SELF STARTERS: NEW DESIGNERS MAKING IT WORK
What is the answer to building a successful design house from scratch in 2019? The first thing is to decide which question it is you are setting out to solve, and then to pursue that solution through your work. Here three very distinct young designers from Los Angeles, London and Milan share the personal stories, beliefs and aesthetics that have equipped them with a creative context in which to define their work.
Rhude
Los Angeles
Does the American dream still exert its power over our imagination? What increasingly seems like a 20th-century narrative has been cleverly refashioned and flipped for a new generation by a 20-something Filipino immigrant named RhuigiVillaseñor. His clothes – this is a streetwear label, but something else too – feature traditional Americana seen through a fresh prism. Villaseñor arrived in LA aged 11 after his parents (his father is an architect, his mother a seamstress) moved the family from Manila via Saudi Arabia. He attended high school, felt like an outsider, but grew into his new culture. His fashion origin story catalyst came in 2012, when Kendrick Lamar wore a blue bandana print T-shirt thatVillaseñor had sent him, and the orders came rolling in.The Spring/ Summer 2020 collection thatVillaseñor showed as his label Rhude’s Paris Fashion Week debut was drenched in visual symbolism. Entitled “Seven Falls”, after a Colorado tourist attraction, there were melancholic Twin Peaks souvenir graphics and funny Richard Prince-esque outtake shots of a cowboy being thrown from his horse.“That represents the will to get up again and keep going despite any negativity,”Villaseñor explained.
The designer has long riffed on cigarette packaging – he says because he once had a girlfriend who smoked and he couldn’t stand it – and rather brilliantly goes beyond font-ripping to incorporate the angular patterns of a Marlboro pack into the hardware on his bags, boots and other small leather goods. It’s not all about America – he’s also borrowed Honda’s unfurled wing – and it’s not all about streetwear, either: a side-striped track pant named the “traxedo” and hybrid but undeniably tailored outerwear pieces hint that his urge to renew is not limited to iconography.“My clothes very much mirror my own journey from the Philippines to LA, and my family’s journey too. But we’ve all got stories, and people relate. I used to call it an homage to personal stories, using iconographies to paint a picture, and in a way it is a nod to that Warholian notion of art.”Villaseñor added:“I just want to make items that can live with you through different eras… something you could wear now, would have worn in the 1970’s, and would still be able to wear in 2070.”
Bethany Williams
London
How can fashion make the world tangibly better? By striving to create clothes in which good is embedded, Bethany Williams has created a working model that apparently has no downside: it is environmentally sustainable, it benefits at-risk individuals and charities who work on their behalf, it is profitable, and it produces menswear that is both attractive on its surface and fascinating in its substance. If there is one problem with this young designer’s way of doing things, it’s as a result of the justified attention her work has won.After showing for the first time at London Fashion Week Men’s in 2018, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design earlier this year and was a 2019 LVMH Prize finalist.When we spoke in September, she was simultaneously preparing to fly to Milan for an exhibition curated by Sara Maino, plotting projects with the Tate Liverpool and Nottingham Contemporary galleries, applying for funding from Britain’s Arts Council for another and, oh yes, working on the collection that she will show next January.“What’s difficult,” she noted wryly, “is that there is so much going on now that it’s hard to find the headspace to think about what to do next.”Williams said that “with each collection I make a new system”, which is true, but each season that system follows a formula that she is refining and improving as she goes. In essence that formula is this: she works with a charity or good cause to partner with the disadvantaged people it champions to help in the manufacture of her collections.The themes that this cause represents are reflected not only in the decoration of those collections but also in their very fabric, thanks to the ingenious partnerships Williams brokers to source raw materials that are upcycled to become the material in the garments.A significant proportion – between 10 and 30 per cent – of the profits made on sales is then returned to the cause that inspired it.Williams’s manufacturing partners include recovering female addicts at San Patrignano in Rimini, machinist apprentice inmates at English prison HMP Downview, a women’s shelter in Liverpool named Adelaide House, a safe space charity in London named Spires, the Manx Workshop for the Disabled on her native Isle of Man, and the recipients of a London food bank. All of these partners work with sustainable materials of which some – like the fabric made from recycled copies of the Liverpool Echo newspaper in the “Adelaide House” collection – that add an extra layer of meaning to the garments.
Giuliano Calza
Milan
Can a story be too good to be true? From the outside, Giuliano Calza’s giddy ascent from junior member of the Blumarine press team to the creator of (and designer at) one of the buzziest labels in both Milanese and global streetwear sounds unlikely. My absolute favourite detail in it is how the acronym that is now famous for signifying God Can’t Destroy Streetwear did not originally signify that at all.As Calza explains it, in 2014 he had been in Shanghai for four years, first at university and later working alongside his brother Giordano on developing a chain of Italian eateries originally named Sofia, and later Mylk (My Little Italian Kitchen). Giuliano’s role was design and image, but all was not well: he was waiting tables to fill staffing gaps, sleeping in the stockroom to save on rent, and then had visa problems. So he headed back to Milan. With him he brought 100 black sweaters and pairs of tube socks emblazoned in collegiate font with the letters GCDS: “Actually this stood for Giuliano Calza Design Studio, which was the company I was trying to develop in Shanghai. But to sell them in Milan I had to start by thinking of another name.” And so God Can’t Destroy Streetwear was born. Five years on and the Calza brothers (Giordano runs the money side, Giuliano the design) have just opened a store in Hong Kong, have more soon opening in London and Shanghai, present co-ed shows at Milan Fashion Week, employ 30 people in their studio, and number annual sales in the millions. Calza says: “GCDS today is about being ironic colourful and fun – and not taking everything too seriously… I’m decorating with my own fantasies that I had as a gay teenager in Naples.” A recent make-up launch saw them create a lipstick named Velvet Dick.They are poised to reveal a rebranding of the pasta brand Barilla, in which its packaging is turned from traditional blue to hot pink. Looking at the GCDS collections and its underboob buoyed campaigns featuring Pamela Anderson and Caroline Vreeland, you can indeed see the same distinctive anchovy saltiness of street fashion in Naples – the sexy funny slogan sensibility that is particular to that great city. For Spring/Summer 2019, GCDS proposed a knee-high laced boot featuring the face of Pokémon icons Pikachu and Jigglypuff. Calza says retailers (of which the brand now has 400) were unsure: “But after we fixed some problems with construction they sold out everywhere.” Being bold is paying off for the Calzas: haters can’t destroy streetwear, either.