Vice Style

While I was on tour in Osaka—the city everyone says is cooler than Tokyo, to prove how cool they are—with my band T33TH!!!, in between multiple meals of street side takoyaki, I visited two really amazing stores: Excube, a shop/gallery in downtown Osaka selling original Keith Haring jumpers and limited edition AKIRA laser discs, and Fragile, one of the best t-shirt stores in the world.

One of the Flygirls - Rotterdam, 2002

Exactitudes, the photo project started in 1994 by Dutch photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek, is probably the best way of crushing any persisting dream you have of individuality, if that's the kind of bizarre, masochistic thing you're into. Spanning almost two decades, Exactitudes is an anthropological study of every social group and subculture the duo can get into their studio, from the Beijing kids obsessed with Scream Records, and fur-loving Italian women, to stay-at-home dads and religious rockers in Rotterdam. Every group is photographed in a super uniform way and placed in a grid, to accentuate their similarities and differences. I spoke to Ari about the project and what it's all supposed to mean.              

We met Balmung, BodySong, and Runurunu in one of the weirdest buildings in Tokyo. They're in a fashion collective called Dinner, and although they hang out and work together, they make clothes under their own names. They build shrines out of boom boxes, have Japanese contemporary dancers perform in intestine-inspired costumes, and make performance artists wear two-foot tall boat shoes.

We like Primitive because they're really trying to shape a new, not totally boring and predictable fashion scene around their store, which is an unfortunately rare thing in a business built on novelty. They stock insane Japanese labels you've never heard of and really need to see up close, but also stock enough stuff people like you and I can actually afford, as well as weird, techy fashion mags and exhibitions. And, you can always tell when they're having a party, because Kingsland Road near their store fills up with what always looks like dozens of very fashion-forward all black-clad bands. Veronica So's band Teeth is on tour with Primitive in Japan, so we had her ask one half of Primtive, Andrew Green, about the Japanese fashion scene and some more about the store.

Remember when that old friend of yours asked your opinion on the Arab spring and you said Hussein Chalayan’s SS12 collection wasn’t too strong but Nasir Mazhar’s stuff was looking good? That was mortifyingly embarrassing, huh? And, by the way, made you sound borderline racist, because Turkish people are not Arabs.

Anyway, the best method of clawing back any shred of respect from a situation like that, while also demonstrating that you really do have an interest in geopolitical issues as well as pretty clothes, is to become an advocate for Japanese designer Ryohei Kawanishi. He collages together socio-political-inspired images, employs layered fabrics to signify layers of meaning, and tangles fabric to represent the way issues are inextricably intertwined to produce wearable reportage on whatever’s bothering him in the world. Sure, this sounds pretentious, but it's also sort of genius-level insane, and anyway, expensive clothes, by definition, sort of always are. You'll probably remember his graduate collection as, “That ridiculously insane show with the bummed-out looking Hasidic Jew, junkyard fabric, the huge UN flag, and all the Twitter and Facebook logos.”

BSST is a column asking people what they want to beg for, sell, steal or trade.

Dog Show is kind of a "girl's wet dream", explain designers and shop owners Christine Stormberg and Anna Greer. Their studio and store-cum-miscellaneous art space in residential Echo Park, LA, is marked by a gigantic unicorn head on its exterior, alongside a painted Necco Wafers-tinted American flag and the exclamation: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. Inside, they hawk custom swimwear and 90s vintage sportswear‚ a 12-foot hair wall displays barrettes and scrunchies, while pieces of pink braided hair wind around their chandelier. Tina and Anna, both formally trained artists, also live in the space and treat it like a morphing installation.

Their current personal styles: Tina's is millennium dark angel and Anna's is the lesbonic plague promote an aesthetic that's gross but beautiful... and weirdly futuristic—think Barbie meets Shrek somewhere in cyberspace. They host salon nights with other artists that do things like spray tan tattooing, fortune telling, and goth life coaching, whatever that means. Their debut presentation, Bikini Weenie Roast, is this Sunday.

VICE Italy's still life shoot was rendered by 26-year-old Portland-based psychedelic, performance, digital, and installation artist, fractal employer, virtual world builder, and portals into other dimensions-seeker, Brenna Murphy. 

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.

You don’t need to be a die-hard fashion person to figure out how fashion works, it’s pretty obvious stuff: whatever is IN fashion now won’t be next season, and vice-versa—it's an endlessly predictable cycle. So really all you have to do is track down whatever looks stupid at the moment and wear it before everyone else does. Or, if you don’t have time to do that, some people will do the digging for you. Someone like Dora Moutot, for example. Her trend forecasting website called La Gazette Du 'Mauvais' Gout, "the newspaper of bad taste"—it's a play on France’s first fashion mag, Gazette du Bon Ton—is a convenient catalog of all of the ahead of the game freaks. 

Have you ever wished there were t-shirts with meaning behind them, sans the teen angst, with photos sourced from obscure Danish amateur photography books form the 1950s? If so, then Tourne de Transmission might be for you.