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dippedanddripped · 5 years

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One afternoon in 1999, when the designer Shayne Oliver was in the sixth grade, he came across a magazine ad for Dirty Denim, a line of “pre-soiled” jeans by Diesel. The ad featured a collage of faux paparazzi photographs documenting the meltdown of a fictional rock star. Oliver was struck by the campaign’s tagline: “The Luxury of Dirt.” “That blew my mind,” he told me recently. “Spending money on something that looks dirty? I was, like, ‘This is genius.’ ” He informed his mother, a schoolteacher from Trinidad named Anne-Marie, that he needed a pair immediately.

Oliver’s father had abandoned Anne-Marie before Shayne was born, and she had struggled to raise him on her own. They lived in a tiny apartment on Halsey Street, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Oliver, who attended some rough schools—he witnessed knife fights in the halls—was highly intelligent, and Anne-Marie was determined to nurture his gifts. She stood up to people on the street who heckled him because he was effeminate, and fought with school officials who wrote him off as a rowdy black kid. She didn’t have the money for the jeans, which cost three hundred and seventy-five dollars, but she respected Shayne’s sense of urgency. “How are we going to afford Diesel clothes?” she asked herself. She soon began working evenings at the Diesel store at the corner of Sixtieth and Lexington. She got an employee discount, and her kid got his jeans.

Oliver began accompanying Anne-Marie on her shifts at Diesel, folding shirts, examining seams, and offering customers unsolicited style advice. Although his suggestions were impeccable, after a few weeks the management told him to stay home, noting that it was illegal for twelve-year-olds to work in retail. Undaunted, Oliver walked a few blocks to a Roberto Cavalli store. Employees there were so charmed that they offered him an unpaid internship. He didn’t take it, but he continued to visit the store—and pester the staff. “I would just be in the shop, hanging out all the time and talking shit,” he recalls. “It was fun.”

Oliver was a recent arrival in New York. He was born in 1987 in Minnesota, where Anne-Marie had immigrated to pursue a teaching degree, and he had spent his childhood shuttling among female relatives in St. Paul, St. Croix, and Trinidad, before settling with his mother in Brooklyn, in 1998. In St. Croix, at the age of five, he had begun making his own fashions out of scraps of fabric scavenged from his grandmother, a dressmaker. After moving to the United States, he started cutting up items in Anne-Marie’s wardrobe. In an effort to discourage this practice, she took him on regular trips to Jo-Ann Fabrics. He kept looting her closet.

When Anne-Marie rode the subway with Oliver, she noticed him staring at men who were wearing streetwear brands like Mecca and FUBU. “Why are you looking at all of these guys?” Anne-Marie asked him. “You’re all up in their Kool-Aid!” Oliver protested that he was inspecting them for their clothes, which was only half a lie. He began cutting up his jeans and ripping out the crotch, which made him a target at the Pentecostal church that he and his mother attended. “I was being expressive!” he recalls, adding that other parishioners expressed themselves by speaking in tongues. At thirteen, he quit the church.

That year, Anne-Marie sent Oliver to a public school in Long Island City which focusses on the arts. For weeks, he came to class wearing a head scarf, and was often mistaken for a Muslim girl. (“I should’ve played that up a little bit,” Oliver told me. “Muslim girls get a lot of attention.”) Shortly after he enrolled, Anne-Marie rented for him a videocassette of “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 documentary about voguing competitions in New York. A year later, he became a member of the House of Ninja, one of the groups featured in the film. “The Ninja people were all offbeat and not glamour kids,” he recalls. They encouraged him to explore various looks, and in competitions, he said, he “swayed between ‘vogue femme’ and ‘runway.’ ”

As a teen-ager, Oliver began applying his ingenuity to his hair: “There was one point where I was mixing textures—it was, like, a mullet of dreads and then permed on the sides. I’m sorry, that hairstyle was so nasty! It was ridiculous. It was so good.” He went out most nights, commuting between the largely white electroclash scene centered on Club Luxx, in Williamsburg, and the mostly black and Latino scene on Christopher Street, where he liked to “smoke, go to the pier, and then vogue.”

Before entering the tenth grade, he transferred to Harvey Milk, the country’s first high school for L.G.B.T. youths. Many of the students there wore three outfits a day: one for their neighborhood, one for school, and one for going out. It could be dangerous to wear the wrong thing in the wrong place, so kids kept outré clothes in their backpacks and changed on the subway platform. Oliver, though, prided himself on assembling outfits that worked in all three environments: butch enough for Bed-Stuy, smart enough for school, glam enough for the club. He devised subtle, colorless ensembles, the drape and shape of which sent coded messages to the educated eye. “If you have on all-black, you can go unnoticed on the block,” Oliver explained. “Then you go intothe city, and someone who’s thinking about clothing in a different way notices all the cuts and layering.” Styling choices helped him adapt his look to different contexts. Oliver liked wearing tight poom-poom shorts, but on his way to school he pulled them low, so that they sagged “in a masculine way.”

At Harvey Milk, Oliver made friends with another boy who was obsessed with fashion, James Garland. Each was an only child, raised by an indulgent single mother who had given her son the master bedroom. They recorded television broadcasts of runway shows and pored over the designs. Garland liked the debonair luxury of Tom Ford; Oliver preferred the forbidding moodiness of Rick Owens. Before long, the boys began making clothes, conducting photo shoots in Fort Greene Park, and staging runway shows at school. They generated new pieces through collage, stitching together items from vintage shops, children’s jackets from thrift stores, and treasures from their mothers’ closets.

After creating their first line of T-shirts, named Ammo, and their first collection, Cazzy Calore, Garland and Oliver graduated from Harvey Milk and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Garland flourished there, but Oliver chafed against the curricular constraints and dropped out in his freshman year. In 2006, he diverted the tuition money that Anne-Marie had saved for him, and launched a fashion line with his friend Raul López, who also hung out on Christopher Street. Oliver called the new line Hood By Air. The phrase suggested a style that was proudly ghetto and proudly élite (“putting on airs”). Within a few years, the label had become the most prominent high-fashion brand to have emerged authentically from street culture.

Oliver’s original mission with the label was to bring to fine menswear what he calls the “thug silhouette”: the shape created by a long T-shirt paired with saggy pants, as if the wearer had a very long torso and very short legs. He also believed that he could turn streetwear basics such as oversized hoodies and multipocketed jackets into high-concept luxury items.

By 2007, Hood By Air clothes had begun showing up in boutiques in downtown Manhattan. The collections cannily combined the audacious (trousers with a dozen pleats) and the accessible (silk-screened T-shirts). The first Hood By Air T-shirts featured bold graphics and slogans like “Back to the Hood.” Oliver and López had the shirts custom-made by Dominican tailors, and they were expensive: two hundred dollars apiece. From the start, they sold well.

In the aughts, Manhattan boutiques were awash in designer hoodies (many of them by Jeremy Scott and Raf Simons). Oliver judged their stitch too fine, their length too short, their colors too bright, their patterns too busy. He felt that designers who appropriated streetwear had a fascination with urban men but were also afraid of them—he considered their skittish engagement to be “peckish,” “gross,” and “disconnected from the real masculinity” driving street culture. He told me, “It’s, like, ‘I think that guy is really hot, but I don’t know how to approach him, so I’m going to put elements of myself in him.’ There’s a power play where you’re inspired by something but you don’t want to give it credit.” Turned off by these “fey” imitations of streetwear, Oliver made clothes that were aggressively harsh and masculine. The graphics on his T-shirts often played with urban-horror imagery: a panorama of a prison yard, red marks evoking blood spattered by gunfire. At the same time, instead of hinting at homoeroticism, he foregrounded it. The first Hood By Air editorial video, uploaded to YouTube in September, 2007, featured a model repeatedly grabbing his crotch.

Oliver also embarked on a conceptual exploration that he calls “formalizing sloppiness”—highlighting the transitional phases between dressed and undressed. “It’s like when someone is horny and in a T-shirt, and it’s dropping off the shoulder,” Oliver explained. He liked conjuring those alluringly awkward moments when an amorous couple still has a few items of clothing on: “The idea of that being so open and so vulnerable—it’s, like, ‘Where’s my pants? Where’s my underwear?’ ”

By the end of 2009, López and Oliver had put Hood By Air on hiatus. López founded his own clothing line, and Oliver focussed on hosting a new dance party called GHE20G0TH1K (Ghetto Gothic). Held in various spaces in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, the gatherings united disparate musical tribes—urban, goth, queer, punk. Oliver ran GHE20G0TH1K with his friends Jazmin Soto (a pansexual Latina) and Daniel Fisher (a straight white Jew). Soto was in charge, but Oliver sometimes took a turn as d.j., and he favored a dark sound. “At the time, no one was playing Marilyn Manson, and I was playing records that resonated that way—the idea of, like, fear of the world,” he recalls. “I was prying into my past—all my history of being provoked.” Many of the party’s charismatic attendees wore Hood By Air T-shirts. Interest in the brand was so strong that Oliver decided to relaunch it.

This time, he had crucial help from Leilah Weinraub, a filmmaker who was working on a documentary about a lesbian strip club in South Central Los Angeles. (The film, which she plans to release in 2017, comes off as a female-focussed update of “Paris Is Burning.”) Weinraub, who was Soto’s girlfriend at the time, began doing projects with Oliver, and one day they shot a look book for the designer Telfar, a mutual friend. Oliver was among the people cast, and Weinraub was unafraid of challenging him. She recalls, “He was wearing the wrong piece—a shawl—and he refused to be styled. He said, ‘Style me like a lady’—he had on this I’m-a-demure-woman voice. I asked, ‘Can you stand a little more like a man?’ The room stopped.”

In 2012, Oliver asked Weinraub to work alongside him on the relaunch of Hood By Air. (The partnership with López was completely dissolved.) She said yes. Weinraub, who is eight years older than Oliver, told me that she felt protective of Hood By Air. “It was at the point where other people started seeing it as a success,” she said. “And at that point people start to rob you—blind. They start to trick you.” She was wary of mainstream cultural figures looking for a quick way to acquire edge—of invitations to, say, “work on Katy Perry’s team.” Shortly after Weinraub became Oliver’s partner, investors offered to buy Hood By Air and put Oliver and Weinraub on fixed salaries. She was appalled. “This isn’t fucking Motown!” she said. Hood By Air, she declared, would remain closed to outside investors while it was in its “incubation period.” (To date, the company hasn’t accepted any outside investments—an arrangement that is virtually unheard of in the fashion industry.)

In order for Hood By Air to maintain control of its intellectual property, Weinraub believed, it had to grow quickly and attract media attention. Otherwise, the company’s designs would be pirated by bigger labels, which treated avant-garde street culture as a resource to be plundered. In a 2013 article in the Times, Guy Trebay suggested that Riccardo Tisci, the creative director of Givenchy, had referenced Hood By Air designs “without crediting them.” (A spokesperson for Givenchy said, “Hood By Air has never been a reference for our brand.”)

Around the time that Weinraub joined Hood By Air, it presented a runway show at Milk Studios, on Fifteenth Street. One of the models cast for the show was the rapper A$AP Rocky, a friend of Oliver’s at the time. Rocky’s participation helped the brand reach a wider audience, affording it a measure of protection against fashion-world vultures. Rocky also boosted Hood By Air’s reputation by incorporating endorsements of the label into his lyrics. His devotion eventually cooled, though, and in 2014 he released a diss track that included criticisms of the brand. He gloated to a reporter, “I birthed it, so I can kill it.” But Rocky was too late. Hood By Air had established a cult following among affluent teen-agers, avant-garde adults, and pop stars like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Kanye West. The label was critically acclaimed, too, winning the Swarovski Award for Menswear, from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and a six-figure prize from L.V.M.H. Although Hood By Air remained rigorously experimental, it also became profitable, as fans lined up to buy T-shirts with the H.B.A. logo, which cost as much as six hundred dollars each. According to Hood By Air, its sales have doubled every season since 2013. The brand’s reach remains unimpressive by Gucci standards, but business has been good enough to give Oliver “the ability to do whatever the hell I want” in the studio. (He still shares an apartment with his mother, in Prospect Heights.)

Last September, I visited a cramped office that Hood By Air was renting on Hester Street, on the Lower East Side. The space, crowded with garment racks, could have been mistaken for a costume shop, were it not for the giant poster boards propped against the walls, which were covered in mini-Polaroids of harsh, alluring faces. Attached to each photograph was a Post-it scrawled with a concept: “spanish hustlers,” “obscure fetish.”

A dozen men and women, including Leilah Weinraub, sat in a circle, with only one subtle sign of hierarchy: Oliver was the only person not taking notes. Since 2012, Hood By Air had grown into a small collective, and its members were meeting to finalize plans for the Spring/Summer 2016 runway show. They had been joined by an outsider, Rich Aybar, a freelance stylist. Born on the Upper West Side to Dominican parents, he looked like a cross between a Rastafarian and Rasputin.

Oliver was dressed in jeans, a black vest, and a Hood By Air necklace—a chunky chain and a padlock—that he never removes. “Ooooooh!” he said. He had just received a text. “Connie just got confirmed for the door.” He was referring to Connie Girl, a doorwoman who was famous for being impossible to get past and impossible to book. “Taste that,” he said. “Ta-a-a-aste.”

“What’s the lighting like at the space?” Akeem Smith, Hood By Air’s chief stylist, asked. His hair was in small braids gathered into pigtails, and he wore a T-shirt bearing the words “The Black Genius.”

“Bright,” Weinraub replied. “White-blue.”

“Clinical,” Oliver said, approvingly. The show was being held at Penn Plaza Pavilion, a cavernous, fluorescent-lit building, opposite Madison Square Garden, that was slated for demolition. Hood By Air shows are traditionally held in unglamorous spaces.

Several people got up to leave, and a smaller group began discussing the casting of models. Each season, labels compete to book them, and Cathy Horyn, a critic at large at New York, told me that Hood By Air had some of “the best casting of the season, and I mean anywhere.” The brand is known for “streetcasting”—enlisting people who aren’t professional models.

The group stood and went over to a casting board, which was crammed with photographs of prospects. “We have to edit,” Oliver declared, inspecting the images. “We have to be really hard right now.”

“I think your story up there is really strong,” Aybar said. “It’s, like, Undernourished Retards—in a beautiful way.” He liked the “living-under-the-bridge vibe.” Then Aybar started ripping photos off the board. One boy, a Ryan Lochte type, was deemed “too dopey—a white guy in the most boring way.” Oliver asked that another male model be removed for having a swishy walk that struck him as off-brand. “It’s gay-y-y-y-y,” he said. After thirty minutes, a dozen pictures had been taken off the board.

The designing of clothes follows a similar group dynamic. Paul Cupo, the brand’s fashion director, told me, “The top concept is Shayne’s concept, and there’s a very select group of people that are allowed to contribute to this concept. Shayne then comes up with some shapes and silhouettes he wants to show, and then I plug in fabrics and colors.”

Cupo, an Italian-American from Bensonhurst who favors loose tank tops and sneakers, showed me a creation for the upcoming show. “The basic idea is a bomber,” he said. Instead of using nylon for the shell, however, he had used taffeta—a material often fashioned into ball gowns and wedding dresses. It was a surprising choice, he acknowledged with a smile: “It’s sort of a weird fabric for ‘young edgy cool designers’ to be using.” A Hood By Air bomber jacket sells for nearly a thousand dollars.

few days later, at Penn Plaza Pavilion, Hood By Air sent a male model down the runway in a tight bun, a shirtdress, and black heels. The shirtdress, made with black silk, was divided into sections, which had been loosely lashed together with chainlike zippers. The bottom had a feminine band of ruffles, as one might find on a dress worn by Michelle Obama to a state dinner. The middle was a wraparound panel of fabric that, from a distance, resembled high-waisted athletic shorts. The top was a button-down shirt with a crisp collar and oversized chiffon sleeves. Like a chimera, the shirtdress was incongruous but beautiful.

The model, who had been spotted on Instagram, was a twenty-seven-year-old from West Harlem named Mello Santos. He had a thin mustache and a goatee, and as he walked down the runway he allowed the zippers holding the outfit together to start coming undone. Dark silk was peeling off his torso like a rotten-banana peel, and the garment threatened to self-destruct at any moment, revealing Santos’s many tattoos (and parts of his anatomy). From some angles, Santos looked like a cross-dressing gangster; from others, like a futuristic pop star.

Subsequent models showed off equally mongrel creations: bomber jackets recut into togas, backpacks made from tufted sofa pillows. Some models looked like bullies, others like prey. A recording of the Jamaican dancehall performer Buju Banton roared over glitchy speakers. “Circumstances made me what I am,” he sang. “Was I born a violent man?” For the finale, each model took a seat on a raised platform, as if posing for a class picture. Together, they looked scary but sexy, butch yet femme.

The collection was called Galvanize, and the idea for the runway show was to evoke the ramshackle school that Oliver briefly attended as a youth in Trinidad. To galvanize is to electrify—to shock and inspire. But it also means to coat scrap metal with a layer of zinc; it’s the poor man’s version of gilding. Galvanized steel is a common roofing material in Trinidad, and the show’s name suggested a duality about growing up in the West Indies: Oliver claimed that the education he received at the school was exceptional—“college-level English in fourth grade,” he said—but the building was decrepit. This duality extended to the students’ clothing. Oliver and his classmates modified tattered, hand-me-down uniforms so that they became fashionable looks. The Galvanize collection—manufactured in Italy from sumptuous materials but with roots in a Caribbean schoolyard—was gilded streetwear whose aim was to electrify the audience and inspire a new generation to carry the countercultural torch.

The show impressed many critics. Sally Singer, the creative digital director of Vogue, told me that Hood By Air had presented one of the season’s top collections. Cathy Horyn, the New York critic, who was seeing a Hood By Air show for the first time, wrote that the clothes represented a “shock from the future” and a “fist in your face.” She told me that Hood By Air’s startling designs were welcome mutations in an era in which high fashion is controlled by bland international conglomerates.

Several critics described the clothes in the Galvanize collection as “deconstructed.” Deconstruction—whether of a novel, a soufflé, or a shirt—means breaking down a concept into its constituent parts, often with an eye toward destabilizing our vision of the whole. In fashion, it’s traditionally associated with accentuating raw edges and functional elements like seams. Hood By Air’s collection, however, riffed on the modifications that wearersmake to those designs—details like slashing, cropping, and sagging, which typically define a look only after professionals have finished their work.

Galvanize was an homage to the expanding cohort of shoppers who use clothing to revise standard images of race and gender. (Weinraub calls such consumers “modern people.”) In blunt terms, a rich white woman can wear a Hood By Air garment and feel modern because it makes her look like a poor black man; a poor black man can wear it and feel modern because it makes him look like a rich white woman. Whereas other labels had merely broken down design, Hood By Air was breaking down identity.

A classic deconstructionist turns garments into sculptures and models into scaffolding; Martin Margiela often covered his models’ faces. In the show for the Galvanize collection, the models’ faces—adorned with splotchy, wraith-like makeup—were key visual elements. The splotches paid homage to YouTube makeup-contouring tutorials, evoking the moment just before blending tools transform a painted monster into a Kardashian.

Despite the show’s triumphant reception, it did not unfold without flaws. There was a monumental error in the execution of the choreography: the models failed to crisscross, as directed, along the venue’s multiple catwalks, with the result that much of the audience saw only half the collection. It was a mistake that might have sent a tyrant like Coco Chanel or Alexander McQueen into a rage. Oliver, though, was unfazed. After the show, he appeared briefly at a bar on the Lower East Side, and spent only fifteen seconds conferring with Weinraub about the mistake before moving on to a more vexing problem: someone had given Oliver’s mother the address of a rented penthouse where the Galvanize collection had been put together, and where a post-show gathering would be held. (The Hester Street office was too small to accommodate dozens of models.) Anne-Marie had just arrived at the penthouse with pink hair and an entourage of younger Afro-Caribbean women. Oliver was forlorn. “This is exactly the moment I want to turn up!” he moaned, rubbing his cherubic head, which was shaved, and clutching at a floor-length sweater-dress of his own design. “Now my mother is there with her friends!”

I happened to know the identity of the culprit who had supplied Anne-Marie with the party’s address. It was Weinraub, who enjoys seeing Anne-Marie at every runway show. Her own parents have never come to one.

In late March, items from the Galvanize collection began to arrive in stores. Barneys New York installed life-size silicon replicas of six Hood By Air models in its four windows on Madison Avenue. Two of the models were Hood By Air regulars named Chucky and Sunny—Angelenos whose bodies (and faces) are covered in tattoos. In the window, the fake Sunny wore a pleated pant-dress, and his mouth was held open by a guard typically used in dental surgery. Chucky wore a padlocked baby pacifier and a purple leather shroud that might look good on a Jedi. It was the first time that the windows had featured mannequins in menswear. When I stopped by to see the display, in April, crowds of tourists, joined by local one-per-centers, had gathered to gawk. Many observers reacted with baffled revulsion. Inside the store, meanwhile, none of the radical clothes worn by the mannequins were for sale. The Hood By Air racks were instead filled with logo tees. The runway pieces may have blown fashion critics’ minds, but it was the T-shirts that had changed the way people dressed.

Leilah Weinraub studied film as a graduate student at Bard. Before joining Hood By Air, she had no experience in business. Her official title is C.E.O., but she told me that the designation is “fictional.” She recoils at any suggestion that she is Oliver’s Pierre Bergé—the commanding executive who helped Yves Saint Laurent become an international brand. She took the title of C.E.O. in part so that she would be taken as seriously as a man would be: “If I were just Shayne’s friend, and a woman, and me, people would just be, like, ‘O.K., bitch, get the fuck out of the way.’ ”

As Hood By Air has expanded into a collective, she explained, everyone with authority is essentially a creative director—even if, like her, they don’t literally design clothes. The early phases of the label’s design process take place in group texts that unfurl over weeks. For the Galvanize collection, eight employees contributed to what she calls a “running personal diary.” In addition, the label has an iCloud folder for sharing found images—Hood By Air’s equivalent of a mood board. Weinraub wouldn’t let me examine the entire folder for the collection, but she sent me a selection of the materials. There were photographs of Ike and Tina Turner, a jpeg of Aunt Viv, from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and a picture of a Chinese acupuncturist who stuck two thousand and eight needles in his head, in honor of the 2008 Summer Olympics. “It’s memes,” Paul Cupo, the fashion director, explained to me. “It’s never really literal—you’ll never see a jacket on our reference board.” In 2015, when Women’s Wear Dailyasked Hood By Air for an “inspiration photo,” the label sent back a screenshot of porn.

Weinraub is one of only a few lesbians in high fashion. (Others include Patricia Field and J. Crew’s Jenna Lyons.) She grew up in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, the daughter of an African-American textile designer from Compton and a Jewish pediatrician from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is small with squinty eyes, broad shoulders, and an almond-shaped face. The skin around her eyes is darker in tone; these raccoon-like circles are so formidable and stylish, and presented with such aplomb, that strangers often can’t decide whether the coloring is congenital or cosmetic.

Rebellious from the start, Weinraub ran away from home several times as a teen-ager. In response, she claims, her parents threatened to put her in foster care. (Her parents deny this.) As a compromise, Weinraub went to high school in Israel, through an exchange program.

After a year, Weinraub returned to L.A., legally emancipated herself, and looked for a job. Her uncle knew a buyer at Ron Herman, an upscale clothing store, and helped Weinraub secure a shopgirl position. “It was in Brentwood,” she recalls. “There would be kids shopping there that were my same age. I hated it.” She soon took a job at Maxfield, a boutique with a more progressive bent. Its owner asked her to help oversee the books section, where she befriended a regular who liked to linger in the store and discuss topics such as slavery, America, and Judaism. It was the director Tony Kaye, who had just made a film about a white supremacist, “American History X.”

One day, Weinraub saw Kaye’s face on the cover of a magazine. She read an interview inside and noticed something: many of Kaye’s answers borrowed language that she remembered using during their conversations at Maxfield. Weinraub sensed an opportunity. She called Kaye and said, “I want to do this for you full time. I’ll be your voice, I’ll answer all your questions, I’ll do your research.” There was a catch: Weinraub was feuding with her family again, and she needed money to pursue higher education. She told Kaye, “If you send me to college, I’ll be your professional student, and you can own all my papers.” Kaye agreed, and began paying her tuition when she enrolled at Antioch College, in Ohio. When Weinraub returned to L.A. for breaks, she assisted Kaye on commercial shoots and chauffeured him around the city. The arrangement lasted until Kaye got a girlfriend who demanded an end to the tuition payments.

Kaye famously lost control of “American History X” in the editing suite, when New Line Cinema allowed Ed Norton, the film’s lead actor, to do the final cut. (Kaye disavowed the version that was released.) The incident left a lasting impression on Weinraub: if you don’t control celebrities, they’ll end up controlling you. She was happy to leave people like A$AP Rocky behind. As she put it, she preferred to go it alone and make Hood By Air’s “own world happen.” She was adamant that she would not temper the label’s provocations. “People are into high concepts and respond well to them,” she assured me. “People want drama. They love it.”

The penthouse that Hood By Air rented in the weeks before the Galvanize show had cathedral ceilings, a vast terrace, and an eight-person hot tub overlooking the Lower East Side. An apparent extravagance, the penthouse was leased in order to save money on hotel rooms by providing a live-and-work space for collaborators flying to New York. This frugal-luxury strategy would succeed, though, only if the palatial digs survived the week intact. (The label has a history of losing hotel damage deposits.) To keep the proceedings professional, alcohol was banned from the penthouse until the work was finished.

Five days before the Penn Plaza Pavilion show, I visited the penthouse, which was fragrant with expensive leathers and gleaming with racks of lustrous silks. Models began to arrive, lining up like supplicants to be dressed by the label’s clergy. Hirakish, a twenty-two-year-old African-American artist and musician from New Orleans, was one of the season’s most charismatic new models. He was walleyed and skeletal—you could see every bone in his cranium. For the show, he was to be dressed in a slashed wedding gown and accessorized with a strip of gauze affixed to his forehead, as if he had just survived a street fight. He was in drag, but the effect wasn’t campy: he looked mutilated but threatening, like a zombie. Hirakish had moved to New York a month earlier, after breaking up with his girlfriend, and this was his first fashion show. “This is what I dreamed of,” he confided, gazing at the penthouse’s occupants, who included several d.j.s whom he followed on Instagram. “This is the modern-day Andy Warhol.” (I never heard the principals of Hood By Air compare their workplace to the Factory. Instead, they referred to the label as a “family company.”)

As evening fell, I spoke with Ian Isiah, Hood By Air’s “global brand ambassador” and an in-house muse. Isiah can pull off the label’s clothes with confidence—or, as Oliver puts it, with “a lot of swag.” Isiah wears the brand exclusively, and between runway shows one of his responsibilities is to attend events where he will be photographed. He also coaches celebrities on how to wear Hood By Air properly. Six feet tall, he shaves slits in his eyebrows and styles his hair in tendril-like dreads.

Isiah went out to the terrace. Disrobing and getting into the hot tub, he said, “Now, this is a fashion interview.”

Isiah had been helping to recruit other models for the Galvanize show. The label, he said, had sought to create a unique tableau: “Black doll-babies. Transgender babies. Little skater boyish-boys. Boys with rashes on their face—less albino, more scabs everywhere. Braces! There’s a braces girl on the board.”

Isiah told me that the more established fashion brands were trying to keep current by copying Hood By Air’s streetcasting (and, sometimes, by poaching models with the promise of more money). But he wasn’t worried about the competition. “All the grannies of the ten-year anniversaries”—he was disparaging Alexander Wang, who was celebrating his label’s decennial—“are trying to latch on to what’s happening now, which you can’t do by getting a random model. You need a culture behind it.”

Oliver appeared, and Isiah urged him to get in the tub.

“What, you want me to do Mariah?” Oliver asked, alluding to Mariah Carey’s passion for swimming fully clothed.

“Yas!” Isiah squealed. “We got a dryer.”

Oliver decided to forgo clothes. A casting associate named Walter Pearce walked onto the terrace. A frenetic twenty-year-old with sixteen thousand Instagram followers, Pearce looked like a member of the cast of “Kids,” but he had come to the Lower East Side by way of Chappaqua, where he graduated from Horace Greeley High School. Like Oliver, he had dropped out of F.I.T.

“I started interning for Shayne when I was fifteen,” Pearce said. “They literally raised me.” A gifted streetcaster, Pearce was responsible for bringing on Hirakish, the New Orleans model. “He’s a legend,” Pearce declared. “And it’s not only because his look is unreal; it’s because he lives the life—he’s a maniac.”

Oliver confirmed that Hirakish was “extremely H.B.A.” He grabbed a towel and took a seat on a nearby bench. “I have conversations with him, and I’m, like, ‘Whoa, his mind is so insane—I want to work with this person.’ ” Hirakish’s mind was so insane that, later that night, he urinated inside the penthouse elevator. The mishap panicked Oliver until he discovered that there were no security cameras to record the violation. Oliver admired Hirakish’s uninhibited spirit, and felt a duty to place people like him under Hood By Air’s wing: “It’s almost, like, not orphanage-y, but I want to see these energies succeed.” (Later, he added, “New energy is very intimidating—it rewrites what has been created. We all get jaded by experiences in life, but I try to create environments for younger kids.”)

Pearce, who is gaunt and pale, got into the hot tub, and Isiah cooed, “Oooh, we got trade in the water.”

Cupo and Akeem Smith, the stylist, joined the group, along with several interns. Weinraub eventually got in, too. Many of the people in the hot tub, if viewed from behind, would be hard to identify in terms of race and gender. Oliver and Weinraub had complained to me that fashion critics often described their work with terms like “unisex” and “gender-fluid,” which evoked shapeless androgynes. Oliver hated “unisex,” because the word was unsexy. Weinraub had a similar problem with “gender-fluid”—in her estimation, it was “not hot.” She had come up with a syntactical solution, though. “You can say it differently, and it could be hot,” she said. “Like, ‘Wait, I smell gender fluid.’ ‘I’d like a little gender for my coffee.’ ”

By now, more than a dozen Hood By Air employees were in the hot tub, and the gathering looked at once absurd and utopian: creative directors splashing and laughing alongside their junior associates. At one point, Weinraub spoke ruefully of how Hood By Air was perceived by outsiders. She said, “People are, like, ‘The super-gender-bending, nonconforming, all-day-all-night party that’s coming at you so windy! Who’s a boy? Who’s a girl?’ Then you’re embarrassed by your own life.” ♦

#hood by air #streetwear blog #fashion blog #urbanwear blog

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ducknewt · 5 years

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ASAH | Four

Warnings: scars described and mentioned. and quick flashbacks.

There’s something about this gift shop, that makes Irene feel sentimental.

She’s not sure what exactly it is, or for what or where the weird inapposite sense of nostalgia comes from. But it’s something in the way the white to cream colored walls pull pictures out of her head. Skimming over things she’d rarely ever think about. Like cold days in the warm cover of a home, shielded under a blanket from the harsh grip of winter. A coffee in her hand, burning against her palm. Her fingers lighting up with energy, sparks jumping between her fingers, tip by tip…

The way the scent of the room fills her up on lilac and cinnamon memories. Leading her somewhere too deep in her head to remember the places, or remember the faces. It wrenches a sort of uncommon sensation of safety out from the pools of doubt she’d had on her since coming back into herself. It acts like no question to her what these feelings could be. What these little pieces of herself could possibly mean in relation to what she feels is something truly of foreign elements.

She has thought it over many times, and processed it carefully, and in doing so, found the conclusion to be that of something she’s always known, but chose to never process; home. She would say the feeling is. Catching on to her like a thread, wrapped on too tight around the snared together hollows of her ribcage. It makes her feels small, almost enervated; shrinking amongst the long and towering shelves around her. Like that of a small child lost in the sea of a wondrous crowd, ignorant and oblivious to her existence.

Irene and her friends, had took one last break before the last stretch of the city crept up on them. A tidy well kept together gift shop like the ones found off the sides of streets in big pre-eminent areas. The kind that people drive a hundred and some miles of bold blacktop roads and cross crowded cities for. All of them more of less, a subunit built in the favor of some fancy popularized destination. The regular old tourist traps, as some would say. Irene remembers the ones she used to come up on back in her teen days.

Back when her parents would take her out to an amusement park or a museum. She used to miss those days, standing outside in the balmy-temperate weather, moving about the town in her pink coat and rain-boots. This is something close to it, or rather, a small but sufficient substitute of those same places. Complete with tacky t-shirts, cotton-stuffed bears, and flashy keychains. They went in for a recharge—a bathroom break, really, but a break nonetheless. Something to replenish their stash, find something to eat, and something else Nadiya had said that needed to be taken care of.

Irene didn’t catch any of the scientist’s words. Too much noise stirring up in her skull, too much static; her head feels like a too big air balloon by the time she awakes. Airy and fit to burst. Stumbling and unfocused, and finding herself lying alone, frontside facing the ceiling in the backseat of some untagged vehicle was, if she could be honest with herself, quite the trip. She had only just awoke moments ago, eyes blinking, slow, then blown stone-wide as if a shock of revelation had came over her. She felt her body shake—a thousand watts of electric emotion surging through her legs, her arms, her fingers. Like mercurial twists, too brash to ignore. They call at her being, tug into her spirit; trying to ease her up and at ‘em before she even has the chance to register her own face. Her own eyes. Before she even has the chance to feel like herself and know it. A thing, so intangible, almost bleak in voice and mind, spoke to her. Shrieking as if in haste to reach out, to grab, to twist her from akinesia. Hurry now, you’re losing time! Get up. Look around. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! And by the pull of those words, she reannounced herself to the world with a dull thud to leather and a hand to her heart.

She sat there for a moment, collecting all of what she knew and what she didn’t. And in comparing the thoughts, found that she knew less of what she did before than she did now. It was a scary thing, waking up in such in unfamiliar place and no face around to comfort her unease. But shortly after she sits up and makes her way towards the handle of the car door, it rips itself open. Pale daylight flooding from the outside and drinking in her form. A shadow stood in the space of the door, still, then reaching out and grasps her by the shoulder; warm, gentle, and she’d popped one of her eyes open to look.

All that had greeted her then was the dark and rich umber of Remy’s eyes. The polished dark skin of his shoulder and forearm bathing in blanched lines of sunlight. They studied each other for a moment. She watches the way his mouth shapes up; curled like that of a citrus leaf in summer and throws his whole body forward. She catches him, perceptibly aware of how different he looks. There’s a new cut on his shoulder, his hair a ragged but strewn together mess that looked combed half-assed in some places. He’s wearing new clothes and there’s a distinct but fairly faint smell of Dove soap on his skin.

They got together and talked for a moment. He tells her what he knows, and she refrains from asking too many questions. It is a lot to take in, but she manages, as best as she can. In situations like these, you have to be calm. A couple or so years in HR have taught her that. Though this however, is something entirely different from the regular pull of filing papers and organizing events on a deadline. She is not used to any of it, had never been and perhaps, never will be. But she has no reason to complain about it. At least not right now.

So the team splits up to give everybody time to do things. Seeing an opportunity to explore a bit in peace, Irene pokes her head into the nearby shop where here, she stands and allows herself that time to think. To process on what all Remy had said to her. She stops in one aisle, walking up to the shelf to press her fingers over a texturized pattern on a quilt. Looks at the tag line and just studies it for a long while. The quilt reminds her of all the times her moms had shown her how to sew. They always had many types like these hanging about the house, on the walls, and the floors. She can recall one of her oldest blankets from when she was only a baby, still lying folded somewhere in the old room she had before she moved away. It had an intricate style to it. Old caribou-hide, four-colored; the patches sewed heavy with symbols of her family, and the stitched in image of a bear sat embroidered in the center of it. Large. Daunting. Its eye turned elsewhere and never meeting Irene’s.

She wonders, if at all, about the kind of state her parents must be in. About how worried they must feel at this moment. Sitting at home, not knowing of what is happening to her. Of not knowing about their daughter being unknowingly wrapped up in something she hasn’t quite processed yet. Following behind two strange women and one man and knowing not when she will ever come home. Whether she will ever pick up a phone and call them.

She imagines, in some universe where they had known, one of her mothers, the softer shorter one, sitting on the couch, blowing her nose and dotting at her face with a napkin like an 18th century woman in grief. Red puffy-eyed and blubbering whilst her wife, taller, a more moon shaped look to her face and wine-dark eyes, sits with her and holds her steady. They probably don’t know much about what’s going on with her, and frankly it was probably for the best. Thank goodness and all that. They probably most likely disregarded the broadcast, and have hopefully believed that she’s fine. Or at the very least, unaware of what truly had transpired.

Either way, she probably has nothing to worry about. Probably.

She rounds the corner swiftly exiting out the aisle of old knick-knacks and padded down quilts. Nearby there is a rack of t-shirts and another full slender rack of keychains. She heads for those first, pretending like she’s here to shop and not to remedy herself from the woes of homesickness. She picks out a keychain, feeling over the smooth bauble on the end of the chain in her hand. A cute yellow cartoon bird with the state university stamped on its sweater, shouts with a text bubble over its head. The words “We’re just Peachy!” is printed on it in bright bold letters. Irene actually snorts at it. A gaudy bright, ridiculous thing in her hand.

“ Takin’ stock of our keychains there, are you?”

She visibly jumps, the keychain almost slips through the cracks in her fingers. She hadn’t heard anyone sneak up on her. Hadn’t heard nary a sound, or a voice, or the familiar pattern of footsteps behind her. Slowly and with deliberate motion, she turns around to eye the source of the voice. A man much older, fraying light brown hair that receded past the line of his forehead, stood with a box held up and in front of his chest. A wide and generous face greeted Irene as she took one step back, eyeing him, offhandedly making notice of his name-tag that’s half-way obscured by the box in his hands. Charles.

“ Each one is handmade. Personally designed and tailored for everyone who’s into their state pride.”

Irene blinks, a beat. Somewhere between the time away from the fellowship and the wake-up call she had recently in the car, she forgot her own social etiquettes.

“ Oh. That’s nice.”

The man smiles, then adjusts the box in his hands to put it down on the floor. “ Yep. You know, the missus spent a lot of time putting most of it together.” He says, quite proudly, and puts his arms out akimbo eyeing the shelves. “ She’s the storekeep of this place. Everything you see here, is pretty much of her own design.”

Irene tries to meet the smile, firm but faithless. Truthfully she wasn’t looking for a conversation at the moment, but she was never one to turn people away from her. There was always that sort of friendly attraction she held about her, the kind that drove people in like bees to flowers. An aspect, she’s grateful hasn’t done her in yet. Her eyes fall beyond the man’s head, eyeing a rack of 50% off snow-globes sequestered off to a corner of the shop.

“ Really?” She says, in a voice she hopes is convincing. “ That’s interesting.”

Charles nods. “ Yeah, spent a whole fortune on this place. But the money comes in well so can’t complain…” Then a beat, and he turns to her. The smile still there. “So, is there anything in particular that you need or are lookin’ for around here? I know we got tons of stuff lying around and what not but…”

“Oh! No!” Irene quickly holds up her hand, shaking her head. “ No, nothing at all. I was jus—looking. Just looking around.”

Charles seems to understand, his mouth pulling firm in a line as he slowly nods. “Well if you’re just looking, then I guess I should get back to my business.”

He shows off a crooked smile, then leans down to pick the box off the waxed tiles. In the seconds he does, Irene searches the floor between her feet, avoiding his gaze.

“ If you’re in need of anything, Barbara’s always happy to sell or help if needed.”

He turns away from her and walks back to round another. Irene releases a brief sigh of relief, forcing the ache in her shoulders to calm a bit. Gods, when has she gotten so anxious? All this unnecessary pressure around her chest and hands has made her feel caged somehow. Made her feel like she was unable to speak or meet eyes or do much of anything at all.

She continues to walk on until she spies a table with three serve-yourself coffee makers off in the corner. Thinks on it, and decides to go pour herself a cup. One little drink of bad caffeine couldn’t hurt for a bit right?

There’s a little sign on one of them that reads in badly typed comic sans: TRY OUR BREW! All CUSTOMERS WELCOME! Topped with a gimmicky stock photo rendition of an emoji holding its own cup of joe. Smiling at that, she goes for a cup. They’re set away on an inconveniently high shelf for her height, so in reaching for one, she’s almost leaning over the table. White cloth sliding against her loose orange button-up. She goes to grab for a lid, when her elbow knocks with the side of the percolator, and the still healing scar on her forearm pulses with an anchor-deep ache she hasn’t taken notice of until the affronted muscles cried out, blistering, and she flinches—

It is then that she starts to become signally, fully, unmistakably aware of the bruise that flowers her elbow. The discoloring of skin around the oval scab that draws a line from the mountain out her joint to the bend under her upper arm. She stills for a moment, eyeing it carefully. Studying it odd as if it had jumped onto her skin somehow; a foreign object she had missed. Then—

It’s quick, like a flash. Something comes back to her in her head. Something distant, and off centered, marked by the presence of haze, and Irene sees herself somewhere else. Bigger, brash and much larger than life in a different shop, in a different time. A crash, something like loud blistering heat cutting at the tough skin of her arm. A shout, a voice so tinny and small; a face like a red beast holding something slick like smooth metal in its hands, she feels an odd heart beat thudding loud in her chest. Then white lights, then running.

Irene catches herself, her fingers forgetting the cup to grab at the table cloth. Gripping hard and tense. One of her hands comes up to rub at her face, staring into the floor, bewildered. What the fuck was that?

"You’ll get yourself worked up if you think about it too much."

Irene pauses, shoots her head up, looking around for anybody nearby. There’s no one in ear-shot of her. She’s by herself.

“ Whatever it is you are trying to do…” Kardala warns, from someplace within her. Irene can feel her threads of being pull at someplace warm and desperate, burning through her ribcage as she stands more straight. “Stop. You will only hurt yourself.”

“ Where did this scar come from?” She asks. Speaking in mind, because she doesn’t like the idea of having a verbal conversation with her other self in public.

Kardala doesn’t say a word, her silence muddled out by the noise of the work in the shop. It leaves Irene unnerved, her eyes squinting. “ Do you?”

“Ask the Demon.” Kardala simply says.

A weird answer, and she doesn’t like it. She makes it sound like it’s some well-kept secret. Irene can feel a scoff coming over her, hear it actually leave her mouth and turns her head to look towards the wall where the bathrooms stood. Nadiya had took Mary off in there to take care of something she didn’t quite explain to her when they went. The most she got as an answer was something along the lines of a “ minor check-up” and nothing else. Irene didn’t really know what that meant, but she didn’t bother to press for answers. Too caught up in her head to ask.

“ You know, it’s not nice to call people demons.”

“ But is she not one? Her abilities to hide emotion is something of an enormous feat I have yet to understand.

“That’s not true at all and you know it. She’s a nice girl who’s just hasn’t learned how to open up yet. You shouldn’t label her as emotionless just cause she chooses not to show out.”

“Hm. It is not my qualm if you choose to believe that, but I know the truth and I still stand by my words. Her extraordinary abilities are not of human origin.”

She makes a face, deciding from that, to turn away from the conversation. She goes for her discarded cup and begins filling it up, absentmindedly thinking back to her scar. She feels a bit warm in the forehead, taking a napkin up and dabbing the along her hairline, she sighs. Suddenly tired.

“ My head hurts.”

“ There is medication in the car. Kardala says, “You should take some. Your headaches are likely due from hunger. The little man has offered to go look for some food while the demon and the Sage woman tend to their wounds.”

“Wounds?” Irene perks at that, half-way through squeezing the lid on her cup. She looks back to the percolators. A line of concern drawing to her forehead. “ What happened?”

“ Something not good.”

“ Like what?”

After a moment, when the goddess doesn’t answer, Irene persists.

“ It would be wise to ask the demon about it.”

“ Why? Why can’t you just tell me?”

The sound of a door screeches open a few feet away from the back of the store. Out the corner of her eye, Irene spies the familiar form of Nadiya and Mary round the corner and walk out. She watches them maneuver through basket stands of flowers and shelves of old Russian dolls before they reach the storekeep. Nadiya passes something into the storekeep’s hands, whose eyes are wild on Mary throughout the entire exchange. Nadiya says some words and the woman behind the counter just nods and waves, tacking on some friendly have a nice day platitude as they walked off.

As the two women come closer, Irene gets a glimpse of their figures, and she can kinda see why the storekeep was so bewildered. Mary, despite how clean and kempt up her washed face looks, is a shaky nervous thing standing beside Nadiya. A blown apart mess in her too loose clothing. The collar of her shirt is wet, buttons done up crooked, unruly; the neck hole exposing some of her collar bone. The blotched red coloring of her cheeks, her shirt—chin, neck. Nadiya has wrinkles in her clothes, dark tired moons etch their home between the hills of her eyes and cheek bone. Their gaunt hands held together, one shaking and one firm, and despite what all cleanliness they had to salvage, Irene thinks to herself, they somehow look worse than they did walking in.

They say some words to each other, then Mary parts, sporting a small smile on her lips when Irene’s and her eyes meet. She watches the red head go, and Nadiya steps closer.

“ Hey.” Nadiya addresses, eyeing up Irene. “ You all set to go?”

Irene tries to speak, but finds her words are stuck to the back of her throat, she simply nods her head. Swallowing stiffly.

Ha! Thinks Kardala, a laugh too loud, it rattles against Irene’s teeth. You can’t even ask her!

Hush.

“ Great.” There’s a patient, but hard tired line to Nadiya’s voice, one Irene can’t help but notice. She remembers Remy telling her about how Nadiya spent most of her time on this trip driving them everywhere and never sleeping for more than an hour, and something in her chest itches.

Nadiya looks to the cup in Irene’s hands, a beat. “ Grab me a cup?”

“ Sure.” She blurts out, without even asking. “What kind?”

“Black. Two shots of cream if they have any.”

A simple task, Irene can handle that. She can handle pretty much anything besides an aggravated goddess riding shotgun in her body. She starts to turn back just as Nadiya pulls two crumpled fives out from the confounds of her pockets.

“ Here, for the coffee in case a cup isn’t free. And, if you’re feeling up for a snack from here instead of waiting on Remy.”She passes it to Irene than steps back. In the middle of watching Irene un-crumple the bills, she asks. “ Hey, are you alright?”

Irene looks up surprised. “ Uh, yeah. I’m fine. I’m okay.”

Nadiya nods, but there’s hesitance there, her brows creasing as she looks to the floor then back to Irene. “ Okay, just making sure.” She says, “See you outside?”

“ Yeah. See you.”

Nadiya makes for the door, the bell at the top chiming as she leaves the shorter woman behind to check up on the other two who are no doubt still waiting outside. And here Irene stands in the middle of this stuffy gift-shop. One coffee sitting in the palm of her shaking hand and repeats those same words in her head. It feels nice, proper somehow. Even if it’s not quite the right words. She still feels somehow at peace with it. A small smile comes over her as she fixes up her friend’s drink.

I’m okay.”

She feels Kardala somewhere swimming in her chest. Soft aura filing up the mountain of her ribcage and to the bridge of her neck in a warmth so real, so desperate, she almost chokes; the lid in her hand squished hazardly on the cup in reaction. She imagines hands where they are bones. Imagines breathing where there is a heartbeat, and knows that Kardala feels the same.

We are. We’re okay. Kardala booms, a thundering long shudder through Irene and she almost laughs, wiping at her face, doesn’t realize she’s crying.

And right she thinks.

They’re okay.

Somewhere between Ashville and the long winding road to Atlanta, Irene and Nadiya made the switch. It took a lot of begging, and a lot of Irene’s patient tender words and soft reasonings to wear down the stubborn wall that was Nadiya’s pride and her strict driving rules. Irene thinks that it’s for the best and that Nadiya deserves to have some rest for once. She’s been putting in so much of the work, it only seems fair that one or two of them pitch in to help every once in a while. Remy was actually surprised that Irene managed to wear down the wall where he had only scratched the surface with Nadiya. But was happy nonetheless; anything that gets her butt out of the driver’s seat is a fine solution to him. Seeing no complaints and took to the back seat where he and Mary hung out.

Irene didn’t mind, it was just a nice way to recollect herself. Gather her thoughts and maybe get a better handle again on her motor skills since it’s been so long since she’s come back from—well, that. She doesn’t really have a word for what that place is, but its sticky and cramped and awfully not as cold as she would have pictured it to be. Maybe with more room, and a little bit of light. If she could build that place to her liking, she would have added all sorts of nice things to mend it into something of a second home. To which, in a way, sounds ridiculous because she’s pretty sure Kardala resonates there? Or at least she does when Irene’s in the driver’s seat. Steering the reigns of her body all the way, relishing in her control.

It’s been a quiet drive so far, they’re driving fast highway side; buildings mixed in the splash green of trees, blurring past.

Nadiya is in the passenger seat, quiet, elbow locked with the side of the window. Her chin meeting the coarse palm of her hand, looking outward. While the other two in the back, lie out and sleep the last few hours of their trip away. There’s crumpled paper of sandwich wraps and the sweet bitter smell of three-hour old coffee cups sitting like a barrier between Nadiya and Irene.

“ So where are we going again?”

“ We’re heading to a place called Huntington Hills.” Nadiya sighs. She’s put her hair up in a tight bun. The fixture of sunlight outside the window hones in on the dome of it, a shiny blotch of bitter-autumn red. “ It’s a couple of miles away from the main city.

“ Huntington Hills…”

“Yeah. Remy’s place. It’s not that far.”

Right. Irene thinks, because she should’ve remember that. “And when did we all plan this?”

Nadiya look over to her, stares, then turns back to her window. “ Back a couple of days. We were staying at a hotel at the time, and were trying to figure out on where to go from there.”

Right. Right.

“Right.” Irene slows, searching the side mirror for incoming cars, then turns on her blinker, changing lanes. Right.

“Did no one like, debrief you on this? Or…” Nadiya starts, she’s sitting up in her seat now. Turned firmly away from the window and Irene wishes her voice wasn’t so sharp-tipped, wasn’t so stripped of mildness.

“No, I did, I just. Swam over most of the details.” She says. It’s not the perfect answer, and it don’t make a lot of sense, but its the only excuse she thinks Nadiya can weather over ‘My mind blanked and I zoned out.’ Digging her fingers deep into the shell of the wheel, coughs just so she can get her words up. “ Little by little it’s coming to me. But it wasn’t like I didn’t have help.”

She was right though, Nadiya doesn’t look like she believes those words. But all she does is hum curtly , like that acts as a response, nodding some. If Irene could turn and look at her in this moment, she would. But she refrains. They’re in the car right now, and she’s driving, and turning her eyes away from the wheel is a dangerous thing, something she would never do. Because she’s a good driver, and knows not to take her eyes off the road. Because she’s that all-star samaritan that follows the rules and keeps things centered. A neat and tidy woman; all wool and a yard wide. She would never. Absolutely she would never.

And after what feels like a long breath of silence, Nadiya shifts in her seat, settling backward. “ Kardala I assume?”

“ Somewhat, there’s still some things she hasn’t told me. But I’ve asked Remy and figured it out, put two and two together and all that. But it was a lot to take in. She says, “and some things were a lot harder to process than others but I took it all in stride…”

“ I’m surprised she told you anything at all. Given how much she hates being ‘imprisoned’ in you.” Nadiya points out, “I would think communications on your end would be moot.”

Irene’s mouth curls, with a laugh under her breath. Low and warbly. “ I used to think the same myself. Even though we have our differences, we still try to navigate ways to make things more amicable between us, despite our situation.”

“ And is it working?”

Irene takes a beat to respond. Outside, a bright green-blur of a sign buzzes past them. “ I don’t think so.”

Nadiya sighs at that, expectant. “ She’s a brash woman—er, goddess.” She shrugs, not sure if she should be using one or the other. “ Has she always been in you? Or was it just—”

Nadiya lifts her arm up and unrolls a sleeve. Points to it. Suggesting towards the STEM-plants.

“ No. I mean she was, but. She wasn’t as vocal as she was back before.”

“ Before…?”

“ When I was little. A long time ago, and maybe even before that.” She laughs, it’s short and startled, but its a laugh all the same. Then brings it back down, her shoulders forming hills. “ During those long years, I always felt like I wasn’t by myself. Like there was a shadow watching over me. The feeling never escaped, even as I grew older. In fact, I think it got worse.”

Most of that, from what she knows is the truth. Even if in a way, she can’t quite remember when and where those feelings came from, where that shadow first appeared. But she knows without a shadow of a doubt that it’s always been with her. This small once intangible feeling she’d get from the aching hole in her chest.

There was always something disconcertingly off about the way her body clenched at the first signs of thunder. The way the hairs on the back of her head always stood out; clear, vibrating with a life that was not her own. And there was something to be said about the way she felt stretched too thin in her own body. Like there was a thing within her. Burrowed deep in the shape of her bones, churning, blossoming into something with hard lines and jagged angles. A form that felt extended down; ancient in the ways her mothers used to tell her stories about gods and the people of the north. Bold in the ways she felt when she danced in rain, pink boots stomping dirty side-walk puddles, relishing in its bath. The way her veins thrummed with the existence of lightning, and snow, wind and rumbling thunder. A raging, unforgivably volatile thing. Menacing but alive.

“ Wow.” Nadiya says, breaking up the silence. “ I never knew it went that deep.”

No one knew. Irene thinks. Almost says.

When the stretch of the city of the finally came into view, they rolled at at brisk, less speeding pace. The sun rolling over the dome of the city’s skyline; light essentiates its form. Fleshing out the outlines, and drawing out the shadows.

They make it to a stoplight at the first left turn. The map on the dashboard skids, and Nadiya pulls it into her hands to read the street names. In that time, Irene is thankful for this moment of peace, for this moment of brief respite. She feels like she’s opened a dam up, words flooding out through rubber-slick lips, and yet somehow it feels like she’s only spilt a drop of who she is. Of what she feels she is, and more.

She scratches at her shirt, at the orange fabric that rubs uncomfortably against her neck. Wishing, not for the first time, that she had grabbed a spare set of clothing from her locker before fleeing on this trip. Then realizing quickly, how ridiculous that thought was, fingers pausing stiff; a nervous twitch.

It feels wrong to mourn something as trivial as a pair of sweats when there is so much else to worry about, but thinking about the Fellowship, after what all Remy had told her, and all the wreckage they left behind makes her chest tight.

And If she thinks of it for too long, she’ll start to get moody and then—

Well, maybe it was easier pretending she had less to worry about than. Better to be worried about a pair of pants than to think about a whole berg sucked into the ocean. Then it can’t be so overwhelming.

And yet—

“ What music station is this?” Nadiya asks over the static talk of the radio, Twisting quick through stations. A blubber of smooth tawny voices of southern era, mixes in with the raw electric cries of rockstars. There’s this brief flicker of emotion out of Nadiya, like heat lightning, her brows furrowing as she scrambles for tunes. She's got this funny look on her face. Thin lips pursed and eyes look built with a bowstring tension in the dark city lights. And Irene gets this shaky feeling in her gut, that she wasn’t the only one aching for a consolation.

“ Country.”

Nadiya’s nose bunches up. “ Gross.”

“ You don’t like country?’

“ Never did, it was always so weird. Artists singing about trackers and cheatin’ husbands and honky tonk? Ugh, spare me…”

Irene laughs good-naturedly and her worry ebbs. “ Not even Jolene, by Dolly Parton?”

There’s a beat of silence between them, almost for a whole minute as the light turns green and Irene drives off.

“Alright.” Nadiya says, “You got me beat there.” Irene smiles—something bright, and Nadiya ducks her head sheepishly.

The reaction is enough to send Irene guffawing, so much so, she almost loses control of the wheel.

#my writing

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webmuch · 7 years

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Pride Month 2017: LGBTQ Fashion & Beauty In style

Happy Pride Month Everyone! Every year, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month is celebrated in June to honour the 1969 Stonewall riots. The riots, which took place in Manhattan, were a crucial tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the U.S. So every year during this month, everyone around the world comes together to celebrate how far we have come since then. We show our full support for the LGBTQ community and we in particular love what the fashion and beauty industries have done this year. So many brands help out but raising money and awareness for the LGBT charities and we all need to appreciate it. During the entire pride month, we saw some amazing collaborations, collections, beauty products and got to know about several LGBT owned brands we never knew about.

We hope this month, next month and every month after will inspire you to help out the LGBTQ movement. Let’s stick together and stand up for love because after all love is love! Check out the all the LGBT glam below:

L G B T

Life gets better together

Pride Month 2017: LGBTQ Fashion & Beauty In Style

LGBTQ Owned Brands You Need To Know

We all know the amazing gay men that have really shaped the fashion industry over the years, by building these high-end brands for us. Women’s fashion has been taken to a whole new level because of them and we don’t know what the fashion industry would be like without them. But we all know a lot about them right? What you might not know are the small super cool designers killing it with their gender-bending clothing lines. You should check them out, especially during this time where we are celebrating pride month. Some of the LGBTQ owned brands are really worth checking out.

Chromat

An American Fashion Label based in New York City was built by Becca McCharen in 2010. Fashion can help move the society forward and this is what this brand has done. Chromat is known for its innovative structural and angular clothing. They have also become very famous for its black clothing that features designs based on the structure of the human body. Becca McCharen is part of the LGBTQ community and has experiences discrimination. She says that her clothing is just like her being ‘queer’! Her experiences and trials had formed her brand into what it is today. She makes sure her campaigns and models involve a range of different people from helping women, people of color and people of different sexual orientations. She wants to be able to break into the traditionally male-dominated fashion industry. Last year we saw this upcoming trend of inner wear becoming outerwear and this is what her brand represents as well. She is breaking all the boundaries of what should be worn where.

This pride month she says : “As fashion designers, we have the power to highlight and celebrate beauty in all different forms. Every fashion week is an opportunity to celebrate those inspirational people and have these incredible women and non-binary babes reflected in our runway show. It’s not a trend—it’s our life.”

Ready To Stare

Ready to Stare is a body positive apparel and accessory brand and personal style blog that was started By Alysse Dalessandro. Both the brand and the blog are designed for those who believe in following their passion, loving themselves and inspiring others to do the same. The brand is specifically oriented towards plus size females. Her aim was to create a brand for the people who were getting left out of the mainstream fashion lines.

Dallesandro says “I wanted to create a haven for those who get stared at because they’re different and who choose, instead of hiding, to stare back and keep shining,”

You must check out her “Thank You For Staring” look book, which is explicitly LGBTQ+ and size inclusive.

Play out

Play out believes in: BE OUT. PLAY IN STYLE. A queer owned fashion brand specifically designs gender-neutral underwear that is colourful, bold, playful and bursting with energy. The founder and designer of play out Abby Sugar says: “As a queer-owned brand, we knew that we wanted to create something for our LGBTQIA family, but also embody and proudly display who we are to the rest of the [heterosexual, binary-gendered] world.” Their brand is lesbian-inspired, gender-inclusive, free, sexy, and fun for women, men and people of all gender identifications. As they have grown their brand, Play Out have worked with men, women, trans- and gender-free individuals of all backgrounds, ethnicity, gender presentations and sexual orientations.

Tyler Wallach Studios

Tyler Wallach is such an inspiration, he is a creative and independent queer artist from Harlem, NY. He is well known for his bright and bold coloured street-art characters on both canvas and clothing. The brand brings out the best bold bright graphics to their clothing which features street characters and unisex designs that can be worn by people of gender. His compassion, love and care towards the LGBTQ community keeps him inspired to be the artist he is. He produces large-scale paintings every year that are donated and auctioned off by national LGBTQ charities with 100% of proceeds going to at-risk youth and anti-bullying efforts.

Tyler Wallach Studio is taking over the fashion game! Check out his vibrant and rebellion designs against the status quo!

Rebirth Garments

Rebirth Garments are designed and made by hand by Sky Cuba-cub, a QPOC (Gender queer Person of Color) from Chicago. Every garment is customised and all their brand campaigns feature models of all sizes and genders doing all sorts of splits and fun stuff in wheelchairs with oxygen masks. They are inclusive and representative in their imaginary and garment customization. The aim for the brand is to be able to give products accessible to queer crip youth along with being able to provide free/reduced priced garments for people in need. They believe Rebirth Garments has the power to give you the confidence and strength to feel comfortable in your first skin.

Through the collection, people can confidently express their individuality and identity. This identity according to the brand is that of Queer Crip, meaning queer, gender non-conforming identities, visible and invisible disabilities/ disorders—physical, mental, developmental, emotional etc.

10 Fashion Brands That Are Giving Back To The LGBT Community

Around this time of the year as soon as we hit the month of June we see brands embracing the rainbow like never before. They all find their own unique and stylish ways to honour the start of pride month by releasing collections or limited edition products sporting the pride flag colors. As we mentioned before this is the time when these brands donate the proceeds to LGBTQ charities and organisations. We have put together the top 10 brands who have come out with the most beautiful products in support of LGBTQ people for Pride. Pride branding has really come a long way as the new generation has done so many things to make a difference. We see more brands than ever now using models of color and trans models to promote their brands, rather than going for big celebrities. Check out our favourite picks from this month:

Nike

Nike’s journey of supporting the LGBTQ community began in 2012 with their #BeTrue Collection in the wake of its marriage equality campaign. Ever since then Nike has provided approximately $2.5 million for financial and in-kind support for LGBT causes. They come out with the most amazing limited edition kicks and rainbow spins on some of their most popular shoes. They have taken a bold step with their #BeTrue2017 Collection where they suggest that rainbows are not the only gay symbol. They have paired it along with other symbols of Pride, such as the color pink and the triangle.

“Sporting your rainbow in the gym or on a run became a way to feel like you belonged to something larger – you were connected to being ‘out’ or being an ally. The rainbow has and always will be incorporated into the BETRUE product in some way.” – Robert Goman, LBGT Network Leader at Nike

Dr. Martins

We love what they are doing! Dr. Martins is donating $5 from every $145 pair of 1460 Pride Boots to the Trevor Project. This is a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth. They are also going to be hosting Pride events all summer long to create a huge amount of awareness and give the LGBTQ community all the support they deserve. This funky colorful boots are totally taking us back to the 90`s. The shoe brand is associated with punk rock and these boots come with a message. On one boot there are words written across it such as LGBT+, LOVE and UNITY On the other boot it has a rainbow pattern all over and both the boots come with bright rainbow laces.

American Eagle

American Eagle are really doing their part this year by donating 100% of the sales of its 2017 Pride Collection to benefit the It Gets Better project. Their collection for pride month includes t-shirts, boxer-briefs, boy briefs, a rainbow beaded choker and a hat. They have a campaign called #WeAllCan which was started to remind everyone that they can be anything and do everything they want. This collection has been rolled into this campaign as it fits the message perfectly.

Everlane

Out of all the brands, we have listed Everlane is one of the companies that it truly committed to ethical production practices. They began their 100% Hymen campaign in January where they started giving $5 of each purchase to the ACLU. Later as International Women’s Day came they came out be millennial pink shirts where the profits went to women’s rights organisation. Now for pride month, their complete focus was on PRIDE with 100% Human rainbow shirts.

The campaign declares “Gay. Bi, Lesbian. Queer. Trans. Non-Binary”. Whoever you love, however, you identify, we’re all 100% Human.

Gap inc.

The most famous Pride lines are rainbows, love is love and love wins. Gap Inc. came out with colorful rainbow t-shirts with these lines along with being paired with their brand logo. 30% of Gap’s Pride T-shirt net sales and $2 from every Pride-themed eGiftCard will go to the UN Free & Equal organization. For pride month Gap inc. released a corporate video in order to encourage their employees #weartheirpride.

Levi`s

Levi’s approach to the pride month merchandise is a little different than the others. They believe in going beyond just slapping on rainbows on t-shirts. They came out with black and white tanks and tees that have Fight Stigma written across them. The Fight Stigma initiative and product line is inspired by 80`s HIV awareness efforts. Levi’s Pride collection this year is utterly thorough, with jeans, shirts, pins, bandannas, socks and underwear.

100% of proceeds will be donated to the Harvey Milk Foundation and Stonewall Community Foundation.

Urban Outfitters

We love how fun and refreshingly the Pride fashion line is from Urban Outfitters. They designed the #UOPride line in partnership with hip-hop artist Taylor Bennett where all the profits are going to GLSEN. GLSEN is a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving the school experience for LGBTQ youth. The designs as we said are very fun and bubbly. The collections for pride month is full of soft pastel colours with rainbows and statements like love is love. This year, the merchandise was shown off on a mix of young LGBTQ creatives, like dancer Harper Waters, model Torraine Futurum, activist Tyler Ford and musician Taylor Bennett.

Meundies

MeUndies are donating $1 from every pair of Pride underwear sold to the Los Angeles LGBT Center. We find their colourful polka dot underwear super cute along with being one of the most stunning campaigns for pride month. Their campaign involves a range of diverse and refreshingly female-focused line-up of human beings. Their “celebrate yourself” campaign and video series is about “feeling proud from the inside out.”

Converse

Converse have gone all out with not 1 but 37 different shoe designs on its Chuck Taylor’s and they are all pretty amazing. A part of the line is 70’s inspired and others include rainbow-soled high-tops and low-tops. They have patterns of all sorts from gradients, flags, spots, lines and stars. The name of their campaign is #YesToAll where this encourages people to feel free to be who they are. Net proceeds will go towards the It Gets Better Project and Miley Cyrus’s Happy Hippie Foundation.

Gucci

Gucci pays tribute to classic Elton John with this fantastic footwear for pride month this year. These platform sneakers are really giving a strong fashion statement. Along with these platforms they also came out with leather high-top sneakers and a pride print t-shirt.

Beauty Brands That Are Giving Back To The LGBT Community

We have discussed and seen how fashion brands have shown their support during Pride month this year but the beauty companies are no exception. We heard of companies giving out free products to the LGBTQ youth on every purchase along with others trying to raise a huge amount of money for organisations that support them. The true essence of Pride Month is giving the LGBTQ community a chance to freely express themselves. We saw the rainbows on the clothes, shoes and accessories it’s now time to see some fun colourful beauty products. You should really feel proud to own some of these products in your beauty kits.

We also came across several Pride-themed makeup looks everywhere on social media throughout the month, so people were either celebrating and supporting by buying some of these beauty products or creating vibrant colourful looks.

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