own. Introducing Ke$ha's new look, ladies and gentleman, complete with white girl cane rows, platform trainers and massive ghetto hoops. I smell a diss track. Or maybe a fist fight, which would be seriously entertaining with those nails.

ISABELLA BLOW'S WARDROBE OPENS TO THE PUBLIC

If you haven't realised from the video above and you don't already know (which you should), fashion editor and stylist Isabella Blow was hugely influential to British fashion, playing host and muse to countless designers, including her BFF, the late Alexander McQueen.

Unfortunately, suicide and the fashion industry seem to have a bit of a rapport, because Blow – having struggled with her mental health for many years – also fell victim to her depressive tendencies and took her own life in 2007. To combat losing pretty much the sharpest dresser on the planet (so sorry, will.i.am, you can have second place), Somerset House announced this week that 100 pieces of Blow's best Disney movie baddie clothing will be on display from November 2013.
 

GERLAN X JOYRICH

Seeing as this week's tidbits is dedicated to all the bad bitches, it wouldn't make sense not to include Gerlan Jeans, who clothe practically every bad bitch who's ever set foot in NYC. Which is most of them. Bar Katy Perry, who has an unfortunate affinity with GJ and insists on wearing it a lot of the time.

Gerlan have a pretty good track record of being that designer you might not know the name of, but you've almost certainly worn a knock-off of. They're also sold on Opening Ceremony, which is essentially the starting block for all the best young fashion lines atm. The only trouble with Gerlan, is that it's really, really expensive. Not Balmain expensive, obviously, but spending 195 bucks on a raglan shirt isn't really something I'm able to do right now, or probably ever. Which is why it's good news they've teamed up with Joyrich for a back to school collection that we can only hope (and assume) is a little bit more unemployment friendly.

LET'S END ON THE WORST NOTE POSSIBLE

Photo by Syed Zain Al-Mahmood via

Not to put a downer on this totally fun and empowering edition of FTR, but I'm going to remind you that at least one thing you've bought from a shitty high street store in the last year was probably made in one of the factories that collapsed in Bangladesh last week, killing upwards of 1,000 people. Good feeling, right?

Shops including Primark and Benetton hung their heads in shame as their garments were dug out of the rubble, and an emergency meeting between Gap Inc, H&M, JC Penney, Nike Inc, Wal-Mart, Britain's Primark, Marks & Spencer and Tesco was held, basically to cover their own backs in case any of their shit was discovered in the clutches of a dead Bangladeshi sweatshop labourer, too. 

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Previously – Mandatory High Heels and Hating Your Body

PHOTOGRAPHER: VINCENT PERINI
STYLIST: ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Hair and Makeup: Melissa Aboud
Models: Dan, James, Jessica, Rachel, and Z
Special thanks to: James, Mark, and Mickey

Sandro shirt, Lacoste swimming trunks, Ray-Ban sunglasses; Jack Henry swimsuit, Mark McNairy skirt, Bing Bang by Anna Sheffield ring

Lacoste shirt and swim trunks, Asos tank top, Mark McNairy shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses

Sandro shirt, Nike shorts, Gucci necklace; vintage bathrobe

Faherty swimsuit

Ray Ban sunglasses, Gucci necklace; Faherty bikini top, Jack Henry shorts, vintage shoes, bracelets, and earrings; Lightning Bolt towel

Asos tank top, Mark McNairy shorts; vintage bikini top; Jack Henry shirt

More VICE fashion shoots:

Summer Dressing 101

Phlo Finister XO

I "Like" London

Hi I'm Bertie, this column is basically a place for me to call bullshit on girl related things I think are stupid.

It should have worked, really. New York, arguably the city where punk was born, having a ball to launch an exhibition to celebrate the ways in which its angry little anarchic baby influenced fashion. Sure, I don't think the original punks would have liked having their movement reduced to a set of Instagrams from Katy Grand, but I think by this point we've all come to accept that when the fashion industry sees something it likes, it apes it, gets it an endorsement deal and starts flogging it. This is not a column about how furious I am that punk has gone mainstream, I've been in H&M in the past ten years, I know about the studded belts, I'm not a moron.

No, it's more that I'm disappointed by how laughably bad today's A-listers were at interpreting a fashion style that an eight-year-old with a school skirt, some safety pins and an ounce of bravado couldn't fuck up. Read on for a breakdown of the things Hollywood seems to think are "punk" and why that means the world as we know it – or at least just everyone who was at the Met Ball gala on Monday night – deserves to burn.

WEIRD COLOURED MAKE-UP
According to Emily Blunt, Lily Collins, January Jones and some other less important people, punk can be evoked with one word – not "anarchy", you idiot, "eyeshadow". What a sorry state of affairs it is when the only bit of their bodies our beloved style icons are willing to sacrifice to the gods of punk is the centimetre-and-a-half of skin above their eyes. Why don't famous people wear nipple-less bras and trainers and smoke on the red carpet any more? How could you even concievably convince yourself that painting a part of your body that is hidden 90 percent of the time fuschia makes you an iconoclast? Hollywood, you're so dumb.

"EAR CUFFS"
Okay, not just the ear cuffs (I'm SMH at you, Jessica Alba), but all the diamonds that weighed down the hands and necks of our appointed idols at the Met Ball gala. Is there a worse way of paying homage to a movement which prided itself on its DIY aesthetic than smothering it in clusters of really expensive squashed glass? Unless I've got it totally wrong and all the celebs were getting their glitter from broken beer bottles, this is really bad form.

STUDS
I'd assumed that studs died a death in 2012 when this happened, but apparently not. Here, in the spirit of all things PUNK and REBELLIOUS, they are draped all over Sienna Miller's perfectly highlighted GHD-straightened hair and £3,000 jacket. True story: I once wore that jacket on a shoot and it weighs the same as having a pitbull strapped to each of your arms. Which might have been an appropriate outfit idea, given what must happen when a punk walks through the Broadwater Farm estate these days. But I can't help but feel most of those in attendance would think Broadwater Farm is a "healing retreat".

ANYTHING THAT COST OVER $20,000
Which is everything, once you've factored in the virgin hair extensions, the manicures, waxing, tanning, coiffing and chauffeurs. Why are you so confused, Hollywood? Why can't you grasp a concept without it being fancy dress? Look at yourself: You're Miley Cyrus in Marc Jacobs with spiky hair, waiting patiently to be interviewed by the 14th fashion blog of the evening. You're wearing thin plastic bits of blue hair on one side of your head, you've got a pink dip-dye. The whole thing is a shambles. You're a shambles. Is it too much to ask for some basic research? Surely you employ enough stylists for just one of them to go on the internet and find out who Crass are.

HOLD ON: IS HOLLYWOOD THE MOST 'PUNK' PUNK, BECAUSE IT SHITS ON PUNK?
Maybe, just maybe, the way that the A-listers so flagrantly refused to conform to the accepted image of punk, is kind of actually the most punk thing they could have done. There you are, Jessica Alba, with your diamond encrusted ear cuffs, saying fuck you to cultural history. We live in an age of £4,000 handbags and Victoria Beckham custom-cars, why should I expect the people who represent the very top tier of that selfishness and vanity to understand anything else?

If punk is about the bravery to be yourself, then the Met Gala was really fucking punk. It was the most brazen and shameless display of wealth and banality imaginable – God Save the A-List.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Previously – A Basic Guide to Existing in Summer

PHOTOS: KITTY RIDDELL
STYLING: BLANCHE KENNEDY

Model: Anna Tatton @ Nevs

Nike T-shirt, Army Surplus windbreaker, vintage Polaroid sunglasses.

American Apparel vest and shorts.

American Apparel top and shorts, Nike trainers.

BHS vest, vintage jacket.

Nike top, Le Specs sunglasses.
 

BHS vest, Beyond Retro sunglasses.

PHOTOS BY JAMES A. GRANT
STYLIST: CLAUDIA ALEXANDRA SINCLAIR

Hair: Sapphire Lewis at Bleach using Bumble & Bumble
Make-up: Francesca Morris
Nails by WAH Nails
Photo Assistant: Andre Titcombe
Fashion Assistant: Olivia Pigeon

_{Absolute Vintage jumper and skirt, vintage ring and earrings.}

Vintage fur coat and jewellery.

Absolute Vintage dress, ASOS sunglasses, Slazenger socks.

Rokit coat, jumper and skirt, Reebok trainers, Slazenger socks, vintage jewellery and bandanna.

ASOS suit, Prada sunglasses, vintage jewellery and bandanna.

Absolute Vintage top and skirt, Timberland boots, Nike socks, vintage earrings and bandanna.

Suzie High raincoat, Dolce & Gabbana bra, vintage skirt, MCS London scrunchie.
 

Lucy in Disguise top, MCS London scrunchie, vintage earrings and ring.

Suzie High raincoat, BHS top, vintage Versace trousers, Reebok trainers, vintage earrings and bandanna.
 

TYRONE LE BON SHOOTS STRIPPERS IN "ATLANTA DREAM$"

One of our favourite London-based photographers, Tyrone Le Bon, has turned his hand to film-making. Art directed and produced by WAH Nails queen Sharmadean Reid, Tyrone shot the new short as part of the Nokia Music "new American noise" programme. Follow a hotel valet, Don Juan, T-Pain, Trinidad James and hella strippers as they walk you through the underground clubs of Atlanta – places where girls will pick a new rapper to dance to and, all of a sudden, those rappers are getting radio plays, record deals and, I'm guessing, more strippers. Tyrone's candid, personal footage of the dancers is refreshing, fascinating and – sorry dad – pretty inspirational. Clear heels, please.

YOU WANT ALL THIS CHAMPION STUFF

When I was young and naive I always thought Champion was the kind of brand you could only find in really obscure rural French supermarkets, which was why all of my best-dressed friends had a shitload and nobody else had a stitch. How wrong I was.

Although it's managed to maintain a specialness that sets it apart from other blown-out sportswear brands (bitchy, soz, but whatever), you can totally get your hands on Champion's sweatshirts – and crop tops masquerading as sports bras (!) – without spending 14 hours on a ferry. They've also recently relaunched their EU website, so go swaddle yourself in sportswear and you'll probably sweat off all the weight you'd lose from actually going to the gym, anyway.

VERSACE VERSUS ARE #REBRANDING

When Christopher Kane's reign at Versace came to an end last year and Donatella appointed the king of minimalism JW Anderson in his place (woohoo – two British designers in a row, btw), everybody expected a shift in Versus's aesthetic. That new age has now arrived, in the form of an online rebrand that aims to reconnect Versus with the sexy teenagers it's always been designed for.

Pushing the revamp on social media, Versace have described the tasteful overhaul as a bringing "Versus back to the map of young people and re-establish[ing] it as the young heart and spirit of Versace." Can't argue with that, Donatella. Seriously, you can't argue with JW Anderson designing tasteful minidresses for strung out glamourous it-girls, either. God, grunge is so dead.

RAYBAN HAVE MADE BLU CANTRELL'S FAVOURITE SUNGLASSES

Stop what you're doing on all your other tabs and look at this picture. Let me walk you through it. Green aviators for your all-over camo look; pink for your Anastasia-inspired moments, blue obviously for re-creating the amazing outifts from Blu Cantrell ft. Sean Paul (or, tbf, just any Blu Cantrell look ever) and then yellow for those hungover Fear and Loathing moments when you can't look people in the eye because you're so dizzy you'll vomit. Thanks, Rayban – how the hell am I supposed to pick one?

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Previously –These Rodarte Vans Are Just Perfect for a Fashion Intern

Photos: India Grove
Styling: Blanche Kennedy
Styling Assistant: James Munro
Model: Kitty Riddel with Nevs

Mary Benson jacket, Nike trainers
 

Mary Benson jacket, American Apparel dress
 

Hermione De Paula jacket, Zara dress, Onitsuka Tiger trainers
 

Hermione De Paula jacket, Zara dress
 

Dress, jacket and earrings all by Rebecca Jeffs
 

Hermione De Paula dress, New Balance trainers
 

Hermione De Paula jumper
 

Mary Benson dress

Uniqlo's UT line has been running for a decade this year, which might explain why they're hosting the biggest blowout ever to celebrate the launch of a new line of limited edition t-shirts. Happy 10th birthday, UT, let’s have ten drinks and stay up for three days.

To baseline what's essentially a two-week compact festival of art, music and clothing, Uniqlo have launched UT Camera, a smartphone video app that turns two-second looped video portraits into an animation. Download it from the app store and share your video with the world on the official UT website, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re savvy, use the hashtags #UT_LDN and #UT_CAMERA for the chance to win goodies, too.

Not only is the shop going to be a canvas for your animations, it’s also hosting a whole load of parties. The dream team of Uniqlo and VICE have partnered to throw a fortnight of art and music themed events on Kingsland Road, which will include installations from Dan Freeman and Damien Weighill, film screenings, workshops and special performances from Swim Deep, Wolf Alice and Fred Macpherson. Apply online for more information about each event and the VIP parties kicking off on Thursday the 18th with Gabriel Bruce, GETME! DJs and a whole bunch of free drinks, provided by Tiger Beer (who are also running a competition on their Twitter to win tickets). You can always take Friday off. In fact, you’ll probably need to.

The UT pop-up LON store will also be open daily from the 19th to the 27th of April, so head over there between 12 to 6PM to shop the limited edition UT collection and pick up super exclusive UT VIP offers that you can use in any Uniqlo store. Basically, there’s a tonne of stuff going on that you really shouldn’t miss.

The whole thing is part of a massive global takeover, which has launched pop-ups in pretty much every single one of Kanye’s favourite shopping destinations: Tokyo, Paris, Singapore, New York – you get the idea. Oh yeah, and did I mention there are 1,000 different t-shirt designs to get your hands on? Lucky the drinks are free, because chances are you’re going to have some serious difficulty only picking one.

(it's nothing like this, basically.)

There are a lot of fashion intern advice pieces floating around the internet today, so I thought I'd pitch in with some of my own. Things that are required of fashion interns at big publications: endless parental funding, endless free time, endless patience to ride around in cabs which will contain ONLY shoes and no people, an encyclopaedic knowledge of entirely useless information like denim styles, hairdressers in Knightsbridge and models' dogs' names.

As fashion intern, it is your duty to be awkward for the entire duration of a 13-hour shoot during which you eat half a fruit muffin (wtf) and then stay two hours after everyone else to help the alchoholic stylist wrap every single item of child-manufactured clothing in tissue paper. Expect: to get fired for sending an email to the wrong Anna, for accidentally swearing in front of the editor, or for coming to work hungover and rolling your eyes at your "boss". Categorically do not expect: a job, a reference, any acknowledgement whatsoever from any of the team outside of the office doors, to be allowed to touch a model's dog. It's SO great!
 

WAH NAILS POP UP

Everybody knows WAH nails have the best nail art, best manicures, best looking salons and (by a long shot) best chat. As of this week, there are now even more opportunites for you to get your square tip French mani (just me?) in good company, thanks to a Boxpark pop-up nail bar just by Shoreditch High Street station. Whether it's acrylics, nail pens or just general therapy you require, WAH's got you. Personally, I'm a fan of hanging around at the back of their salons for hours trying to overhear life advice. It's better than TV. I suggest you do the same.

RODARTE X VANS

I know, normally everything going on in the US is totally depressing and boring, but sometimes something good-looking comes along and you have to give them credit for being amazingly superficial, clean and shallow. No, I'm not talking about Lindsay Lohan the best looking human on the planet, I'm referring to this custom pair of Vans slip-ons designed by the sisters behind cult fashion label Rodarte – Laura and Kate Mulleavy.

As part of a nationwide initiative for high-school students, the Rodarte sneakers were donated in support of the Vans Custom Culture competition, which awards one lucky kid $50,000 to put towards their high school art programme. If there's anything I wanted as a Princess Diaries and Slipknot loving high schooler (I was confused...) it would have been diamante Rodarte Vans. Someone pass me a glue-gun.

JAMES FRANCO IS MAKING A FILM ABOUT GUCCI

Evidently James enjoyed filming this Gucci commercial so much that he decided he would just go ahead and produce a full-blown feature-length documentary about the fashion house, called The Director. The film, which is now finished, is set to preview at the Tribeca film festival, because it's a real film, remember? It follows the brand's creative director Frida Giannini doing loads of fascinating fashion stuff for an 18-month period, not unlike what the directors of Lagerfeld: Confidential did for Chanel. If this film is anything like that film – which FYI I'm guessing it won't be, because Giannini doesn't set his fashion shows on imported glaciers or publicly call Adele "too fat" – it's going to be amazing.

Previously – Be the Baddest Bitch in Florida

55DSL have continued their love of moving images – after a great short film shot for their last collection – with Italy, Texas: Wild Souls, another short film focusing on the town of Italy in Ellis County, Texas. The film, directed by Irish filmmaker Aoife McArdle, focuses on a central theme of unconventional friendship in the sleepy Texas town, presenting both another perspective on America's Italy and communicating 55DSL's own unique brand ethos.

Find out more about 55DSL on their Facebook page.

Since Battersea Power Station was closed in 1975, there have been various ideas banded around for what the desolate industrial space could be turned into. The theme park and football stadium proposals were kind of exciting, the luxury flats and shopping centre less so – unless, of course, you were the developer planning on charging tenants the Koch brothers' monthly wage for living a 30 second walk from both a Nandos and a bit of dirty water. In which case, I'll bet the anticipation was bone-shattering. 

However, what nobody's really been able to do in that time is go and nose around inside, which is a shame because it's essentially 40 years of untouched London history going to waste, despite the fact that it would be easily within reach if people weren't so concerned with unimportant things like health and safety and girders collapsing and crushing anyone underneath them. Luckily for you, Palladium Boots took singer Eliza Doolittle to explore the power station and filmed a tour of the whole thing for their short film, Battersea: Power Of London.

MARILYN MANSON RISES

Given that Hedi Slimane's understanding of the Saint Laurent brand hasn't quite gelled with that of the rest of the fashion world, imagine my squeals of excitement when I saw Marilyn Manson fronting their new campaign. Finally, Slimane had done something (accidentally?) right, by appointing the king of freaky 90’s acid-goth fashion as an ambassador of his mediocre at best SL line.

Marilyn Manson is a love or hate figure – much like soy milk or Nicki Minaj – but I have personally loved him, ever since I heard Holy Wood. I love his freaky-ass face and his unwavering dedication to hot but crazy, teenage girlfriends. The pictures of him and Rose Mcgowan from the late 1990s are practically glued to the back of my eyelids, and flash through my mind whenever I hear the words “romance” or “alcholic”. Sure, he’s kind of an incredibly annoying guy IRL, but fuck your hip-hop rudeboy fashion, Manson’s back, baby. PVC and everything.

OPENING CEREMONY X SPRING BREAKERS

Isn't it funny how Harmony Korine makes a film about mainstream culture, and suddenly all the shit we swore we wouldn't consider wearing again after 2009 has come full circle? If you told me literally last month that I'd be coveting white tracksuit bottoms covered in pink alien heads, I would have laughed you all the way to Victoria's Secret and asked you to stay there forever. Oh how fickle I am, because after seeing Vanessa Hudgens totally killing it in a graphic print, white, crop t-shirt and high tops, I am so ready to re-embrace my tweenage roots.

Thanks to Opening Ceremony we can all get pissed on watermelon Margarita mix looking like we just stepped out of a Spring Breakers-themed freshers night. They're releasing official merchandise including lurid bikinis, bandannas, hoodies and, of course, the notorious balaclava. Now, all I need is James Franco to snog me wearing grills, and I can die a happy woman.

MISSONI AND CONVERSE MADE MY FAVOURITE TRAINERS

I'm not sure how this happened, but apparently either Converse or Missoni have been closely monitoring many aspects of my life. I can't really think of a better explanation as to how they could have managed to design my absolute dream trainers. Soft, multicoloured, throwback running shoes that would work equally well on Kurt Kobain or Mildred Hubble.

A limited run of these trainers are currently available to buy in Converse and Missoni stores, or here in a selection of colours. But please DON'T buy them, because the quicker you do, the less likely it is that I'll ever manage to touch, smell and possibly steal a pair. They're amazing. Don't buy them. Please.

MORE BEAUTIFUL THAT BARBIE

Considering how obsessed everyone is with seeing celebrities without makeup, it was only a matter of time before someone proffered up an image of the most stereotypically beautiful woman in the world, sans the war paint.

Eddi Aguirre's interpretation of bare-faced Barbie has unsurprisingly gone viral and is raising questions about kids having realistic looking role-models; so they, basically, don’t grow up thinking they’re hideous. Apart from the traintracks, which lots of people are calling unnecessary (give her a head brace for all I care), to me, the whole thing is pretty well-executed and effective. See kids? We are all that puffy sometimes.

Previously – Screw You Ethnic Print Trousers

Models: Harry, Stephanie and Robbie at Nevs

Boxfresh x Passarella Death Squad jacket, vintage t-shirt, adidas trousers, Topman sunglasses, Converse bag.

Robbie wears Rokit fur cape, vintage top, Nike leggings, Karrimor bum bag, MCS London scrunchie; Harry wears Victorinox jacket, Boxfresh x Passarella t-shirt, Alpinestars shorts, Trussardi sunglasses, WeSC headphones.

Tommy Hilfiger denim jacket, Lacoste L!ve bikini top, Annie Phillips trousers, American Apparel hat, vintage necklace, badge and pencil case stylist's own.

Stephanie wears WeSC jacket, Penfield shirt, Rokit skirt and shoes, Blitz leather bag; Robbie wears vintage French Connection top, Rokit skirt, Kickers shoes, Mary Benson earrings, MCS London scrunchie, vintage tights and socks.

Vintage DKNY top, Calvin Klein Jeans trousers, Blitz belt, Trussardi sunglasses, purse and keyring stylist's own.

Stephanie wears Lacoste L!ve jacket, American Apparel roll neck, vintage Stephen Sprouse skirt, Converse hat; Harry wears Sam MC London jacket, vintage Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt, Adidas trousers, badge stylist's own.

Monki top, American Apparel trousers and belt, Esprit visor, Trussardi sunglasses, vintage clutch bag, Topshop socks, Underground shoes, Eastpak travel case.

Penfield shirt and gilet, Calvin Klein Jeans skirt, American Apparel bra and belt, Esprit visor.

American Apparel skirt, JuJu jelly sandals, vintage socks.
 

PHOTOS BY ANDREW KUYKENDALL
STYLIST: ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Photo Assistant: Larsen Sotelo
Hair and Makeup: Tsiporrah Liebman
Models: Kelley Ash at Q, Lauren Young at Elite 

Shot at the Los Angeles Athletic Club

Nike sports bra and shorts, Be&D sneakers

Adidas Originals tank top, Nasty Gal leggings, Nike sneakers, Casio G-Shock watch, Love Me x Bing Bang by Anna Sheffield earrings and necklace

Cobra Fitness Club crop top by the Cobra Snake, Nasty Gal leggings, Bing Bang by Anna Sheffield bracelet and ring

Nike sports bra, Calvin Klein underwear; Victoria’s Secret bra, Calvin Klein underwear

Victoria’s Secret bra, Calvin Klein underwear

Motel sports bra, Calvin Klein leggings

Opening Ceremony jacket, Nike sports bra and shorts, Be&D sneakers, Bing Bang by Anna Sheffield earrings and ring; American Apparel jersey, Adidas Originals x Opening Ceremony shorts, Stance socks, Converse sneakers

Victoria’s Secret PINK sports bra and shorts, Nasty Gal tank top; Calvin Klein sports bra, Nike shorts

Calvin Klein underwear

Calvin Klein underwear

More photo shoots from VICE:

Home Entertainment

American Gigolo

Can We Please?

Last week we told you about Nike’s new “Air Reinvented” films, made to celebrate the release of their new range of shoe models forming the Air Max HomeTurf pack – a new collection reinventing the classic shoe by taking design cues from the architecture and street style of three different cities.

Nike has teamed up with a trio of creatives in those three cities – London, Paris and Milan – all of whom have reinvented their respective city inspired by Nike Air Max.

Firstly, enter the studio where London band AlunaGeorge discuss their own transformation from solo artists to a collaborative duo and how their city has influenced them and their music. Travel the streets with Milan-based Jacopo Ceccarelli who reinvented himself as 2501 and regenerated his own style, which has now become a blend of wall painting, paint on canvas, video and sculptures. Finally, discover Paris with artist Yué Wu’s as he reinterprets the element "Air" using balloons as exclusive illustrations.

Watch all three of Nike’s Air Reinvented films here.

T-SHIRT PARTY BIRTHDAY PARTY

Well it's not actually a birthday, but they (by which I actually mean "he", but "he's" secret) just made their 100th t-shirt. If you don't know what T-Shirt Party is then you should, because they make small runs of amazing, funny, cool t shirts every few weeks or months – often with accompanying videos. Which sounds weird but actually works. The latest crop have featured a shitload of collaborations with designers and generally great people. You can see all the T's here – and maybe buy their sexy 100th anniversary rose speckled dream shirt.

CONVERSE STILL OWN SNEAKERS

Ok I don't want to come over all emotional or anything, but I was sorting out my shoe rack the other day and I came across one of the very first pairs of Converse I ever bought. Can we just take a minute to appreciate the beauty of something which I had when I was 13, still being totally appropriate for me to wear 10 years later? If I did that with half of my other outfit choices I'd probably be fired (I'd definitely be fired). But there were my Converse (size 4, hi-top, black, in case you were wondering) just waiting to be slipped on and possibly sick on a little bit. It happens. So, I don't know. Thanks, I guess? You're probably one of my most reliable friends. Way more reliable than my ex-boyfriend was, but I guess that's not saying much. And now is not the time to get into that. Again. Anyway, thanks.

PENFIELD HAVE REINVENTED CAMO – THANK GOD

If, like me, you've been wearing camo religiously for about seven months now, and the fact it's suddenly all over everyone has basically just ruined all your outfits plans for the next week (so annoying) then take solace in the fact that Penfield feel your pain. They know that not every wants to look like off-duty Rihanna. Although in hindsight there are definitely worse things. Anyway, in order to combat all the camoflage (geddit?) Penfield decided to make their own unique floral camouflage print. It will both come in handy when you're tring to blend in to fauna, and equally when you're trying to stand out among the swathes of camo kids you're probably going to be encountering for the entire summer. Take your pic from shirt, shorts and a bucket hat (which is amazing FYI) among many others. If I were you I'd probably just throw everything on and own it. A bit of warlord swagger never hurt anyone. Did it?

ETHNIC TROUSERS NEED TO DIE A DEATH

I bet you always thought that paint splattered hairdresser jeans were the most heinous trousers possible? Well, your Western ignorance has let you down I’m afraid because the worst leg-coverers known to man are found by searching “ethnic” and “trousers” in Ebay. Within seconds you’ll be confronted with the worst display of cod-Eastern, pan-Mythical clothing outside of Mick Hucknall’s Lock N Store unit. Everything about the trousers, from their shoddy manufacturing to their one-size-fits-all take on mysticism is enough to make all but the most fevernt WOMAD-goer want to run for the hills with their BP job application form in hand. We’d sooner hope that distressed denim comes back in than these patchwork atrocities.

Previously – Love Valium? Marry It

VALS TO HAND

Wearing rings that represent the "real" you is a fun idea; American baseball players wear team rings with a club logo, couples in Asia wear couple rings, Harvard guys wear those creepy fratnernity rings, and obviously VICE have a team ring. Still, what happens if you love the idea, but the only thing you do are benzodiazepines? Chances are if you spend your days in a Valium haze, there aren't going to be many other hobbies you have the time to be passionate about. Cast of Vices must share your painless pain, because there are now even rings for you, sleepy. Specifically, sterling silver rings in the shape of Valium and Xanax pills. Available at about the same price of 100 Valium tabs, you'll be able to show off your reliance on the drug, and when the tablets run dry the ring will still be there for you. Perfect way to propose to your totally cracked out gf/bf too, am I right?
 

GARAGE MAGAZINE X TIM BLANKS

Hearing fashion journalism veteran Tim Blanks talk candidly about the street style photography phenomenon genuinely does sound riveting to me, but if you're not sold, this (sort of) fashion film also feautures interviews with Susie Style Bubble, Proenza Schouler and Tommy Ton. Discussing the democracy of street style vs. the fashion week peacocking that we all know and loathe, Garage Magazine have compiled a really interesting short film with a whole load of influential contributors. Worth a watch, if only for the vintage Bill  Cunningham footage.
 

ANIMAL TESTING IS FULLY ILLEGAL. YAY.

This week the EU finally got around to banning the sale of cosmetics tested on animals. No cosmetics containing any ingredients tested on animals will be available anywhere in the EU as of now, regardless of where in the world the animal testing was carried out. Good news for rabbits everywhere. Previously it was illegal to test on animals in the UK but it was still okay to import cosmetics from countries that wouldn’t think twice about putting lipstick on a cat and mocking it for hours. So uncool.

Luckily it sounds like everyone’s seen sense on that whole terribly immoral and unethical practise. Apart from (possibly) Satanist assholes Cosmetics Europe, who just released a statement saying that “by implementing the ban at this time, the European Union is jeopardising the industry's ability to innovate". Actually we think this is a perfect example of the industry innovating, in case you didn’t know there are plenty of cruelty-free testing methods out there now. Not only has Israel also enforced the ban, but India, Brazil, Korea, Russia and Canada are currently considering it too. I’m not holding my breath for China though.
 

KENZO X VANS

Once you've watched the KENZO resort 2013 film Electric Jungle, hopefully I won't need to explain to you how to style these KENZO X Vans trainers. But if you're really slow and you still don't get it, let me help. Get a parrot, get a shitload of different coloured leopard print clothes, put them all on together, own it. It's really not that hard. If you can't find a parrot, a snake will do. If you're rubbish at sourcing exotic animals (your Friday night outfit will suffer but NVM) then I guess you can stick to bright coloured drinks instead. Orange Bacardi Breezer, blue WKD, pink Archers, yes yes yes.
 

SAINT LAURENT NEEDS A LONG NAP

Left image: Saint Laurent menswear AW 2013, Right image: Saint Laurent womenswear AW 2013

Hedi Slimane's already in hot water for banning journalists from shows and generally making the laziest fashion since Kevin Federline discovered skunk. But who could have predicted that in his Kills-soundtracked stupor he'd actually start ripping himself off? Putting the same boring lumberjack shirt down the runway twice? That's a serious no-no, Hedi. Minus ten points for bad form.
 

NICKI MINAJ STRIPPED IN ELLE

Can you dress like this all the time please? It's the only thing that stops me feeling ashamed about knowing every single word to Super Bass...

Previously – Rent Your Thighs Out for Money

PHOTOS BY BEN RITTER
STYLIST: ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Hair and Makeup: Victoria Aronson
Models: Chelsea, Dora, Jessica, Kristian, Ryan, Sam, Tyler
Special Thanks to Josh Lekach

Feltraiger shirt, Raf Simons x Fred Perry trousers, Adidas trainers; Pedaler shirt, WeSC tank top, Mark McNairy shorts, Dr. Martens boots

Edith A. Miller shirt, Fred Perry skirt, All Saints boots; Agyness Deyn x Dr. Martens shirt and shorts, Dr. Martens boots, vintage bracelets; Fairground top, Mark McNairy skirt, Dr. Martens boots

Nike jersey, Topshop necklace

Topman jersey, Jack Henry hot shorts, Converse trainers, H&M bracelets

Dr. Martens shirt, WeSC shorts; Illesteva sunglasses

Stolen Girlfriends Club tank top, Shades of Grey by Micah Cohen trousers; Agyness Deyn x Dr. Martens dress, Topshop bracelets; Raf Simons x Fred Perry shirt, WeSC trousers, Carhart WIP belt

Asos jumper, H&M earrings

Stolen Girlfriends Club shirt, Mark McNairy tank top; Fred Perry shirt, H&M earrings

Schott jacket, vintage t-shirt, Topman jeans; Agyness Deyn x Dr. Martens jacket, American Apparel t-shirt, Court Shop trousers, Shourouk necklace

Chances are you've owned a pair of Nike Air Max's at some point in your life, along with all your friends and a bunch of strangers you've spotted and instantly admired for having such impeccable taste. But, at a risk of sounding sycophantic, the thing about Air Max's is that they've undeniably fallen into the tattoo or plain white tee slot of the sneaker world – it doesn't matter how many people have them, they're still fucking cool. 

This year is the 25th anniversary of the Air Max, which is obviously a pretty big deal to you considering those older kids wouldn't have paid you any attention if it wasn't for the all-black 90s you wore to your first day of school – and the fact that they've spent the last 25 years being arguably the most iconic trainers in the world.

To celebrate hitting the quarter century mark, as well as their history of reinvention, Nike is releasing three new shoe models as part of the Air Max HomeTurf pack, reinventing the classic shoe by taking design cues from the architecture and street style of three cities: London, Paris and Milan, which will be showcased in three upcoming Reinvention films.

For example, the London shoe merges Nike's Hyperfuse material with a blend of other textiles to create a mix of shine and matte, representing both the glossy sheen of modern, big money London and all the griminess hiding under the skyline.

Inspired by the HomeTurf Pack, Nike called in creatives from each city to reinvent something of their own. Paris has artist Yué Wu doing an exclusive set of illustrations with balloons, Milan's got street artist 2501 decorating the city and London has AlunaGeorge who, guaranteeing you have a set of ears, you'll definitely have heard feature on Disclosure's "White Noise" at some point in the last month.

Although they only got together a little over a year ago, the London-based duo Aluna Francis and George Reid have already played string of shows and have numerous festival appearances lined up this summer.

The duo have had their own metamorphosis – they began their musical careers as individual artists but, after hearing each other’s work, they formed a partnership. As a nod to their own reinvention, AlunaGeorge have lent one of their own unreleased songs, "My Town" to the project. It’s an ode to London and to the infinite possibilities it gave them to become who they really are.

VICE are premiering Nike Air Max’s reinvention-inspired films about AlunaGeorge, Wu Yue and 2501 in April, so keep an eye out for them then.

Read more over at the The Creators Project.

If we want to move forward with culture and not get left in the stalemate that's gifted us talent shows and endless remakes of ancient films, we need to expand on what we already know, search for what we're really passionate about, crash a few of those things together and see what kind of new stuff we can create.   

Granted, sometimes it can be a bit off (2006's ill-feted musical genre "grindie", "Cruggs", that time someone let Joe Pesci record a rap), but done right, smashing two good things that already exist together can create a whole new, unsurpassable fusion of amazingness.

The motto for adidas Originals' 2013 is "Crash, Collide, Unite All Originals" and follows that very idea – that colliding two pre-existing things can inspire true originality. Think about the work of John Baldessari (photos of people and colourful dots) and hip-hop (disco and speaking), for example – there's how to forge an authentic original out of various elements that have already been around for years.       

To celebrate that idea, adidas Originals are challenging artists to come up with their own collisions on paper. The brief is to involve at least one element of adidas Originals – be it the logo, a shoe or a specific piece of clothing – and collide whatever they want with it within the artwork. Preferably creating something new that nobody has ever seen or thought of before, because that's kind of the point of originality, obviously.

The collisions will be showcased in the London and Liverpool adidas stores before a judging panel will grant three artists an unbelievable opportunity to further their careers.

Click here to find out more and follow adidas on Twitter: @adidasUK or search for #unitealloriginals

Before we had low-rise, straight-leg, skinny, selvage, stretchy, resin-coated, lotion-infused or mum jeans, there was simply jean – the fabric. The name likely originated from gênes, referring to Genoa, Italy, where sailors wore a twill blend of cotton, linen and wool that came in a variety of stripes and colorus. 

Today’s jeans are made from heavier, all-cotton denim woven in a combination of indigo-dyed vertical yarn and natural horizontal yarn, resulting in the fabric’s white-speckled surface and pale underside. And although the original name for denim came from Nîmes, France – as in, de Nîmes – the fabric was most likely first produced in England.

Once the United States emancipated itself from British rule, the former colonists stopped importing European denim and began producing it themselves from all-American cotton, picked by slaves in the South and spun, dyed and woven in the North. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by the textile trade, which almost singlehandedly upheld slavery. When the cotton gin mechanised processing in 1793, prices, already subsidised by slave labour, dropped dramatically. Cheap goods drove demand, and a vicious cycle ensued. In the period between the invention of the cotton gin and the Civil War, America’s slave population shot from 700,000 to a staggering 4 million.

After the Civil War, companies like Carhartt, Eloesser-Heynemann and OshKosh slung cotton coveralls to miners, railroad men and factory workers. A Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss set up shop in San Francisco selling fabric and work-wear. Jacob Davis, an entrepreneurial Reno tailor, bought Strauss’s denim to make workingman’s pants, and added metal rivets to prevent the seams from ripping open. Davis sent two samples of his riveted pants to Strauss, and they patented the innovation together. Soon after, Davis joined Strauss in San Francisco to oversee production in a new factory. In 1890, Strauss assigned the ID number of 501 to their riveted denim “waist overalls.” The Levi’s 501 blue jean – which would become the best-selling garment in human history – was born.

Initially, jeans were proletarian western work-wear, but wealthy easterners inevitably ventured out in search of rugged cowboy authenticity. In 1928, a Vogue writer returned East from a Wyoming dude ranch with a snapshot of herself, “impossibly attired in blue jeans… and a smile that couldn’t be found on all Manhattan Island.” In June 1935, the magazine ran an article titled “Dude Dressing”, possibly one of the first fashion pieces to instruct readers in the art of DIY denim distressing: “What she does is to hurry down to the ranch store and ask for a pair of blue jeans, which she secretly floats the ensuing night in a bathtub of water – the oftener a pair of jeans is laundered, the higher its value, especially if it shrinks to the ‘high-water’ mark. Another innovation – and a most recent one, if I may judge – also goes on in the dead of night, and undoubtedly behind locked doors – an intentional rip here and there in the back of the jeans.”

Around this time, jeans were a nostalgic souvenir from an increasingly closed and diminished western frontier. By the 1930s, the buffalo was all but extinct, the vast majority of Native Americans had been put on reservations, and western farmers had divided up and fenced off the once vast, wide-open land. Levi’s were unavailable east of the Mississippi, making them the quintessential California brand. To the rest of the country, it barely mattered whether the real cowboys wore blue jeans, when movie stars like John Wayne, Will Rogers, Gene Autry and William S. Hart did.  

Workers on the Alexander plantation in Arkansas picking cotton in 1935. Photo courtesy of Ben Shahn/Library of Congress

In the South, as sharecropping was just dying out, jeans carried a different set of connotations. A 1941 fashion spread in Life magazine titled “Doris Lee Offers the Southern Negro” featured a series of the artist’s Maira Kalman-esque sketches of African-American women in midriff-baring halter tops, turbans and colourful skirts, juxtaposed against photographs of white women in similar outfits. The text read: “[The artist] reports that these ‘low-country’ Negroes, more primitive than elsewhere, have a flair for colour, a ‘proportion oddity’, great resourcefulness and ingenuity especially in their adaptations of castoffs”. One pair of images included “faded coveralls… readily adapted into clam-digger-style blue jeans.” The spread suggests that, like the blues, American blue-jean styles were adapted – or stolen – from African Americans. It’s little wonder that jeans didn’t catch on in black fashion for decades. Southern blacks had no use for clothing that harked back to a brutal history of violence, oppression, and exploitation.

During World War II, off-duty American servicemen wore their jeans while overseas, exporting their appeal like Western-style democracy. From there, blue jeans’ allure continued to increase internationally. For instance, East German authorities noted the prevalence of “cowboy pants” at a workers’ revolt in 1953. Jeans represented a similar kind of rebellion in the postwar US. But brands weren’t ready to associate their products with antiauthoritarian delinquents like the 501-clad Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Instead, they viewed this semiotic shift as a disturbing departure from the clean-cut movie-poster cowboys of the past. The Wild One was, after all, based on a real motorcycle riot in California. Newspapers made sure to mention when criminals wore blue jeans, and high schools banned them. Rather than exploiting the bad-boy image and embracing what could have been an easily executed marketing campaign, denim manufacturers tried to whitewash it with slogans like “Clean Jeans for Teens” and “Jeans: Right for School”. They even formed an organisation called the Denim Council to hold wholesome “blue jean queen” beauty contests and outfit JFK’s first Peace Corps volunteers. But it was all for naught. 

By the late 60s, actors like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Dennis Hopper smoldered onscreen in movies like Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider, while the counterculture assimilated into the mainstream and teenagers became a market that wielded serious buying power. “That mass consumerism, with all the standardisation it implied, could somehow be reconciled with rampant individualism was one of the smartest tricks ever pulled by Western civilisation,” wrote historian Niall Ferguson in 2011’s Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Ferguson’s point was observable on an international scale, as a Cold War-era sociological conundrum: As cheap, widely available proletarian clothing, jeans were the ultimate paradoxical symbol of consumer culture for the USSR. He summed it up nicely: “Perhaps the greatest mystery of the entire Cold War is why the Worker’s Paradise could not manage to produce a decent pair of jeans.”  

When bikers and beatniks embraced jeans, denim companies tried to whitewash their image by showing clean-cut youth donning blue jeans. Photo courtesy of Levi Strauss & Co.

Life observed the results of this back in 1972. “Fashion-sensitive Russians might be forgiven for viewing blue jeans as an international capitalist conspiracy,” the magazine reported. A pair of contraband Levi’s could fetch $90 on Russia’s black market, and American travellers financed European holidays by selling extra pairs. Soviet officials even coined the term “jeans crimes” to describe “law violations prompted by a desire to use any means to obtain articles made of denim.” 

By the 70s, jeans began to enter the realm of high fashion. And the fit had to be perfect. American designers like Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Geoffrey Beene and Calvin Klein transformed jeans into a status commodity and promptly cashed in on their handiwork. Klein in particular understood the sexual potential of a tight butt in an even tighter pair of jeans. After his first denim attempt failed commercially in 1976, he adjusted the fit: raising the crotch for emphasis on the package beneath and pulling up the back seam to accentuate the buns. Three years later, Klein had cornered 20 percent of the designer market. 

A 1980 Calvin Klein print and TV ad campaign infamously featured a 15-year-old Brooke Shields (“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?”). Klein quickly turned $25 million into $180 million. This was before stretch denim flooded the market, so these jeans were not only unusually high-waisted and skintight, they were also thick and unforgiving: so tight and rigid that women had to lie on their backs and use pliers to pull up their zippers. As distracting and perhaps painful as they must have been to wear, it was also the final realisation that jeans could be more than just clothing. 

If a sexy fit defined the 70s and early 80s, the next phase in denim culture was all about the finish, achieved with an array of tools like stones, bleach and acid washes, scissors and safety pins. The look may have started in the street, but soon enough, designers like Vivienne Westwood and Dolce & Gabbana sent punk-inspired denim down their runways. In 1988, Vogue’s new editor in chief, Anna Wintour, put a model in stonewashed Guess jeans on her first cover.

By the mid-90s, denim’s ass was outright owned by high fashion. Tom Ford embroidered, beaded and feathered jeans for Gucci. Torn and slightly oversize, they hung from models’ hips and sold for more than $3,000. “Before they were even in stores, the first shipment sold out through advance order,” the New York Times reported. “Winona Ryder, Mariah Carey and Helen Hunt ordered the skirt; Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett, the jeans. The singers Lil’ Kim, Janet Jackson and Madonna ordered both.”

For all of its potential guido pitfalls, Diesel was the first brand to successfully bring Italian-designed, artfully distressed designer denim to suburban consumers. The brand paved the way for flared legs and whiskers (those faded crease marks that fan out from the fly) with $100 price tags. Seven for All Mankind, Habitual, Citizens of Humanity, Paper Denim & Cloth, True Religion, Chip & Pepper, Earl, Yanük, Frankie B. and too many more to name here followed suit with stretch yarns woven in, to better allow for low-slung, thong-exposing waistlines.

Calvin Klein may have sexualized blue-jeans advertising with Brooke Shields in the early 80s, but Gucci was no slouch either. Photo courtesy of Advertising Archives

And now, in the midst of the Great Recession, we have come full circle, with the fairly recent demand for nostalgic “heritage” jeans that recall the hardscrabble industrialism of the Great Depression: work shirts and overalls faded to shades of cornflower blue and rough-hewn, no-nonsense, deep-dyed dungarees. Like their precursors from the 20s and 30s, these jeans seem imbued with a sad nostalgia for a bygone country (but maybe this time with a better fit). We’ve entered the Dorothea Lange era of fashion – clothed in flecked wool cardigans, formidable flannel shirts and sturdy work boots, Depression-era from head to toe.

The look is cataloged in magazines like Free & Easy from Japan, which is where much of the aforementioned heritage denim originates. In the 70s and 80s, efficient American mills perfected cheap, voluminous product. The Japanese went the opposite direction, working with premium designers, employing old-fashioned shuttle looms and less consistent yarns. The resulting fabrics have the kind of selvage (the unfrayed woven finish along the material’s narrow edge) fetishised by denim snobs everywhere. They wear out with much more character than the fuzzy, overwashed denims of recent decades. A new breed of bloggers are obsessively documenting their jeans’ disintegration, extensively cataloging brands, ages, washes and wears. The phenomenon is similar to the recent barrel-aged cocktail trend, observable at any number of artisanal “speakeasies” across the country. 

The vast majority of Americans cannot afford bespoke, ring-spun, resin-coated dream jeans, however seductive and special. Most buy their jeans at places like Walmart, where a two-pack of house-brand Faded Glory jeans can be had for around $22. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the same price the Vogue writer paid for one pair of jeans in 1928. Of course, these cheap jeans come with the hidden cost of US jobs. Cotton Incorporated reports that only about 1 percent of jeans available in the US were manufactured domestically. By 2009, most American denim factories had been closed, with manufacturing moving to plants in China, Mexico and Bangladesh. 

Perhaps a nation of unemployed Americans in $11 jeggings is our dystopian eyesore of a future. Glenn Beck, of all people, addressed the issue last year by launching his own line of American-made jeans ($129.99 a pop) with a jingoistic PR campaign after he was upset by Levi’s ads he felt glorified “revolutions and progressivism”. Beck is by no means the first Levi’s customer to conflate his own values with his blue jeans’ branding, but no matter how nostalgically we clutch our denim, it’s no longer just about us. 

The US market for blue jeans has been left in the dust; Latin America and Asia drive the future of denim. That said, there is a small, healthy designer-denim production chain alive in Los Angeles, and one of Levi’s early suppliers, Cone Denim, still weaves fabric in North Carolina, where small-scale manufacturers like Raleigh Denim market their product. Maybe one of these operations will be able to grow to an economy of scale and make “Made in America” accessible to its masses once again. Or it’s possible that blue jeans will just live on as America’s greatest contribution to the global closet. Until then, they’re still here. Faded, whiskered, and stretched. But still here.

More from our Fashion Issue:

Denim All Day

Chop, Drop and Roll

Bulletproof Kids

PHOTOS BY VINCENT PERINI
STYLIST: ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Photo Assistant: Isaac Lekach
Hair and Makeup: Victoria Aronson
Model: Nola at APM

Minimale Animale rash guard, Adidas bikini bottoms

Minimale Animale swimsuit, Feltraiger hat

Minimale Animale swimsuit

American Apparel swimsuit

Stampd swimsuit, Randolph Engineering sunglasses

Vans swimsuit

Nike towel, American Apparel bikini bottoms, vintage necklace

American Apparel swimsuit, Wildfox sunglasses

More of our fashion shoots:

Herb Ritter

Because the Night

Colts and Fillies

PHOTOS AND STYLING BY OLIVIA BEE

Photo Assistant: Cooper Campbell
Models: Lillie, Max. Rory, Tuesday
Horse Wranglers: Jan Campbell and Suzanne Losh
Horses: Blue, Harley, Tristan
Special thanks to Susan Aromaa, Corinne Hunt, Brooke McLeod, Courtney Reid, Holly Stirncorb, Shady Springs Farms

Vintage dress, Justin boots, Carolina bandana

The Fig Leaf dress, Durango boots, Carolina bandana

Tony Lama cowboy hat

Vintage vest, Vikni Crochet top, vintage pants, Nine West boots, vintage necklace

Vakko New York jacket, Roper shirt, Wrangler jeans, Durango boots, Tony Lama cowboy hat

American Apparel top, Male pants, Jeffrey Campbell shoes

Want more from our Fashion Issue?

Anarchy in Hip-Hop

The World's American Dream

Do People Really Dress Like Shit in Buffalo?

As if Buffalo, New York didn’t have enough to worry about with its struggling economy and tons of fat people and brutal winters, last year a website called Bundle.com named the city of 260,000 the “least fashionable city in America”. Bundle based this assessment on the percentage of households that bought goods from high-end designer merchants four times in a year – New York City and LA were near the top of the list, while Buffalo was near the bottom, even trailing the terrible-looking trolls who inhabit Jacksonville, Florida and Louisville, Kentucky. Understandably, this pissed off Buffalo’s more stylish residents and business owners, who are sick and tired of hearing about how their hometown is inhabited by nothing but mouth-breathing, obese, Zubaz-wearing, unemployed rubes. To get their take on the matter, I spoke with Erin Habes, a Buffalonian who returned to her hometown in 2005 after a stint as a sales rep for high-end footwear. Shortly after moving back, Erin founded her own clothing store, began producing one of the city’s biggest annual fashion events, and was called “Buffalo’s premiere fashion maven” by Buffalo Spree magazine. So I figured she’d be a good judge of whether or not everyone in Buffalo dresses like a slob.

VICE: How badly do people really dress in Buffalo? Like, do they even know how to put on pants?
Erin Habes: Any city has its fashionable community and then has the average community that wears flannels and PJ bottoms and scrunchies in their hair. I think that there’s a healthy mix of individuals here who know how to dress. When I came back after being in New York City, it was definitely a struggle owning my own store. I like to think that I was really ahead of my time in terms of the fashion products that I had. It’s a completely different environment now; all my friends who have their own stores are doing unbelievably. Buffalo loves supporting its own. 

Were these fashionable Buffalonians angry about the Bundle.com ranking? 
Yeah! We always end up at the bottom of every single list and survey like that. People were pissed off and were using choice words. But they based it off of how many people were purchasing products from high-end, top designers, which is kind of funny considering the economic state that our country is in. 

If you gathered all the Buffalonians together, what fashion advice would you give them?
Dress appropriately for your body type. A lot of times, women and men are very misguided. They’re putting together outfits and they’ve got it going on, but sometimes someone should tell them, “You know, that’s a little too tight, you shouldn’t be showing off too much.” 

Want more American fashion?

Snoop Through the Ages

Anarchy in Hip-Hop

Johnny Marr Takes Music and Fashion Seriously

This jacket is an example of the pride motorcycle riders have for their Schott Perfectos. Even after many long years of loving wear, the owner made sure to keep its tattered Perfecto tag intact.

American ingenuity is responsible for some of the world’s greatest creations. For instance, the cheeseburger is arguably the best all-around food ever and the internet is borderline godlike in its scope. The same goes for a garment that has been adopted by crusty gutter punks, beer-gutted bikers and yuppies alike: the infallible leather motorcycle jacket. This timeless icon of utilitarian fashion came from the mind of Irving Schott, cofounder of a company now known as Schott NYC, who made history with his iconic asymmetrical jacket design, commonly called the Perfecto.

The scrappy son of Russian immigrants, Irving started his career as a patternmaker for clothing manufacturers in the early 1900s. In 1913, he opened a factory with his brother Jack under the name Schott Bros. in the dingy basement of a tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Irving’s first successful products were sheepskin-lined raincoats, which he peddled from door to door. Like any good business, Schott Bros. began to diversify its offerings, bestowing its top-of-the-line coats with the Perfecto brand name. Inspired by Irving’s favourite torpedo-shaped cigars, Perfecto labels were stitched on all of his best leather and wool-lined outerwear.

Stepping into Schott NYC's Union, New Jersey factory is like going back in time. They use machines that date back to the early 1900s, employ men and women who've been making jackets longer than you've been alive and emphasise quality above all else.

At the time, motorcycles were probably the furthest thing from Irving’s mind, considering they had only recently become commercially available and he didn’t even know how to drive a car. Irving was introduced to the world of boss hogs by a friend who was a member of the Beck family. The Becks were one of the country’s largest Harley-Davidson distributors and published a popular catalog of their wares that was available at motorcycle dealerships across the country. Schott Bros. began manufacturing outerwear for the Beck catalog in 1920, including early iterations of what would become the modern motorcycle jacket.

Up until this point, there wasn’t a single piece of outerwear on the market sturdy enough to be synonymous with riding motorcycles. Wool jackets lacked the ability to protect the rider from the cutting wind at high speeds, and the leather coats of the day were not designed for the hunched-over, extended-arm posture necessary to drive a motorcycle; this was compounded by the fact that wearing either type of jacket on a motorcycle almost guaranteed that anything in the rider’s pockets would be blown into the air while barreling down the road. The advent of the zipper solved these problems and became a key element to Irving’s design.

Modern zippers – invented in 1913, the same year Schott opened its first factory – were at first prohibitively expensive for clothing manufacturers. But then World War I happened, and the US military found several ways to utilise the newfangled enclosure device, which helped drive down the cost and made zippers affordable to the consumer market. Sensing the potential of this new technology, Irving was the first clothier to put a zipper on a jacket in 1925.

In 1928, after a series of designs, Irving created what is now recognised as the modern motorcycle jacket, using the defining diagonal zipper to fasten the enclosure. The angle of the zipper was essential to blocking the wind, and it ensured that the jacket didn’t bunch up when the rider sat down. It was made out of horsehide, produced for Beck under the Perfecto brand, and sold for a whopping $5.50.

Back in those days, the motorcycle jacket was a total oddity, and those bold enough to wear them probably looked peculiar amid the longer formal coats popular at the time. Nearly everything about Schott’s jacket was designed for utility, disregarding style almost entirely. Two decades later, the design had become more common and the modern mythos of the motorcycle jacket began to take hold. Its adoption into popular culture coincided with its appearance in films like The Wild One (1953), which depicted an angry and aimless Marlon Brando wearing a tightfitting Schott Perfecto as the leader of a motorcycle gang that terrorises a small town. By the end of the 1950s, schools across the US were banning students from wearing the jacket, which of course only cemented its status as a fashionable symbol of rebellion. This explosion of popularity resulted in the Perfecto name becoming synonymous with Schott’s motorcycle jacket, superseding the brand’s other designs.

The steely-eyed, fuck-everyone cool Brando perfected continued to be embraced over subsequent decades by icons like James Dean, the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z – all of whom donned some iteration of Schott’s black leather jacket. Like blue jeans, it is a classic American garment that has been reinterpreted by virtually every major fashion designer and brand: from avant-garde weirdos like Rick Owens to traditionalists like Ralph Lauren to no-name companies that supply cheap and inferior versions to big-box stores. But there’s still nothing like the original; no one has managed to best the motorcycle jackets made by Schott NYC, who continue to use turn-of-the-century machines and hand-cut leather in their manufacturing process.

This year, Schott NYC celebrates its centennial. We figured it was high time to pay a visit to their factory in New Jersey and share with you the ins and outs of this impeccable American classic.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article claimed LSD was invented by an American. LSD was actually invented by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss scientist. Learn more about Albert Hofmann here.

All photos by Noah Rabinowitz.

Follow Wilbert on Twitter: @WilbertLCooper

Check out more fashion from Wilbert:

The Evolution of Patrik Ervell

Black Man in a Dress

IT'S INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY!

Yay, a whole day dedicated to drawing attention to the gender imbalance and celebrating women. We say celebrate IWD by ditching your diet (you probably weren't on one), ripping up some magazines (that you probably don't read) and loving your glorious self. There's loads of stuff happening all over the world that you should totally get involved in, so if you feel that way inclined you can find out what's going on near you here. If you're lazy and prefer being liberal from the comfort of your bedroom, this week's tidbits are themed around IWD, so sit back and feel that sweet, sweet equality wash all over you. Mwah.

POSH SPICE MADE A RANGE ROVER

This morning the most chic and pouty of the Spice Girls, Victoria Beckham, was spotted cruising through London in the very car that she helped to design. The fact makes me jell because my car looks like a dirty tube seat and isn't a car. 

Because being a successful musician, designer and part-time automotive expert clearly isn't enough, Posh has also gone tech. UK-based LadyGeek – a group supporting the increase of women in the technology industry, among other things – are campaigning for “changes in attitudes needed to drive gender diversity”. They're dedicated to showing just how important women are to technology and equally to calling bullshit on all the tiny, pink "woman friendly" electronics that, frankly, piss me off more than Sean Connery. Or maybe the same amount.

According to the stats, women represent a bigger financial opportunity than India and China combined, yet have only 17 percent of tech jobs in the UK. On top of that, women control 12 trillion of the global 18.4 trillion in global consumer spending (yay shopping!) but only one percent feel that technology manufacturers have them in mind when designing.

We should be doing everything we can to balance out the gender roles in the tech industry, and believe me, if I could afford this £80,000 car, I'd totally get it. Purely for political reasons, of course.

SEXISM LIVES ON YOUR THIGHS

We’ve heard of people using their heads as advertising space before, but apparently in Japan the gaze falls on a slightly more Sailor Moon-esque body part: the female upper thigh. Nice. Japanese PR company Absolute Territory (translated from "zettai ryouiki", the actual name given to this leg region) is offering to pay girls up to £80 to wear a temporary tattoo on their thigh for a minimum of eight hours. The only rules are that girls must be over 18 and have a social media account linked to at least 20 people who they can then post photos of their thighs to when they’re not flashing them in public. Apparently even Green Day have been using this as a means of promoting their new album.

I get the kitsch factor; it’s cute, it’s dumb, but this is objectification at its utmost, and just because it’s so extreme, that doesn’t mean we can brush it off as niche. Offering young women money to have men ogle their thighs does not strike me as a particularly positive idea. Our bodies are for nobody but ourselves. Can I get an AMEN?

TASTEFUL T-SHIRT DESIGN ON AMAZON

Yawn about those "Keep Calm and Carry On” t-shirts, right? Fashion hasn’t been this tired since Kate didn’t sleep for two weeks in 2001. Still, Amazon found a way to energise the notoriously boring design by selling a range of t-shirts boasting slogans like, “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot”, “Keep Calm and Punch Her”, “Keep Calm and Grope On” and “Keep Calm and Choke Her.” Tasteful, guys!

After a lot of people made a lot of complaints over Facebook and Twitter, Amazon was forced to remove the t-shirts. Then Solid Gold Bomb, the US clothing brand that was manufacturing and selling them, made a comment on their Facebook page claiming that they had “no idea” that these were being printed and that the phrases had been “computer generated (from the dictionary)”. Uh, Solid Gold Bombshell, I’m pretty sure that shit still gets vetted before it goes on sale. Read my lips, SGB, Keep Calm and Keep Running. I’ma wear your skin as a t-shirt if you don’t.

HOW FREAKIN' FIERCE IS LION BABE?

Previously – Karl Lagerfeld's Feet Smell Like Bubblegum

In the pantheon of American fashion designers, Bob Mackie stands alone with his singular focus on sequined, bejeweled and hyperbolic custom-made outfits for the world’s most ostentatious personalities. And even if you’re unfamiliar with his name (which wouldn’t be surprising, considering Bob’s never had a mass-marketed brand of his own), if you’ve ever looked at a photo of a famous person, chances are you’re familiar with his work. Over the course of his 50-year career, Bob has made clothes for the likes of Cher, Liza, Barbra, Britney, Michael, Madonna, Oprah, Dolly, Whitney, Tina and just about everyone else who has reached first-name-only status. 

Bob, 72, started his career in Hollywood in the early 60s, working in various wardrobe departments. As a costume designer, he pioneered the over-the-top look that has dominated the flashier corners of American fashion for most of the past half century, earning him nicknames like the Raja of Rhinestones and the Sultan of Sequins.

Along the way, Bob designed fancy costumes for Barbie dolls, won nine Emmys, was nominated for three Oscars, started a furniture line, dressed the Mob, designed fragrances, developed a couture line and accomplished a million other spectacular things. Currently much of Bob’s energy is focused on his QVC line of “wearable art”, which is much more in line with comfortable, consumer-facing fashion than its name and Bob’s previous work would suggest. 

VICE: What are you doing right now? 
Bob Mackie: I am just outside of Philadelphia. I’m doing a televised-shopping thing. 

For QVC, right? Is that what you’re mainly working on these days? 
It does take up a lot of time, but I’m also always working on other projects. 

Like what?
Well, there’s a cosmetics line I’m working on, and also a furniture line. Which is good because during the recession, I wasn’t making a new line of furniture because people weren’t buying it. You know, if you’re losing your home, why would you buy furniture? But now it’s all changing. 

Obviously, you’re a pretty busy guy, but are you so busy that you can’t even keep track of what you make? Do you have any idea how many different looks you’ve designed over the years?
[laughs] No! I’ve been in the business over 50 years, and I haven’t kept count. 

Do you ever see a piece that you designed without any recollection of doing so? 
Sometimes I see old tapes of television shows that I did a long time ago, and I see something and know that I did it because I designed the show, but I have completely forgotten it. It’s always a strange feeling. But it’s very hard to remember because I used to do two to three hours of television shows a week, and I just worked 24 hours a day. Once it was over, we’d just move straight on to the next one. 

Bob and Carol Burnett in her home, 1967

The television shows you designed wardrobe for back then were classic big productions like The Carol Burnett Show. It all seemed so cohesive. Were you responsible for designing every costume and look?
Well, not everything was designed. I would rent a lot of stuff like uniforms and period pieces, but we were doing 50 to 70 costumes per episode, and we had a show every week. 

I watched an interview with you during which you said that to get inspiration for sketch-comedy wardrobes, you’d walk around the mall and people-watch. You also said that you couldn’t believe what people thought they looked good in. Is strolling around malls or other public places something you still do? 
I don’t do sketch comedy anymore, but I definitely still walk around malls and airports – especially airports – and I think, Oh my God, look at her, or, Look at those ugly shoes! Today, a lot of women are wearing very unflattering clothes.

Yes, I think the worst-dressed people can be found at the airport because somewhere along the line everyone decided that unabashed comfort trumps any sort of decorum whatsoever. It’s crazy. You have people going on two-hour flights in pajamas with neck pillows and their bare feet stinking up the cabin. 
I know! But the thing is, you can be comfortable without looking like a pig. When I fly, I sit there and I watch people board the plane and I think, Where are they going when they arrive? Where can you go when you look that ridiculous?

Are there any specific current trends that you just can’t stand? 
Leggings worn on their own. It stops me cold some days; I just can’t believe my eyes! Just because it’s stretchy, it doesn’t mean it fits or looks good. 

And what about from the past?
Well, sometimes, when they’re happening you think, Oh my God, what’s going on here? And then after a while you start liking it. Like when minidresses came in, they were just above the knee and everyone was so shocked. Then all of a sudden they were barely covering the crotch. And now everybody’s got it all hanging out and we’re used to it. 

Does that happen with things you’ve designed in the past? Do you ever look back and go, “What was I thinking?”
Well, I look back and I say to myself, “That was 30 or 40 years ago and that was the trend at the time.”

Amethyst Aura Barbie, 1997

What decade do you think had the most style crimes?
The 80s. Everyone was rebelling against the 70s and got so overdressed and so garish with all that big, funny hair and those huge shoulder pads. It just didn’t look good. And it’s been long enough ago that, if it had looked good, we would know it did by now. But today, nobody is doing anything interesting or new. 

What do you mean?
I look around, and it’s all just the same old stuff regurgitated and brought back. You see a trend come and go, and then it comes back and goes again, and now it’s coming back for a third time! It’s getting kind of crazy. The fabrics are interesting now, though. There are lots of things you can do with them that we couldn’t do in the past. 

Is there anything that you’ve tried to make that was just too ambitious? Something you had to give up on? 
Not that I remember. I’ve always had a very practical side that would stop me from doing that. A lot of the time I would only have four or five days to get something together, and if you get to the day of the shoot and it doesn’t work or it’s not ready, you’re in deep shit. But then there are times when I’ve had six months or a year to get ready for something, and I’d do research and make all of these huge things with headpieces and back pieces and feathers – these are looks that have to be built. And they have to be lightweight and not break, and they have to move as though they’re made out of butterfly wings. And it’s very exciting to do, but it’s not something I would try when I only had a couple of days. 

Is that one of the things that drew you to working with Barbie dolls? Some of the outfits you’ve done for them would be impossible to put on a person. 
Actually, there’s a whole bunch of drag queens around who will copy a Barbie that I’ve done, and I’ll look at it and say, “Wow, that’s pretty good!” But then other times they’ll try and do it, but they don’t know how to build it; they wear it, and then all of a sudden it collapses.

I’d imagine drag queens must re-create your designs a lot. 
My entire career, people would say to me, “You have to go see this drag show.” And they wouldn’t tell me why, and I’d walk in and every performer would be wearing a copy of what I’ve done. Especially the things I’ve done for Cher. 

Cher in what Bob calls "one of her outfits," a costume from a 1975 television special. Photo by Harry Langdon

Are you still working with Cher?
I haven’t worked with her in several years because she hasn’t done anything. She just went to Russia to do one of those one-nighters where they make a million-zillion dollars, and she pulled out a lot of my old stuff and used it. But I don’t know if we’ll do anything together ever again; it’s a lot of work going out on the road and getting all dressed up like that.

I wanted to ask you about the infamous dress you made for her to wear to the 1986 Academy Awards, the one where she looked like a midriff-baring witch-queen with a spiky Afro. Is it true that it was her idea to do that and you tried to talk her out of it?
Well, she was giving an award to Don Ameche. And he was a man in his 70s who was receiving this wonderful award, so I said, “Do you really think you should dress up like that? Don’t you think you’re going to pull focus from what it’s really about?” And she said, “Oh, he won’t mind.” And of course the next day she was on the cover of every newspaper. And they still print those pictures. 

Over the years, has there ever been someone who you wished you could’ve dressed but it never happened for whatever reason? 
Not really. I like it if someone comes in and they’re 20 pounds overweight. If I can make them walk onstage and look like their old selves and look really good, that’s always fun for me. I suppose I would’ve loved to have dressed Audrey Hepburn. She just looked fantastic in everything; she was like a model. Real people didn’t and don’t look like her at all; she was breathtaking. She didn’t look like a man’s wet dream, she wasn’t terribly sexy, but at the same time she really looked amazing. In my teenage years, my two favourites were Audrey and Marilyn Monroe, who were the exact opposites of each other.

Did you get to work with Marilyn?
My first job in the movies was to sketch all the dresses she was going to wear in Something’s Got to Give. It was on that job that she died – she never finished the movie. It was very strange. I was 22 and so excited, and then Marilyn, my very favourite, was gone. I still can’t watch the movies about her, I don’t even want to look at them – I don’t want to see an actress play her because nobody can do what she did on-screen. She was so magical. Adorable and common and so sexy and so appealing. A very interesting creature, she was.

Goddess of Africa Barbie, 1999

What I like about your designs is that while they’re always pretty, many of them are also funny and shocking. Do you ever set about designing a costume with the goal of getting extreme reactions out of people?
I want to surprise them. Especially when I’m dressing performers. You want the audience to be surprised when they walk out. You want them to swoon or ooh or ahh or clap – all of that’s important, it’s part of the business of show business. It’s exciting. If a woman is going to do an hour and a half onstage, and she’s just in a little black dress, she’d better be Judy Garland. You’re there to see her, you’re not just listening. So there needs to be something visual. At the same time, if you don’t make them look good, you’ve defeated the purpose of putting something on them. It’s all about making them look thinner and taller and fabulous. 

Does the fashion world take you seriously?
The fashion world never really accepted me. I was always a costume designer, not a fashion designer. But because of the women I dressed, I was kind of dragged into the fashion world, which was fine, but the fashion press never really liked me.

What do you think about the fashion industry right now?
I don’t think anything of it. It’s a terrible business to be in. People are going in and out of business constantly – it’s really rough. And with the way the stores are reacting and the way they’re treating the designers, it’s very hard. It’s hard to make a good living there. I see young designers going into fashion and I say, “Please go work with somebody you really admire; don’t try and go into business right now.” Many of them think they can just go into business and start a workroom and be an overnight sensation, and it never works.

Are there any young designers you like at the moment?
I have to admit, I haven’t really paid that much attention. I work with fashion students in Los Angeles, and I think some of those kids are amazing. It can be so frustrating because they’re so talented, but I never hear of them again. I find it terribly sad.

Are there any designers whose work you’ve admired over the years?
I love James Galanos. He’s been retired for a while, but I used to think he made the most beautiful clothes. Oscar de la Renta is still plugging away. He really dresses women to look like women, and I like that very much. A lot of people, they keep going, but it seems like they’re squeezing out another collection just because they have to. 

Two models show off Bob's Fall 1988 collection. Photo by Gideon Lewin

You did a couture collection once, right?
I’ve done several collections. It wasn’t like the price of European couture, but it was still expensive. I think it was very wearable, though. I never did anything I didn’t think people could wear. The sad part is, you can’t control who buys it. Sometimes I just think, Oh, if I could tell that woman which one to buy!, because they’ll invariably pick the wrong thing. I’ll have all of these beautiful samples in, and then Aretha Franklin will come in and order, and it’s like, “Well, it doesn’t look quite the same now, does it?” [laughs] I’m going to get in trouble for that one.

Who have been some of your favourite people to dress? 
Well, it depended on what I was doing. When I was working with Carol Burnett, I could do all this funny stuff, as well as beautiful production numbers. She could look so many different ways. And I loved doing comedy; I loved making an audience laugh. A lot of fashion designers are like, “Why would you want to do that?” They don’t get it. Fashion people don’t have very much humour in them. 

No, they definitely don’t. 
Fashion is like a religion to them, but fashion has to have a little humour. I think some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen are showgirls, like in Vegas. They always make me laugh. Sometimes they’re beautiful, but they’re also so outrageous they make you laugh. And fashion can always be that way. 

I’d imagine you’ve had a pretty big influence on the look of Vegas, right?
I think I’ve had a huge influence on a lot of things, entertainment-wise. I watch Dancing with the Stars and I think, I did that outfit 40 years ago, and I did it better.

You’ve been massively influential. There was a joke about you on The Simpsons once.
At one point I was so notorious. I was being mentioned in books and on quiz shows and The Simpsons. It’s fun, I get a kick out of it. I went to see Best in Show with a friend, and there’s a part where Jane Lynch says, “Bob Mackie, where are you when we need you?”—and I had no idea it was in the film. It’s funny, I love it when that happens.

What’s your house like?
You know, because of all the glamourous and over-the-top stuff I do, most people expect me to live in some kind of marble nightclub with lights and silver palm trees. But I don’t, and I don’t want to. My house is a ranch house in LA, and there’s a pool and some cacti and some things I’ve collected from around the world. It makes me happy, to be there among my things.

Do you find yourself slowing down at all?
Not particularly. But there’s some things I used to do that, physically, I can’t do now. I could never do what I did in the 70s. Well, nobody could do it at that time! How I did it, I don’t know. Nobody worked as much as me. But I just loved it. And I thought at the time, Enjoy it while you can, because you’re not ever going to be doing this much at one time again. And I haven’t.

Archival images taken from the book Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie.

More from our Fashion Issue:

Colts and Fillies

Do People Really Dress Like Shit in Buffalo?

Snoop Through the Ages

I’m Canadian, but if there’s one thing I know about Americans, it’s that they love buying products manufactured by impoverished foreign people. Hardly any of the clothing sold in the United States is made there; everybody knows it and no one really has a problem with it except for a few uptight weirdos who dress either really well or, more likely, like an incontinent grandmother’s shitstains. But what if, one day, the crap-manufacturing industry collapses, and all of the indentured servants the US employs there are no longer able to produce an endless supply of cheaply manufactured flashy garments? What sorts of atrocities would Americans be forced to wear?

To illustrate this hypothetical predicament, I committed to hand-making my own wardrobe from scratch and wearing a different outfit each day of the week. Like most Americans, I know very little about fashion design or sewing, so this process was overwhelmingly tedious and took approximately 5,000 times longer to complete than it would have taken anyone who works in an actual sweatshop (that’s why the system exists, duh). I did attempt to make decent-looking garments so that I had a chance of passing as a sane person. If one of the Olsen twins can walk around in a furry trash bag, what did I have to lose? So I pressed on and am happy to present to you a rough approximation of how shittily Americans and other spoiled Westerners will be dressing in a future where sweatshops don’t exist and we are forced to improvise our own clothing.

MONDAY: SHOWER-CURTAIN DRESS

I thought it was important to use as many recycled fabrics as possible in this experiment, so the shower curtain I selected to make my first outfit with had been hanging in the bathroom of my parents’ house for several years. This explains why the inside of the dress was coated with furry black mold, but I just pretended it was lined with rabbit fur so it wasn’t a big deal.

It took a lot of cutting and sewing (which, again, I had no idea how to do), but I’d say the end product was quite a success, especially if you happen to be into the whole Sears-maternitysadness type of look.

Speaking of maternity sadness, my mother invited me out to dinner the night I finished the dress, and when I walked in the door she insisted that I change. I told her that it wasn’t a possibility because it was “my job, Mom.” A family friend dined with us and told me that my shower-curtain couture reminded her of when she was pregnant. My mother, of course, chirped in and said that I looked like I was on welfare and that she was embarrassed to be sitting across from me.

TUESDAY: TURTLENECK/OWL VAGINA

I know people are divided about wearing realistic pictures of animals and animal prints on their bodies, but fuck those toilet bugs. To me, wearing animal-themed clothing is the same thing as wearing a band shirt, because I’m a big fan of animals – I want to be around them, I want them on me, and I want them inside me, all the time, forever. This owl-print pillowcase was also unearthed at my parents’ house, where it had been banished to the back of a closet. My grandmother bragged about how she had bought it before there was a Walmart in the city, which seemed appropriate considering Walmart goes with sweatshops like owls go with my vagina.

The combination of the turtleneck and the owl skirt worked really well and made me feel more confident than anyone probably ever should, although I did catch myself in a mirror and for a second thought I had a pillow resting on my lap. I wore the outfit to a nursing home, where I felt extremely sexually attractive (if you’ve never felt like you’re hot stuff around a bunch of old people, you’re really missing out).

WEDNESDAY: ACCIDENTAL PYJAMAS

When people wear pyjamas outside it feels like they’re saying, “I’d rather be sleeping than doing whatever it is I’m doing.” This impulse to turn your brain off is, to me, reminiscent of suicide. That’s the long way of explaining to you that I didn’t mean to make pyjamas. When I was “designing” this outfit, I was just trying to make something easy to wear, comfortable, and plaid – what’s wrong with that? I used bedsheets and a piece of elastic to make the pants, and turned an old housecoat into a shirt. In retrospect, accidental pyjamas were inevitable. How did I not foresee this? Do I secretly want to wear pyjamas in public? What am I doing with my life? Am I a pseudo-adult degenerate? These questions were running through my head until I realised I wore this outfit to the mall, where I went to buy ice cream. I’m doing just fine, thanks.

PS: Every good stylist knows how important it is to accessorise, so I also sported this modest, lightweight purse, aka a brown paper bag. Looks like I’ve just created “mental-illness chic.” What happens now? Do I get famous? I hope so.

THURSDAY: FLORAL ONESIE

One-piece suits are great because sometimes it can feel silly to put conscious effort into mixing and matching clothes, especially once you consider that you could be thinking about other things like astrophysics or all of the genocides that are happening at the very second you are squinting at a pair of belts. So this onesie was the piece I was the most excited about creating. I used my favorite fabric – a bedsheet from the 80s that I had cherished for years – and made precise measurements, which turned out to not be that precise because, again, I had no fucking idea what I was doing. The end result was an awkward, camel-toe-inducing, slightly see-through, human-shaped blob of fabric that a slutty street urchin might wear in Charles Dickens fan fiction.

I couldn’t move my body without tearing the seams, and at one point it felt like my thighs were losing circulation. I went grocery shopping wearing this thing, and it felt like I was naked the whole time. This was especially confusing as grocery shopping, for me, also doubles as hotdad-hunting time. Ultimately, I felt too vulnerable to pursue any hot dads. But somehow I ended up spreading my legs too far and ripping the crotch out. I did it all for you, America!

FRIDAY: LACE-TABLECLOTH CIRCLE SKIRT

I made this totally cool skirt out of one of my mom’s tablecloths and paired it with a shirt from the thrift store because, fuck it, sewing is boring, difficult, and I didn’t want to do it anymore! There’s a barbecue-sauce stain on it that kind of looks like period blood, but I think that just adds a little edge to an otherwise delicate and girlish-looking garment that I am very proud of. The thing about wearing retarded stuff on Friday is that you can pretty much get away with anything and still get praised for it. I knew I looked like a poor Harajuku Girl, but next to normal women at bars I came off as too confidently crazy to participate in their primitive attractiveness competitions, which is exactly what I was going for. My reward? Great conversations, lots of laughter, barfing on a grown man’s penis in the bathroom of a drug den, and the sensation of a rash developing on my thighs – perhaps due to the barbecue stain seeping into my skin slowly over the course of a long Friday night.

SATURDAY: “I LOVE YOU” MIDLENGTH TEE

I found this fabric lying around my house emblazoned with i love you, and at this point I was getting ultra-lazy with the cutting and sewing. I just made a square for my body and only stitched together what was necessary to keep it from falling apart. I left the house with seams coming undone and strings dangling all over the place, which was actually beneficial because ragamuffin is such an “in” look right now.

I went out for a midday beer with a friend, and the bartender walked over with a pair of scissors, offering to adjust my outfit. I watched her cut the strings off as she shared her own fashion-design goals. A glimmer of sunshine entered my soul. Maybe this is how sweatshop workers feel on their days off? Oh wait, they don’t get days off. More likely, it was just what being drunk in the afternoon feels like.

Later on I went to a sex-toy shop to buy vibrators for my friends because I was feeling so generous and happy. Maybe the message on my shirt was flowing up into my brain. Or perhaps we should always wear things that we think are psychotic so we end up changing up our usual, boring behavioural patterns. Or it could be that I’m just full of spite and wretchedness, I don’t know.

SUNDAY: HOUSE TOGA

By this point I was so over this sewing-and-stitching shit that I literally just draped fabric over my body and tied it up like a toga. Oddly enough, this was also the most fashionable I felt all week. I have to admit, there’s something really decadent and elevating about swaddling your body in layers of cloth.

All I did on Sunday was loaf around. In jogging pants this “activity” would have felt disgusting and lonely, but in a fine, rich-colored jersey it felt queenly. A friend came over and told me I looked like Beyonce, which, I cannot emphasise enough, has never happened before. Maybe everyone should just walk around in loose, flowing fabrics all day. We’d probably be more relaxed, have massive orgies, feed one another grapes, and drink out of chalices, i.e., live in paradise. Plus, going to the bathroom is a cinch in a toga.

I would be perfectly content draping sheets over myself all day, every day, but this is impossible unless everybody is doing it – people would assume I needed medical attention. Just one more way fitting into society can compromise your value system. I guess when they say, “You have to suffer for fashion,” the “you” refers to a bunch of starving Southeast Asian kids in a factory. Oh, America, what a conundrum you are.

Read more from our Fashion Issue:

Fashion in the 90s

Because the Night

Herb Ritter

PHOTOS BY VALERIE PHILLIPS
STYLIST: BERTIE BRANDES, CHARLOTTE ROBERTS

Hair: Claire Marie Grech
Make-up: Jessica Taylor
Nails by WAH Nails
Fashion Assistant: Lydia Morrish

I.D. Sarrieri bra, Annie Phillips boa, Claire's Accessories hairclips.

Adidas puffa jacket, Marlies Dekkers orange bra, Rokit Levi's shorts, Dominic Jones necklace, American Apparel necklace and earrings, vintage bracelet.

Marlies Dekkers orange bra, Rokit Levi's shorts, jewellery as before.

Rokit jacket, Charkviani shoes, jewellery as before.

I.D. Sarrieri bra and thong, American Apparel suspender belt, jewellery as before.

Playful Promises bra, Marks & Spencers knickers, vintage hairband, jewellery as before.

Vintage Prada top, Rokit skirt, Claire's Accessories hairclips, jewellery as before.

American Apparel t-shirt, Bas Kosters skirt, vintage jacket, Tatty Devine necklace, American Apparel earrings, vintage hairclips and bracelet.

More from this issue:

The Great Lost Expedition Brand

Bulletproof Kids

Flying American Slobs

The 90s were perfect. That’s objective. Not even “the 90s”, really, but particular neon-gilded chambers of time within the 90s (like, super-ur-90s Sassy magazine before it began its slow death in 1995-ish) were perfect. This isn’t to privilege one set of nostalgics over another; the 1990s reverence felt by three small, semidiscrete generations (X, Y, Millennial) is, of course, no different from anyone else’s nostalgia for what came before, but seriously, the 90s were good for us. They were great sometimes. 

I don’t even care about “better”. What’s better? Does better matter, is better relevant, is better possible? But one particular aspect of the culture that is definitely not better right now, and will be no better, is the translation of fashion to film, to video, to TV, to the internet. 

I guess I mean this in an abstract and personal sense of “better”: There are a zillion dedicated segments and shows about fashion, on real TV and online, on blogs and the rest of it, that are doing what they set out to do, achieving everything they want to achieve. Every website I’ve ever been to (ever? Ever!) has featured a closet tour with some emerging or expiring It girl. Like the 90s, this is good and even great sometimes. And the epitome of 90s-fashion television, MTV’s House of Style, was revived last year, with ace model hosts and the familiar and correct cross-genre/high-low/daydreamy approach. 

There is, though, a real and important difference in quality – in nature and the value of that nature – between all that and what came before. The possibilities of fashion x internet x committed curatorial perspective are still beyond us, but what is gone for real – forever – is a loose, unformed intent: Back then, fashion on TV was without the now-ubiquitous gloss, practiced and known backward and forward by teenage amateurs; the self-seriousness and ironic remove; the media training and branding and messaging. When fashion was for insiders, not for Target shoppers, there wasn’t any reason for it. That’s all fine; that is a gradual move of one thing to its nth-degree, advanced-capitalism self and it’s futile to be precious about it. 

Fashion, though, lost something particular when that 90s-style who-cares vérité faded and then became impossible because of new media. What was abandoned, because it had to be, during the inevitable professionalising of fashion content on TV – brighter, tighter, more and more toward a style-smart and fully internetted audience that knew all the names and houses and cities and voices instead of just the faces – is the essential bedroom element, the nonregulation that once came through in an unstaged backstage (now impossible), a messy bed, homemade eyebrows. Fashion – style, actually – is forged in unmediated physical space and time, through posing and playing. For a hot minute, that’s what fashion was, and did, and felt like on TV, too.

In addition to House of Style, the 90s included the ad-hoc-ish era of Fashion Television, a Canadian show that was, improbably, exported everywhere else and lasted for like 25 years (and, much less significantly, there was Ooh La La, the sister show of FT, which looked like Party Girl and featured segments about, say, a girl selling smock dresses in her college-town backyard). “Cool” then passed through fewer regulating bodies, fewer people; content was more awkward, more comfortable with weirdness, frequently slow and often boring, an evocation more than a directive – such a decade, before three-minute music videos were truncated into soda ads – all of which lent itself specifically to the experience of creating and communicating identity, mutable and momentary, through fashion. This sensibility – where you were called on to engage, interpret, understand and be alienated and offended by mean models and nameless skateboarders – was captured in any number of other shows then, about fashion or not: like Sifl and Olly, the late-90s sock-puppet parfait on MTV, and Comedy Central’s Hi Octane, which was a barely there and now lost-to-the-ages car show (?) from 1994 that was mostly/actually about musicians (!) and hosted by then dilettantes Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes (!) with contributions from Thurston Moore (!!!). It goes on, too: The impossible, wantable in-jokes that ran on Sassy spines are nowhere now; everything is easy, available, clickbait.

That television has largely abandoned content and style that embrace amateurishness and risk is, you know, whatever-whatever-whatever, another whole thing. That fashion is, as a result, left without a similarly, necessarily random, uncomfortable, unknown and unknowable forum is culturally real, is felt and is dangerous: When the onus of effort and decision-making moves from the shows’ audiences to the shows’ creators, it’s boring for everyone. When you can see, know or be anything, instantly, it’s really not any better, is it?

Previously - Selfies

PHOTOS BY BEN RITTER
STYLIST: ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Hair, Makeup, and Body Art: William Lemon for Temptu
Photo Assistant: Vincent Perini
Stylist Assistant: Andrew Courtien
Models: Chanelle Elise at Next LA, Melissa Stetten at APM
Special Thanks to Darren Tereul

Irina Marinescu dress

Patricia Field rain cloak, Assembly New York bodysuit, Pedro Garcia shoes

Mink Pink coat

Ashish dress, Han Cholo earrings

Patricia Field bra, shorts, and hat, Han Cholo earrings

Alessia Prekop bodysuit

Aqua by Aqua swimsuit, Mandy Coon cuff

More from the Fashion Issue:

Because the Night

Chop, Drop, and Roll

Colts and Fillies

Until the early 1900s, there was no such thing as “expedition” clothing, much less an outdoor-clothing industry. Explorers would simply find the most rugged gear they could get their hands on and hope it would suffice. In 1903, during an Arctic mineral-hunting expedition, an American geologist by the name of Ben Willis discovered that most clothing doesn’t hold up in 100 mph winds and -60 °F temperatures. Ben returned to New York and started designing garments that could withstand conditions in the frozen tundra from which he had just escaped.

A few years earlier, in 1897, C.C. Filson had begun making his eponymous clothing for gold miners looking to strike it rich in Alaska, and thus, with the two manufacturers and the nascent Manhattan retailer Abercrombie Co., the outdoor-clothing industry was born. In 1928, Willis took on Howard Geiger as a partner, and Willis & Geiger set to work outfitting the era’s most famous explorers: Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Roald Amundsen, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, to name a few. They manufactured private label gear to outdoor brands like L.L. Bean, Abercrombie & Fitch (the “Fitch” was added after one of Abercrombie’s regular customers invested in the company in 1904) and Eddie Bauer. Despite the brand’s deep heritage in the clothing industry, Willis & Geiger – which Town & Country magazine once called the “granddaddy of outerwear” – is widely unknown today. So what happened? It was bought and sold over and over, by a variety of corporations, and the brand only lives on via eBay auctions and a few pieces of clothing from Lands’ End that appropriate Willis & Geiger in name only.

Burt Avedon (cousin of the famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon) revived the company two years after it went out of business in 1977 and helmed it until it was liquidated in 1999. Now 89 years old, Burt is one of the last remaining people to have hands-on experience with the brand. His bio reads like a Most Interesting Man in the World skit: He was a pilot by age 12, raced cars, played football for UCLA, fought at Iwo Jima, won a Purple Heart in the Navy, went from Harvard Business School into cosmetics and fashion, married an Italian princess and later led attempts to excavate downed World War II planes from Greenland ice. After a short search, I tracked him down at his home in Verona, Wisconsin, to find out what had happened to what many consider to be the greatest outdoor-clothing brand of all time. 

PHOTOS BY SAMANTHA RAPP

Stylist: Cristian Stroble at Walter Schupfer Management
Stylist's Assistant: Victoria Cameron
Hair: Ramona Eschbach, using Oribe Haircare at Jed Root
Makeup: Valerie Gasparis
Model: Jamie Bochert at Elite

Diesel Black Gold coat, Ssense cardigan, Reformation top, Ann Demeulemeester leggings and boots

Bass jacket, Acne Studios shirt, Reformation pants

BLK DNM coat, Glenn Martens top, Ann Demeulemeester leggings

Vintage stole from New York Vintage, vintage coat and brooch

BLK DNM cardigan, Acne Studios top, Reformation pants

Avelon coat, Reformation drew

Ann Demeulemeester coat

Vintage stole from New York Vintage, vintage coat

FASHION FOR SWOTS

We like the Le-Tans. Cleo made a film for VICE last year where she went and spoke to suburban French rudeboys about music, which was awesome, and her sister Olympia is a bona fide Parisien it-girl fashion designer. For her collection this season, Olympia seems to have been largely influenced by lederhosen, but don't let that put you off, the classic embroidered bags she's known for, and which have been seen on everyone you'd expect to see them on (I'm talking about Chloe Sevigny, btw) were dangling from the arms of every single model.

Her bags, which are book-sized, and embroidered with the covers of her favourite novels, are basically a one-track way of deciding who you should go shopping with. If somebody has one, they either have amazing taste and loads of money (bonus, if shopping), have amazing taste and qualify as a "fashion muse" so they get gifted shit all the time, or they have amazing taste and are a skilled shoplifter. Like I said, ideal for shopping with.
 

KARL X SCENTED SHOES

Ah, the smelly shoes. Chances are you've owned, or known somebody who's owned a pair of Melissa shoes before. You always know, because one corner of their bedroom reeks of bubblegum. Melissa are a Brazilian brand who make recyclable shoes from plastic. They're super ethical, super comfortable and consistently collaborate with fashion icons including Westwood, Gareth Pugh, Jason Wu and now fashion's craziest uncle Karl Lagerfeld. Freakin love you Karl.

The collection with KL, which is the first of four capsule collections, will be released in March, and although no official images other than the above sketches have been released, chances are they're going to be the shoes I've been waiting for my whole life. Unfortunately I refuse to wear colour on my feet, so the blue ones are out, but a pair of super pointy black rubber shoes designed by Karl Lagerfeld, that smell like candy? Erm, hello.

MEAT A/W 2013

VICE firm favourite, MEAT Clothing, have released their A/W13 lookbook "Believe" in video form. Produced by LOGO and Just Jam, the video premiered on Dont Watch That's YouTube channel, the soundtrack acting as an exlusive mix from Total Freedom.

Okay I know, that's a lot of names and you're lazy. Listen, if you're going to read these tidbits and pretend to be interested in fashion then you need to do your research. How many times do I have to tell you Shit Fashion Girls Say is no more idiosyncratic or controversial than David Cameron appearing in the Red Nose Day One Direction music video? Start being cool, stop liking lame shit.

Wear MEAT clothing and dance awkwardly like a SIMS avatar. Use caps lock a lot, and drop names that most people won't recognise. Only then can you be in my gang, K?
 

ETAM :-(

Oh, sigh, I’m nostalgic for the days when just making it down the runway without falling on your face was good enough. In 2012 Victoria's Secret changed the whole catwalk game by bringing in Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars to perform during their show. IDK, maybe miming along to the beat of Miranda Kerr’s steps was kind of cool. We got to see how short Bieber is IRL, which is really important. Still, it felt a bit like fashion had died.

So, now it’s 2013 and Etam, the French lingerie company who more importantly used to own Tammy (right?) followed suit for the second year running. I guess it's a bit of a fashion-off, except these are two innately unfashionable companies each trying to outdo the other by proving they have more money and better PR contacts. Ew. What did the audience expect walking in to that huge venue in Paris, I wonder. Charles De Gaulle resurrected from the dead, playing electric guitar?

Unfortunately not. There was Rita Ora where Rihanna should have been, and Lily Allen in place of Justin Bieber. Come on. At the Victoria's Secret show the models probably took coke off each other’s glittering breasts backstage. Here's betting that at Etam they were sent home with £150 and a free pair of knickers. Fail.

Previously – Prada, Prada, Prada, Chicken Cottage

PHOTOS AND GIFS BY AWOL ERIZKU
CREATIVE DIRECTION AND WORDS BY WILBERT L. COOPER
Photo Assistant: Adrian Phillips; Hair: Rico London; Makeup: Stephanie Clouden
Special thanks to Levels Barbershop in New York City

Innumerable hours of my life have been spent in barbershops that specialise in cutting black people’s hair, and the majority of my visits had nothing to do with getting my hair cut. The black barbershop is one of the last American sanctuaries and an American tradition. It’s where you go to catch up on the news, debate about butts, play the numbers, watch the game, buy stolen sneakers from a hustler or bean pies from a black Muslim and generally just shoot the shit. In other words, a barbershop’s clientele is what makes it more than a place you go to get fresh.  

Arriving at the barbershop with a cool crew is paramount – how else could anyone endure standing around for hours while dudes get their hair styled into pagan symbols and geometric anomalies? So to exemplify just how crucial the black-barbershop experience is to American style and culture, photographer Awol Erizku and I assembled a cross section of notable heads and hosted the flyest striped-pole powwow ever. We enlisted the help of Tribe NYC, a creative collective of young people bound by their love of black youth culture and art from the late 80s and early 90s; Joshua Kissi, cofounder of Street Etiquette, a website that is pushing street style in a new direction while still honouring the fashion lineage of African American men; and twins Bruce and Glen Proctor, fashion designers with their own line of high-end bracelets called BruceGlen who also help run Sunday services as ministers at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. 

The following photos of young, intricately hairstyled brothers showcases the latest wave in a long lineage of ever-evolving ways in which young black men express themselves and pay respect to their history through their follicles. 

Click through to the next page for more photos from this shoot.

For more fashion photo shoots, check these out:

American Gigolo

Snoop Through the Ages

After working in the fashion industry for so many years I’ve grown complacent to the sight of people wearing the most full-blown crazy shit on a daily basis, so I was very impressed last week when I was in Teddington smoking cigars in a lounge with older men dressed in couture Givenchy suits and the most amazing loafers you've ever seen. As I listened to them complain about their asshole sons who keep talking shit about them on Twitter, I couldn't stop thinking about how amazing they were. And they had a dog with them. A dog was in the lounge. And then I saw one on a pub roof. London: How you get so quaint?

In about eight hours I’m meeting with my first London agency. What a great coincidence that I just happened to get foodborne illness last night and can’t sleep more than four hours at a time. Who knows, maybe this potential agency is into the "flu" look, because I’m borderline Gwyneth Paltrow in Contagion right now. (Here's betting they will be, looking cracked out seems like a great way to get ahead in the industry over here.)

I'm in the UK for work. After my hellish stint of searching for an agency in LA, I’m hoping to be welcomed by London with open arms. My unconventional looks probably fit in better here than they do in Malibu. You guys like freaky looking chicks, right? None of your models have teeth in the right places and they all have eyes like wells that children have been thrown down. I'm in my element.
 
The only downside to being in London rather than LA right now is that I’m missing pilot season. Pilot season is basically the busiest three months of the year for aspiring actors, it's when all the new shows are being comissioned and everyone and their mum (shout out to Dina Lohan) goes to Hollywood to get cast in the next Pretty Little Liars and become famous. I have an amazing manager in LA who's been helping me turn my modelling life into something I can benefit from, which means something that doesn’t actually involve me being a model. Trust me, it makes sense.

My NY booker has submitted me to a ton of agencies here, including the ones that I have no fucking shot at signing with: IMG, Elite, Storm, etc, where the girls are either Kate Moss or 15. I have a return flight to the States soon but I really hope I can cancel that because the future me has succeeded in modelling here.

Or I’ll just return to the US feeling like a piece of shit failure, which I suppose wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I could always return to pilot season and book a guest role on Two and a Half Men where I play a slutty English waitress who goes home with Ashton Kutcher. The mental anguish that would cause me would be worth it if I got to swan around a TV set pretending to find the age-old, transatlantic trousers-pants conflict fascinating and pronouncing all my "TH" sounds as Fs.

You know I’m not just trying to suck up to you English people so you’ll like me, right? Well I am a bit. Is it working? Because I'm not, and I only have a week left on this godforsaken rock to find gainful employment.

Follow Melissa on Twitter: @MelissaStetten

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

Previously – Am I an Inspiration to Dangerously Thin Girls Everywhere?

Patrik Ervell wasn’t supposed to be a fashion designer. The American-born son of Swedish immigrants, who studied poli-sci at Berkeley, had plans of being a diplomat and travelling the world. But things change quickly for guys like Patrik – men who have an unshakable will and precise notion of who they want to be and what they want to do. When he made up his mind to do fashion, as he explained to me in his home a few days after his brazen 2013 fall/winter show at Milk Studio's MADE Fashion Week, the overarching aesthetic of his eponymous brand was already clear-cut in his mind. If you take a look at his early collections like his runway debut in 2006, there is an unmistakable link between those wares and what he’s doing, today from the use of futuristic fabrics to his lean tailoring. 

Unlike most designers who fall into the burn and churn of trend whoring and swagger jacking, Ervell isolates himself and focuses on refining and perfecting his singular vision. It is in this steady evolution, that I find his work so compelling. His latest collection, which is titled “Sylvan” and evokes a nighttime forest vibe, is both familiar and revelatory. Since his fauna-filled SoHo apartment also serves as his showroom and design studio, the designer coolly walked me through the entire new collection pointing out the slight innovations of his classic pieces. There was the woven wool that looked like luxurious fur but felt a bit more masculine, which he used for some of his new cossack hats and outerwear. And the black sneakers he designed in collaboration with Aldo RISE, which took cues from the high-tech synthetic foot sleeves of old school Nike Huaraches and the articulation of expensive hiking sneakers. But my favourite element was the Real Tree-inspired custom camouflage print the designer adorned his signature pieces like his club-collared button-downs, flight suits and bomber jackets with. The print is so elegant, it almost looks like a monogramed Japanese woodblock print.

Patrik has been a favorite designer of mine for years. It has been a thrill for me to watch as he grows pushing his patented mix of high-tech fabrics, classic masculine silhouettes, and romanticism forward every season to even more impressive results. His methodical development is so intriguing to me, it led me to pick his brain on how it all began. We talked about his early days in the fashion industry, what it was like being part of the Berkeley movement that also birthed Opening Ceremony and Rodarte, and why being a tech nerd works for men’s fashion.  

VICE: If you started off as a political science and art major, how'd you get into fashion back in the day?
Patrik: I had inklings of it in high school the way everybody does when you’re starting to experiment with  how you dress and what subculture you belong to and what music you listen to. That’s something all teenagers do. I didn’t start looking at fashion – as in the fashion industry – until college. There were a lot of people who I went to college with that ended up working in fashion, which is weird because Berkeley doesn’t have any fashion program. Like, there’s Carol and Humberto from Opening Ceremony and Kate and Laura from Rodarte. None of us studied fashion, but we all ended up working in the industry.

Were you guys a tight knit group of friends?
Humberto and I were close friends. Carol I didn’t meant until a few years later. Kate and Laura – I would say we were friendly, but we weren’t buddies. I remember studying for an art history final at their house. We were in a lot of the same classes, because we were both doing art history stuff.

What was Humberto like back in the day?
I’m four years younger than he is, so he had already left school, but would sometimes come back for parties. He had this crazy loft in San Francisco that seemed like the coolest thing. It was a big open space in the Mission, when the Mission was still kind of bad. There would be hookers and stuff outside. This was around the time I started thinking about fashion. I think he was, too. I mean all of us kind of were.

So you wanted to be a diplomat, right?
Yeah, I was going to join the diplomat corps. I went through the whole process. I took the Foreign Service exam, which is this intense written exam. If you pass it, you have to go to Washington DC for a second interview. I passed it, but then I decided not to pursue it anymore. Instead, I moved to New York City a week after graduating.

Did your folks freak?
For them moving to New York is like what you do if you’re young and ambitious. They didn’t object to it or anything.

What are your parents like?
They met in San Francisco in the 60s, which always seems like a crazy time and place. They met there; they didn’t meet in Sweden. So they were these two Swedish people in their 20s in San Francisco during the 60s when it was this weird capital of counter-culture. I wish I could say my parents were counter-culture, but they weren’t. They were pretty buttoned-up people. In a weird way, I feel like San Francisco during that period drew a lot of normal people who just thought it seemed cool. I think maybe my parents were those people.

Was there a defining moment when you were like “I don’t want to do this diplomat shit”?
I think I always knew it wouldn’t happen. And all my friends from my year moved to New York. Every year there would be this wave of people who would leave for New York, like immigrants in a way. I just went along with all my friends,.

So how did you land the gig at V?
I had been an intern there the summer between my junior and senior year. It wasn’t something I was planning to do. I moved to New York without a job, and was just hanging out for two or three months, which was the two or three months right before September 11th. When that happened, every company just stopped hiring for a good couple months. I had already done this internship at V and they were like “Oh, do you want to work here?” So I started working there. Mainly because there was this hiring freeze for every single company, so there were no other options.

What was V like back then?
It was much smaller. It was basically three people who did it. Me and two other people. A small company like that, you end up doing a little bit of everything. My title was associate editor, but it was a little bit of everything.

Did you dig working at a magazine?
I did at first. It’s a good thing to do after you finish school. You learn a lot and you meet a lot of people. But after a while you start getting frustrated with it. I wanted to make things and I had plans to do other things and it got more and more frustrating for me. I was working with other people’s clothes and other people’s ideas, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.

So I read that your line started as a graphic T. What were the graphics like?
It was marble statue heads, just details of them. They were really faded and printed on white. It was like a ghosted image of a marble head shot from a beautiful angle. There was a series of three of them. And I think there were some that were an image of a nebulae, something from the Hubble telescope. They were printed on washed out T-shirts. This was when Opening Ceremony first opened, and I think it was one of the first things they sold there. I was still working at V then. I don’t even know what the label said. I don’t know if it was my name or something else. But it was more like a project. It was casual. I don’t know if I have any, but I remember them being very beautiful.

It’s interesting you brought up the nebulae, because it seems like there’s a lot of technology and science in your work. Was that always an interest of yours, and where did that start?
I always thought the things that were the most beautiful were images that come from science and science fiction. As a menswear designer, there’s not that much room for fantasy and extreme dressing up. But in this weird way, science fiction has this narrow little path you can walk on where you can do that and it’s still very masculine. That always interested me.

Did you have telescopes when you were a kid?
I was nerd, yeah.

How big of a nerd?
I remember I was second place in the county science fair in middle school when I lived in in Marine County. It was something about biodegradable garbage bags. I tested them and buried them underground for a month, and some of them were left underwater for a month and then I compared the results.

You spent most of your youth in California, right?
My formative years, sure. I moved there in second or third grade, and then I was there all through high school and I moved to Berkeley after that. Before that it was London for three years and before that Sweden.

So what did your parents do that allowed them to travel?
My dad was in the container industry, which are those big metal boxes that go on ships. Shipping containers. My mom was working with the company also, but I guess she didn’t really have a career of her own.

Since you’ve talked about the early, formative years of OC, what was it like being there when it was first starting?
When it first opened, it was really like a mom and pop shop. It was Carol and Humberto, and they were literally manning the cash registers. And that’s changed so much. They’re a great success story of my generation. They are especially impressive since that store grew so exponentially during a bad recession.

How did the line move from T-shirts to Patrik Ervell?
Very gradual. I was figuring out how to do it and do it correctly. And it wasn’t a full collection until three or four years later. I didn’t have a show until at least five years after starting. I started right away with doing a show, then I did presentations for two or three, and then went back to doing shows.

How do you design?
Sometimes there’s drawings, but it’s menswear, so we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re using forms that we all know. A lot of it is about details and fabric and print. We’ll make the first sample and then apply the details and apply the fabric. It’s not like women’s clothes where you’re draping and fitting something and pulling ideas out of thin air. It always has one foot firmly rooted in reality.

I love that a lot of your stuff is made in New York, and I was wondering if that was always a vision from the beginnings.
That’s just how I started, because I was figuring it out myself. A lot of people in New York who start a fashion label will have already worked at Ralph Lauren or a big company like Club Monaco or J. Crew. Those companies manufacture overseas, mostly in China. So being a designer for them, their training ends up being preparing tech packs to send to China to get the samples back. Because I started learning by doing, I had to do that here. There was no other option. But I’m happy I did. I think a lot of people are now moving back to manufacturing here. You can still find things that are high quality here. It’s a little trickier, but it’s improving all the time.

As the collection has developed, was there a moment when you really found your voice?
It was there from the beginning. There was always a specific approach. I feel like my growth has been gradual, and slow by industry standards because it’s not exactly for everyone.

I love how your pieces evolve in your runway shows, ranging from more basic at the beginning of the show to more experimental at the end. Is there a thought process behind that, or is that just coincidence?
There are different approaches, but I like shows to build slow, like a narrative that grows naturally into a crescendo. I could put my shows from the beginning back to back and have like a 300-look show and it would make sense. I don’t make drastic shifts each season. It’s its own narrative; it stays within its own kind of trajectory. It’s not about seasonal trends or anything like that. It’s more about this brand and the aesthetic.

Do you get more enjoyment from creating your more extreme pieces?
I started doing this is for that aspect of it. However, menswear is so much about the product and the physical thing. It has to be grounded in reality. If it’s not grounded in reality, it loses its power.

Are you cool with people calling your stuff minimal?
I can see why people would say that. But I don’t see it that way. A lot of it is romantic and hopefully has a lot of soul and feeling. I’ve never been into soulless minimalism, or minimalism for the sake of being minimal. That’s not what I do. But compared to an American menswear look, it feels minimal. But that’s changing, too.

Is it hard trying to be a part of the schedule of fashion and fall in line with that constant turnover?
It’s so hard. But it’s also a luxury to have the opportunity every six months to re-invent yourself. I have a lot of friends in other creative fields, like writers and filmmakers. They don’t get second chances, let alone every six months. It’s amazing to be able to turn your back on what happened six months before. Fashion people only remember the last thing you did. They don’t remember before that, which is kind of great, but also kind of scary. 

If you're in NYC, visit the Patrik Ervell sample sale Friday March 1st through Sunday March 3rd, at 35 Howard Street, Buzzer #6. Or visit PatrikErvell.com to shop his spring/summer 2013 collection.

Read more fashion articles by Wilbert:

Black Man in a Dress

A$AP Rocky and Jeremy Scott Schooled Me on How to Be a Pretty Motherfucker

In December, the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, threw the country into a deep depression, followed by a fiery debate about guns. As January brought the US six more school shootings, many “solutions” were proposed, from arming janitors to banning all guns, while companies hawking bulletproof blazers, suits, and even children’s clothes saw sales skyrocket. One of these vendors, Amendment II, has bulletproof backpacks starting at $300. I called company president Derek Williams to ask if business was still booming.

VICE: I assume from your company’s name that you really love the Second Amendment?
Derek Williams: We’re trying to develop products that save lives, but we all are concealed-weapons carriers, and we all believe firmly in the right to bear arms.

Do you feel that selling body armour somehow encourages people to buy more guns?
I can see that from outward appearances, it looks like we’re promoting the Second Amendment by selling body armour. But there is really no causal relationship between body armour and shootings other than the fact that the increase in shootings has caused people to want body armour. The reason I stress that is that we’ve had a lot of hate mail from those who say that we’re contributing to the problem of gun violence. 

You sell something called “designer armour.” What does that mean?
We can bulletproof anything you’ve got: jackets, dress shirts, things like that. Prices are high – some items cost $2,500. We sell to people like celebrities; anyone who wants to look good and be protected.

Could you bulletproof a beret? Or a cravat?
Yep, absolutely. 

Tell me about the children’s backpacks that have caused all this controversy. How did they
come about?
At trade shows I’d have people come up to me and say, “Hey, this armour is lightweight, I’d love to have a vest or a backpack for my kid so I can take him hunting,” or, “My kid was at Virginia Tech during the [2007] shooting, I don’t want to risk anything else like that.” After the Connecticut shooting everything just exploded, and we now have a four-week backlog on orders for the backpacks.

Aren’t parents also worried about protecting their children’s chests?
Well, any body armour has gaps. I did get an order the other week from a woman for a purple bulletproof vest for her six-year-old. But with the backpacks, if you’re running away from a situation then your back is protected. If you’re trapped, you can get in a corner, lie down, and put the backpack in front of you. Hopefully it gives you decent odds.

Should we arm children too?
I don’t know. We try not to get into the politics, but I’m personally a believer in the Second Amendment.

Yeah, I think that’s pretty clear.

More crazy American fashion from our Fashion Issue:

Disasters Made in Bangladesh

Snoop Through the Ages

The World's American Dream

PHOTOS BY RICHARD KERN

STYLIST: IAN BRADLEY

Hair and Makeup: Tayler Treadwell; Photo Assistant: Max Dworkin; Stylist Assistant: Miyako Bellizzi; Models: Christopher Leabu at Request, Tanya Sweet and Aline at Ford; Special Thanks to The Hudson Hotel 

Costello Tagliapietra dress, Gemma Simone earrings and ring, Tous necklace, vintage clutch from Screaming Mimi’s; Vivienne Westwood suit, Jardine shirt, Ralph Lauren Purple Label tie

Ralph Lauren Purple Label shirt, Billy Reid pants, tie, and shoes, Perry Ellis by Duckie Brown jacket, Illesteva sunglasses

Yuasa boxers

Ralph Lauren Purple Label suit and tie, Vivienne Westwood Man shirt; vintage dress from Screaming Mimi’s, Tous earrings

Gemma Simone ring

Osklen shirt, Perry Ellis by Duckie Brown pants; vintage necklace from Screaming Mimi’s, Gemma Simone ring

Tous necklace, vintage slip dress from Screaming Mimi’s

Want more from our Fashion Issue?

Anarchy in Hip-Hop

The World's American Dream

Raggare Love Hot-Rods and Rock 'n' Roll

James Carnes, Creative Director of Sport Performance at adidas, is responsible for an unbelievable amount of innovation in the world of sneaker design over the past 20 years. He's basically the Tesla of trainers, the Thierry Mugler of high performance running shoes, the sneaker game James Dyson with less of the overblown fanfare and passion for air and invisible fans. In the late 90s, he developed the original prototype for adidas' Feet You Wear, then later spearheaded the company's integration with ClimaCool and developed the adiZero technology, which is that stuff you read about going into professional footballer players' boots in every single newspaper at the time.

James just finished his latest streak of innovating, heading up the team at adidas that developed "Boost" – a new shoe technology that's supposedly going to revolutionise running by being way more responsive than any other trainer and feeding energy back into your feet rather than letting the ground steal it all away. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but it has something to do with air bubbles and all sounds completely legit. I figured now would be a good to time to force James to look back over his career, so met him in New York and got him to do just that.  

Adidas Feet You Wear.

VICE: Hi James. So, you started your career as an industrial designer – how has that helped you designing for fashion?
James Carnes: Well, industrial design helps teach you different skills and to work with different components, processes and more technological product design, which gave me a good foundation to work from when I started designing trainers. As time went on, I became more interested in developing more into streetwear, but keeping that core of really understanding how a product is built has definitely influenced my design philosophy. 

Are there any specific elements of industrial design that play a part in your shoe design?
I used to make furniture, so that's always going to be influential in terms of structurally planning stuff. One of the guys I worked with in London is a designer named Alex Taylor and he does brilliant work. Automotive design is always something I else I look at, but it normally does come back to fashion design as the main inspiration when I'm designing footwear.

Makes sense, I suppose. You've done some more high fashion stuff with Y-3 and Stella McCartney, how do you find it switching from design that's mostly about functionality to something that's more about aesthetics and fabrics?
It's really more about working out the priority in each case and then finding a balance between the two fields that works. You have to make sure with the functional stuff that it really delivers, which can then be tough to work around aesthetically. Fashion is more about making individual statements, so you get more leeway with how high performance you have to be. Stella was great to work on because it was right in the middle of the two.

Y-3, adidas' high fashion line with Yohji Yamamoto.

Which one do you prefer?
I have to say, it's amazing to be at adidas because they do both. We're the only sportswear brand with a true fashion label – Y-3 – and then we also do things like supply product to the World Cup, every single sport in the Olympics and so on.

Weirdly, loads of fashion kids seem to be wearing really high performance jogging trainers now, so I suppose that kind of puts you right in the middle anyway.
True. And I get that, because high performance running sneakers have a very distinct, clean look. They're arguably a lot more stylised than your basic streetwear sneaker, so it makes sense to me that the kids interested in fashion are taking to wearing them.

What's the process with designing for adidas? It seems like a pretty intimidating job considering the products are going out to so many people. 
It definitely takes time. This whole project for this Boost technology started over three years ago, and it's all a process of trial and error and experimentation. You get those light bulb moments from people along the way, but nothing's ever taken lightly – those moments are all put together over time. The myth of creative genius is sometimes overrated. That's not to say that people don't have moments of genius, but it's getting the right group of people together to share those ideas that gets things done. 

How big a percentage is aesthetics in the whole thing? Surely even the most worthier-than-thou jogging nerd isn't going to buy magenta, Velcro-strapped grandpa trainers just because they perform well.
Oh, it's a huge part of my design philosophy. Products have to be intuitive and appeal to people as something that's going to be emotionally expressive. It's not all about, "Show me all the technology at once in whatever four colours you like." It's the same with cars: sure, you might talk up the engine or whatever, but it's the shell that's always really going to grab you.

Which era of trainer design is your personal favourite?
For me, I’m really partial to the 60s and 70s stuff because there were breakthroughs in things like the first rubber outsole with herringbone, and the superstar was one of the first shoes to use tumble leather, so I like that inventive innovation. But I was going to uni in the 90s, so all that chunky, technology-driven stuff – when computers and lights and high-functionality aspects were first being added to sneakers – is definitely my favourite era personally.

Cool. Thanks, James!

Follow Jamie on Twitter: @jamie_clifton 

Want some more stuff about sporty shoes? Try these:

Dude, You Slept Rough to Buy Kanye West's Trainers? Why?

My Favourite Sneaker Campaigns

Old Trainers Make Me Want to Have Sex

Forgotten Sneaker Brands

I was hanging out in a business-class lounge at JFK airport, waiting for my flight, when I saw two women enter, one American, one Italian. Try to tell me which is which: 

The first was tall and slender, wearing a fitted puffy jacket, tight jeans, aviator sunglasses and a pair of high-heeled boots that could have been featured on the front page of Gilt that very day. She looked relaxed, classy and very rich, like she was about to go to the plastic surgeon’s office for a tune-up.

The second woman was wearing Uggs and gray sweatpants with the word pink scrawled across the back. A mismatched sweatshirt completed the look, topped off by a sloppy bun that looked more like a pile of garbage than a hairstyle. In other words, the American. Revelation, America: Other nationalities make fun of our seeming inability to dress like full-grown adults on airplanes. It’s no secret that, by and large, we look like shit.

“I think every American female I have ever seen on a flight has been wearing Victoria’s Secret yoga pants,” said Naoise, a rather fashionable Irish national. “Yoga pants, a baggy college sweatshirt and Minnetonka moccasins. This is a thing my friends and I genuinely talk about. Americans on planes dress like they’re going to bed or were recently bereaved.”

In the days when air travel was new and exciting, flying through the sky on an awe-inspiring work of engineering was a special occasion for which people were inclined to look their best. Now flying, for many people, is just the least inconvenient means of conveyance. The TSA doesn’t help matters either, with its insistence we remove our shoes and all of our accessories and skulk through metal detectors while holding our pants up like criminals. It makes people want to dress “comfy”, which is just making this problem worse. 

Somewhere along the line, Americans decided that they would rather be comfortable than glamorous. “I think a lot of people take flying as a chance to let themselves go, even if they are taking a one- or two-hour flight,” said Amira, a young lady who’s spent time in both the Middle East and the Midwest. Thus the international stereotype that Americans are slobs who stumble off planes with enormous body pillows, Crocs and cargo shorts, not caring at all how other people think they look. No wonder everyone hates the United States. If we’re going to keep bombing everyone, the least we can do is not wear pyjama jeans in public.

Check out more from our Fashion Issue:

Johnny Marr Takes Music and Fashion Seriously

The World's American Dream

Denim All Day

Remember in the 90s when you’d walk through the mall and see teenage morons hanging outside Foot Locker or whatever wearing JNCOs and stupid earrings, and they’d sometimes have Nike swooshes or Mercedes-Benz logos shaved into their hair? It was the epitome of brand loyalty – a bunch of suckers who were using their heads as walking billboards for free. We’re not sure if Andrew Lardinois, a 33-year-old living in Portland, Oregon, was inspired by his mallrat days or came up with the idea of making extra cash by shaving the logos of local businesses into his hair all by himself. So far, he’s served as a walking commercial for a liquor store, a fashion boutique and a coffee shop, among other places. I wanted to talk to him about how it feels to invent the “human billboard” look. 

VICE: What was the first design you shaved into your hair?
Andrew Lardinois: One day I was having my legs waxed and saw my sideburns in the mirror. I thought, These look like cowboy boots. All they need are heels etched in one side. I asked my waxer if she could turn my ’burns into boots. I knew she’d love a challenge.

And that turned into, “I should sell my head as a space for advertising”?
I began seeing a barber who specialised in using straight razors from the 1800s. He knew about the designs my waxer friend had done and wanted to try. But sideburns are an itty-bitty canvas, and he wanted a bigger surface: my head. I liked this local beer shop with a rooster logo, so my barber shaved it into my head. He even shaded the rooster with hairs of different lengths. The amount of complexity was unbelievable. Tragically, I could never see it since it was on the back of my head.

Did you just walk into the store with their logo shaved into your hair?
Oh yeah. There were a lot of jaws dropping and people running to get cameras. My hair has been exploited and abused on their Facebook page. Initially, I never asked for anything, but I got a lot of free beers. Businesses started approaching me after a while. I had to work out a pricing guide.

How much does your head cost?
Fifty dollars a week. Some of that goes to my barber. That’s still way less than any of the ad rates in local papers. I’m a walking and talking advertisement, and I’ll promote the store, no matter what. If I’ve chosen to have it on my head, everyone knows it’s worth checking out. 

Do you support yourself with ad sales?
Well, I also work at a Jackson Hewitt tax kiosk inside a Walmart.

Do they make you wear a suit or cover up your hair?
No. One of the awesome and freaky things about the Northwest is that everything’s accepted. I’m not about to wear my 13-inch mohawk in the tax office, but it’s a very progressive Walmart tax office.

Read more from our Fashion Issue:

Snoop Through the Ages

Denim All Day

Disasters Made in Bangladesh