Vice Style

Dr. Noki—Noki being 'ikon' reversed—began his career styling video jockeys on MTV and shoots for the now-defunct Blah Blah Blah magazine. He's currently better known for making the anti-corporate branding one-offs he's been making out of old sportswear, under the Noki brand name, since 1996. He was on the whole sustainable clothes tip way before all those shitty eco-fashion brands began popping up and nowadays is the guy that big brands like New Era call on when they want to do something a little out there, like the limited edition Oink NotPis adidas sneakers, for example. Since Noki made his name attacking brands like those two, which definitely seems on the weirder side of contradicting yourself, I decided to find out if he could make sense of the whole conundrum.

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VICE: Hello Doctor. You've said before that Noki was started because you were reading Culture Jam, Kalle Lasn's book about America becoming a brand rather than a country. Why start a brand after reading a book that attacks branding and consumerism?
Dr. Noki: Well, right back at the beginning of 1996 I was working on a potentially subversive fashion magazine called Noki-Pod, that never made it to print, but I took that idea and started messing with sports logos to make anti-brand statements and physically subverting branded basics by sewing tees together and making them into fabulous dresses. I saw this as a fashion culture jam, which is basically when you disrupt mainstream cultural institutions, like Kalle Lasn talks about in his book.

So you're disrupting fashion rather than becoming a part of it? Because I thought it was weird that reading a book that denounces brands would make you want to start a brand, like some kind of big 'fuck you' to Kalle Lasn.
Ha ha. I actually don't think he is denouncing brands, though. He's more interested in making a very valid public announcement that the subliminal powers that brands have on our psyche are completely controlled by the boardroom manipulators and they disguise those messages as entertainment, which makes them very hard to question. I decided to question that corporate fashion angle and created the Noki-One-Off, my one-off creations, as a direct statement against their guilty secret, the shameful excitement of excess. I used the power of brand names and branding to spread my own anti-corporate messages often in the same typeface as the brand name and in the same spaces on the clothes.

Why did you choose to customize sportswear and not high-end fashion if you're attacking fashion's worst excesses?
Mostly because I was always really into sportswear. For a lot of people sports brands are at the top end of what they can afford: Y-3 sportswear, Stella McCartney sportswear, Ralph Lauren sportswear, Dior sportswear, and all the other charlatan sports brands that sell lame trainers and sportswear garments at premium prices. As soon as I made a dress for my magazine, people wanted to know why adidas and Nike didn't make dresses like that. I'd subverted a household brand into something new and created an art brand, which gave the pieces I made a new value as one-off, desirable creations.

So is Noki fashion at all, or do you see it all as art?
Noki is art, yeah. It's a collage of pop brand identity and lending that art the form of a high fashion silhouette is the culture jam. Then there's the NHS or Noki House of Sustainability which is dedicated to the creation of one-off futuristic street couture, produced from the mountains of inspirational vintage pieces and sustainable textile pieces I get given every day. I helped set-up London's 123 store, and although I have nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the store, they stock my work and provide all the sustainable textiles I use.

Cool. So, how did all the NHS stuff differ from what you'd been doing already?
Well, previous to NHS, Noki pieces were no-holds-barred, brand-bending, anti-fashion, and anti-brand statements. And because of people's reactions to that, it was hard to see what good I could achieve by being so militant with the Noki message. Everything was always so angry, destructive, and difficult. The fashion world has very little space for real thinking, and the art crowd allegedly hates fashion, so NHS didn't feature my subversive, anti-corporate-branding, and brand name-bending slogans.

Coco Chanel said "fashion is made to become unfashionable" which is completely true, in most cases. Is your sustainable fashion stuff with NHS supposed to be sustainably fashionable too? As in, are you trying to create something timeless?
Yeah, I'd like to think that any one of the one-offs is a unique statement and is worth cherishing forever. Noki is fun, it's built around a ferocious drive for change, and it's meant to be art.

Alright. Considering you're so against this whole mass-produced culture, how would you change the fashion industry if you could?
On reflection, I wouldn't change a thing, actually. The fashion industry is so lost in its own vice of mass production and so far gone in terms of its self-important army of workers, that it has created its own problems internally. Now, 15 years later, the big industry brands are questioning their own work. Dissatisfaction with the chain stores and the fashion magazines is causing people to look to real, authentic design, so people can escape the mass-produced monotony on offer. The chain stores have done some good, though, they've educated the mindless consumer about design and trend and a small percentage of those people now desire to escape the mediocre offerings of the chain stores and they're the ones I'm personally interested in.

So, lastly, what are the masks all about?
Oh, the Noki-SOB-Mask—Suffocating Of Branding—is über-important to the Noki visual image. The mask is my way of being honest about the insecurities and paranoia that we all feel, even at our most confident. I also truly believe that it's the human mind's need to remove the masks I put on people which forces them to reject the brand and discover something more important underneath. A human.


JAMIE CLIFTON

TAGGED: Noki, Nhs