Vice Style

Maybe you remember last week's Stalking Heads interview with Niko Da Ikon, the Cali-based 20-year-old obsessed with styling himself via some mad axis where millennial online poker champion meets hood teen, and all sorts of 90s cliches of aesthetic upscaleness. Right after we did that, he sent us this video of him acting out his own video to Tevin Campbell's super-slushy R&B hit "Can We Talk". It's mind-blowing, especially if, like us, you had never heard the song until now, and your brain is now programmed only to match the tune and singing to Niko's insane look and mind. 

Theodor Pištěk, now 80 years old, is a Czech costume designer best known for his work on 1984’s Amadeus, for which he won an Academy Award. During the 1980s, when Czechoslovakia was cut off from the West by the Iron Curtain, Theodor was shut out of the Czech film industry, then a puppet of the Communists. However, he managed to transition into the US market and make films with his friend Miloš Forman, who in 1968 fled Czechoslovakia for the USA. They collaborated on Valmont and The People vs. Larry Flint, but Amadeus was the pair’s biggest success. It took home eight Academy Awards and turned Theodor into an icon among fashion designers.

One could view the victory of a bunch of Czechs at the premier American film awards as one of the signs that the Cold War was ending. But back then, in the mid-80s, the totalitarian regime running the country tended to punish citizens who experienced success abroad, and Theodor became an unlikely target. I asked him about his struggle. 

Gianni Molaro's CV reads a bit like the uncensored ramblings of a delusional schizophrenic with a taste for fashion and offending people. He recently unveiled his bizarre uniboob dress at Rome Fashion Week, designed a range of wedding wear modeled by a gay couple, designed screaming head dresses that look like the physical manifestation of a nightmare, and sculpted a figure of a white Michael Jackson shedding his black skin, which he made public, thoughtfully, on the day of Jackson's death. Also, he broke the world record for the longest veil on a wedding dress—a full 1.86 miles—which isn't that wild, but it might give you an idea of how he gets his kicks when he's not making the internet go crazy for his art couture collections. That's him in one of his own creations above, by the way.

Remember a few months ago when we were freaking out hard over the Comme Des Fuckdown hat that one of the A$AP Mob was wearing in their VICE shoot a couple of months back? The one that made us get all excited about streetwear again, even after tumblr completely over-saturated the internet en masse with endless photos of their swag new swag? Well, Ukrainian-born, Coney Island-raised Russ Karablin is responsible for turning us all into gaggling tweenage girls, as he designed the hats almost a decade ago, before recently re-released them as part of a whole Comme Des Fuckdown range.

If you know your streetwear—as in, really know, not just who collaborated on the last Hundreds line, or whatever—then Russ's name will mean a lot to you. He has been running SSUR, his main brand, for the better part of 20 years, and has released an impossible amount of clothing under masses of different brand names, including The Cut, Rebel Ape, and Natural Born, throughout that time. The brands he currently has on the go are SSUR, Comme Des Fuckdown, and Caviar Cartel, but that could change at any moment. I had a chat with him about his time designing streetwear and why his Comme hats are so fucking cool.    

If you're not into wasting hours of your life every night trawling through Wikipedia looking at movie trivia and inane facts about serial killers, then you probably won't be that familiar with Ed Gein. However, you should get to know, as ol' Ed had arguably the most relevance to fashion out of any of history's notorious killers. Instead of disposing of the bodies, he decided to channel some of his venomous passion for killing into a kitschy sideline of arts and crafts, turning victims into charming belts made out of their nipples and face masks made out of their skin. 

French artist Olivier Goulet's work looks alarmingly similar to how I imagined Gein's creations, only Olivier makes all of his SkinBag range out of synthetic human skin, rather than savagely butchering people and using their remains in demented power rituals. Let me just reiterate: Olivier Goulet makes high concept art fashion out of synthetics, he doesn't kill people for kicks. I had a chat with him to see why he chose human skin as his art medium and not something more normal like, say, paint, or literally anything else.

Igor spent two days making his fruit shoes, which you can see in his Selling My Juice video.

Igor Dewe is just the sort of jollification injection the pouty, dour-faced fashion industry needs: a hairy 21-year-old French guy who gained notoriety by dressing in rainbow-tie-dyed Lycra shorts, heelless platform pumps, and a Turkish hat while sexily grooving his hips and soaping up the limos of stuck-up journalists as they arrived at Paris Fashion Week. Igor is a dancer, performer, fashion activist, and designer, and he makes the most original and insane footwear we’ve ever seen. We’re talking 16-inch platforms made out of fruit, tin cans, sand castles, candle wax, and leaves. Not only does he create the shoes with his own hands, he also crafts equally spectacular outfits and performance art pieces. For instance, he once hooked a fruit juicer up to his crotch and invited people to slurp the sweet goodness that dribbled out of an attached plastic hose. Of course, we had to speak with Igor for the betterment of those sad souls of the fashion industry—and the world at large.

Pierre Cardin is one of those names everyone knows, even if you have no idea who he is or what he looks like. For the clueless, he is the man behind and the designer of one of the most famous logos in fashion—the entwined pc splashed across more than 800 products: neckties, collapsible bicycles, car upholstery, chocolate, cigarettes, ice buckets, frying pans... You get the idea.

It’s not hyperbole to say that Yves Saint Laurent is the greatest, most evocative name in the history of fashion. Stefano Pilati has been the company’s creative director for the past decade, defining yet another era with his analytic eye for design and plainspoken opinions about fashion’s place in modern culture. Before taking the helm at YSL, Stefano worked closely with Tom Ford and Miuccia Prada, perhaps the most innovative figures in Italian fashion of the past 20 years.

While Stefano was the most suitable candidate to take over the billion-dollar fashion house after Tom Ford’s departure, that doesn’t mean he didn’t piss off a lot of people in the process. And while writing about and interviewing those in the fashion industry can very quickly veer into pretentious nonsense, to be honest, for people who—like me—live fashion the same way others live music or art, Stefano’s as real as it gets. So far he’s managed to keep YSL economically viable while flying the banner of elegance and weirdness first raised by his mentor and master, Yves—a psychotic genius whose madness created a new way of communication. But things are changing for designers, times are tough and battles must be picked carefully. As Kim Jong-il used to say, “He who is afraid of a challenge will never be a good revolutionary.” Stefano is undoubtedly a revolutionary figure and he’s not afraid of provocation, whether that means serving up controversy or sitting back while fashion bloggers bitch about him.

I conducted the following interview with Stefano via Skype. He was sitting in his office in Paris, dressed to the nines, while I wasted away on my bed like a Nan Goldin photograph.

Iggy enjoys a tender moment with a companion at his home in Miami, 2012.

Some people might ask, "what does a guy who’s been shirtless for at least two-thirds of his life have to say about fashion"? If you’re one of them, this interview is not for you. Read it some other time, after you’ve listened to The Stooges, Raw Power, Fun House, Lust for Life, and The Idiot and realized that Iggy Pop’s animalistic physicality has informed style for decades and will continue to do so well after the last time he writhes and slithers across a stage.

Iggy’s ubiquitous uniform—pants so tight they could have been spray-painted on, a sinewy bare chest that didn’t start aging until his 60s, and Beatle boots or bare feet, depending on his mood—undoubtedly looks at least five times better than whatever you’re wearing right now. It was also carefully calculated, like a sleek, stripped-down hot rod built with the single-minded goals of efficiency and speed.

A thorough perusal of archival photos and video of Iggy reveals that he took the same care in his appearance offstage, where he tends to wear a bit more clothing, almost every outfit seems iconic in some way, but also natural and unforced. As far as I can tell, over the past four decades he hasn’t worn anything that could be considered embarrassing or dated in 2012. I’m not sure there’s anyone else on Earth—save menswear designers who never stray from suits—whom you could say the same thing about.

But Iggy’s not just a historical figure. In the 21st century, he has worked hard to revitalize his name, with Stooges tours, records, and collaborations with various clothing brands. His argument for participating in these unabashedly commercial enterprises is that the Stooges never got the recognition and the sales they deserved in their brief lifetime. So if this is the way to finally achieve some payback, he has no problem jumping on board.

As far as I could tell, no one has interviewed Iggy explicitly and exclusively about fashion, so that’s precisely what I did.

French brand Sixpack specialize in making people think with their t-shirts, as each collection revolves around a common theme which is then interpreted by a range of proper, exhibited artists spanning disciplines like graphics, painting, fine art, and comic books. Sometimes their t-shirts provoke Muslims to try burning down their office, other times they make you feel calm and contemplative, but every t-shirt is one you'd happily wear because founder and art director Lionel Vivier has 14 years of experience in what makes a t-shirt amazing. I had a chat with him about the Sixpack archive becoming a museum of life and why putting illustrated gay porn on t-shirts probably isn't the best idea.