Deadhead Mall Slime

Photo by Geordie Wood courtesy of  The FADER.

We can excuse Gerlan Jeans the countless celebrity endorsements, because it isn't their fault that seemingly every famous hot female in the world wants to be wearing their kaleidoscopic clothes right now. Something possibly down to how they're also worn by all those amazing kids you see having a better time than everybody else at any club worth its weight in MDMA. It's hard to lock down that out of this world-bizarre thing while keeping stuff sexy, but Gerlan nails it with every piece of clothing, casting, and styling. A perfect example is putting a model in a toxic slime dress that looks both like it's going to burn away all her skin, while also making her the most fuckable person in the room.

All this is made even more impressive when you find out British-born Gerlan Marcel—the designer behind the brand—is based in New York, where every other fashion designer sticks to that standard, excruciatingly dull pensioner fodder that Anna Wintour likes so much. Whatever. Oh, and Marcel also set up Prints Please, designers of prints for awesome people like Jeremy Scott and Patricia Field.

VICE: First off, what is it about mall culture that you love so much? The new collection is called Mall Witch and the entire brand's pretty much based around mall culture, right?
Gerlan Marcel: Yeah, everything is inspired by my love of mall culture past, present, and future. I think it's because the mall experience is all-inclusive and completely global—it's something anyone, anywhere can experience in so many different countries. Plus, malls play such an important role in shaping and developing our personal style from a really young age—when you first get into fashion. Unless you're Suri Cruise, obviously.

That point when you first start buying your own clothes and begin working out who you're going to be?
Yeah, totally. The Mall Witch collection was inspired by those exact moments of self-discovery, specifically the moment when you realize you want to be alternative, but at the same time you were still self-conscious about everything that made you different, you know? That transitional period from tween to teen can be so awkward, but that's also what makes it so inspiring when you look back on it.

What was your awkward mall look when you were growing up?
Oh, it was forever evolving, but as a tween I was totally and completely obsessed with all things Benetton and Esprit and it was all about matching my accessories to colors from the Esprit or Benetton logo. They both became total aesthetic influences as well. The Esprit corporate manual, Esprit, the Comprehensive Design Principle, kind of became the Gerlan bible for a while.

As a business model as well as an aesthetic influence?
Exactly. I grew up in Ohio and you could walk into an Esprit store there, or one in New York, and still get this full-on Memphis design wherever you were. It was a fully-realized concept, like how I can only imagine the Fiorucci store in New York was—this entire experience beyond the physical clothes, a world you could really be part of. I feel that's something that's definitely been missing from the high street in the last decade.

What was your next progression? Esprit and Benetton don't sound very alternative.
I guess it was when I became a freshman in high school and realized I could totally reinvent myself, so instead of trying to hide all the things that made me different, like my weird name and my frizzy hair, I was going to embrace all that stuff. So that was when I, like, shaved the back of my head, braided my front bangs into cornrows, wore all black—that kind of thing. It wasn't identifiable by any specific group, though. It wasn't, like, punk or goth, I wasn't coming from any specific place, but it was just a vibe I wanted to give off. Cool. I read that you were a Deadhead for a little while after that too, correct? That has to have influenced your tastes somewhere along the way. 
Yeah, I went on a Grateful Dead east coast to west coast tour for two years, which is where I first started making and selling clothes, so it spawned everything for me. I'd inherited all this vintage Liberty print fabric from my mother and my friends and I would rent a hotel every couple of weeks so I could plug in my sewing machine and make a load of stuff out of it. I was making boob curtains, spinning dresses and pipe pouches, and selling them all on Shakedown Street. There were lots of embroidered Stars of David, ganja leaves, and polka dot mushrooms. It was this incredible opportunity that The Grateful Dead provided where you could travel round with this circus of people and be completely self-supportive, because you could finance yourself off the community, and all the frat boys would come to the shows with money in their pockets to burn. I guess the UK equivalent would be going on tour with a sound system, but that kind of self-existing, traveling community thing doesn't really exist anymore, which is a shame.

You did a sound system tour as well, though, huh?
Yeah, after Jerry Garcia passed away a lot of us ended up embracing the rave scene because it was a natural progression from The Grateful Dead vibe, so we traveled round a bunch with this sound system called SPAZ—Space Pirate Audio Zone—who had linked up with Audiotribe from the UK. There was one girl in SPAZ who made her own clothes and obviously I'd been making my own clothes, but very much in a hippie, textiley, arts and crafts capacity, while she was making all these outrageous fur jackets with eyeballs sticking out of them—very Goa trance vibes. She'd studied fashion design in the UK and told me I should do something like that, which is what gave me the idea of going back to London.

Do you think it was coming to London that made you adopt your slightly avant-garde thing? Because New York really doesn't seem to have a lot of that going on?
In all honesty, I don't think I could say anything in particular made me design the way I do. I think it was just me that made me design like that, you know? I definitely feel an affinity towards to the London vibe and the London scene, but I'm also influenced by a lot of what has happened in New York with, like, Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Stephen Sprouse. I feel like everyone's all New York is this stifled place nowadays, but a lot of people forget the energy that was involved in that era, and I think that energy still exists, it just isn't as well-supported as it was back then.

Do you find it difficult putting out all this great stuff but having the powers that be in the New York scene turn their noses up at it?
Yeah, I think it's important for me to show in New York because I feel like New York does need that energy, and fashion week can be a very serious thing here, so it's nice to have a real show and event where you can tell a real story. Hood By Air and Telfar are great examples. They're both New York-based brands and have this amazing energy, but without the support they're not able to get their stuff from the runway out to the thousands of people who actually want to buy it, you know?

Very true. Right, let's talk about your actual clothes now. Why is Gerlan a print line?
It was just an organic thing. I'd always been drawing and illustrating, then I'd also been sewing and making things, so it was natural to just bring those together. I'd close the studio today if I was only doing color blocking, but that's not to say a lot of thought doesn't go in to them, obviously. Not everybody can wear head to toe print, and even if you do wear head to toe print, there's a big difference between something that works as a flat graphic and something that works on the body, so one of the biggest challenges is crafting clothes to suit the prints.

What about the slime dress? Because that's neither print nor conventional clothes design. 
Well, almost everything for me starts with a moment in time or a vibe I'm going for and I work out a visual language to tell that story. For the slime dress I figured I was doing this alternative teen-inspired collection which is partly influenced by Hot Topic, a store that mass-markets being alternative and turns it into a commodity. That led me to thinking about this mass-marketed idea of being a teen, which is very Nickelodeon, and then I realized that whole concept of sliming is now a very iconic idea, and that the green slime has become an iconic substance for that generation, so it encapsulated everything I was trying to put across.

There were a lot of crop-tops and vaguely exhibitionist strappy clothes going on as well.
Yeah, that was taking from some of those really naive ideas you have about styling yourself. Like the girl on the night bus with her bra-straps everywhere, and her three ripped up tank tops, and her 14 belts, you know? It all comes from that place where you're trying to find out who you are and what your signature is and all these incredible things just happen to you when you're doing that.

Talking of styling, the casting and styling for that Mall Witch show was great. I can totally imagine all those models being real kids from the most bizarre mall ever built.
Yeah, the styling was something that really resonated with a lot of people. Avena Gallagher styled it, who's just so prolific and amazing, but I think it's also because most people in the fashion business went through that period of being the freak or being the weirdo, so I feel like it really resonated with people on a lot of different levels and we got super-deep into it. Like each model had a story, like she's her best friend, and she dressed like her last year but then over the summer she went to camp, started smoking cigarettes, and turned into a complete badass, you know what I mean?

That's amazing. Real method modeling, right there.
The funny thing is, because most models are so young, during the casting I was like, "OK, so you're a bad teen, you're pissed at your parents—fuck it, you're pissed at everyone. You should always be thinking 'don't look at me, don't talk to me'", you know? And of course, most of these girls were literally going through that at the time, so it was brilliant because they were all already mall witches—they embodied the exact thing I was going for.

Jeremy Scott wearing his all-over french fries pattern, designed by Gerlan.

Awesome. Lastly, you run Prints Please, which is almost another entire interview, but tell me about the work you did with Jeremy Scott through that, because some of those prints have become pretty iconic. 
Well, I originally started interning for Jeremy when I was at Saint Martins, then continued to work for him until I graduated, then flew to LA basically five minutes after the Saint Martins press show to carry on working for him. But yeah, working with him was an incredible experience and we share a similar aesthetic naturally, so I didn't have to sacrifice any of my creativity or aesthetic to give him what he wanted.

So was it quite collaborative from concept onwards?
Yeah, definitely. But then every print did work slightly differently as well. With the french fries print, for example, Jeremy said he had this idea of an all-over print of french fries, then it was up to me to graphically interpret that however I felt I wanted to, but because we shared an aesthetic it worked out as a very collaborative process. Sometimes it was a lot more direct, like the food fight print: "I had this dream about a food fight,and it was all boxing and hamburgers", and because we share this aesthetic, the shared vision was these cartoon junk food guys having a fight, so it really was a natural process working with him.

And how does it work now that you're not directly working for Jeremy? Do you come up with stuff and present it to other designers?
It's mostly commissions or consultancy-based work. So I've been doing a lot of stuff for Pat Field—we did the Keith Haring collaboration—and I did all the graphics. Then we did some collaborations with some Japanese brands for Pat Field, as well as instore stuff. Then, on the opposite end of the scale, I do a lot of stuff for Calvin Klein Jeans and handbags, which is obviously a totally different aesthetic from Gerlan Jeans, but I have a lot of different aesthetics I like to work with, Gerlan Jeans being just one of them. So Prints Please gives me this outlet to be able to do some of the other kind of print work that I love to do, which is a little less conversational and a little more graphic, a little more painterly, and a lot more pattern-based.