AFTER KANYE, AFTER VIRGIL, AFTER HERON
After decades of flirtation, hip-hop and high fashion have created a union perfected in men’s fashion
The speed with which hip-hop and high fashion have become enamored of each other is staggering. Increasingly, it is impossible to speak about one without invoking the other. From one direction, rappers like ASAP Rocky, Lil Uzi Vert, Tyler, the Creator and more have become style luminaries, fearless adopters of forward-looking selfpresentation. At the same time, the shapes of high-end menswear have been morphing, taking in silhouettes borrowed from streetwear and the hip-hop style of the 1990s.
This union is the end result of decades of flirtation between the two worlds, dating back to Dapper Dan’s luxury bootlegs, with stops at the jiggy era of the mid-to-late 1990s and the Japanese streetwear influence of the late 2000s. All those moments set the table for what now seems inevitable: Hip-hop is dictating the tone of men’s fashion at the highest levels.
The current family tree in many ways begins with Kanye West, who long agitated for embrace by the luxury fashion world before creating his own Yeezy clothing line and teaming with Adidas on ravenously received sneakers.
Many of the high-end designers currently thriving are West’s spiritual children. Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear and founder of his own label, Off-White, was for many years West’s creative director and righthand man. Heron Preston, head of his own namesake label, was an art director for West during the early years of Yeezy.
Abloh and Preston have become a new kind of standard-bearer by taking the DNA of streetwear and rendering it with luxury materials and prices. Along the way, they have fundamentally reshaped the scope and meaning of contemporary high fashion.
Their triumph isn’t the endpoint, however. They have empowered a passel of younger talent who are digging into, expanding upon and refining the aesthetic provocations of the hip-hop generation.
Below are profiles of five creators who embody the many facets of this movement: Bloody Osiris, a stylist and moodboard inspiration; Brick and Du of Bstroy, post-streetwear avant-gardists; Ev Bravado, who is innovating the texture of streetwear; and Tremaine Emory, a jack-of-alltrades who hosts parties, designs clothes and serves as a kind of spirit guide for these rising stars of tomorrow.
Bloody Osiris
Talk to Bloody Osiris about shapes. He’s tried them all.
Over the past four years, perhaps no one person has foretold as many signature tweaks to the shapes of forward-looking contemporary menswear as Bloody Osiris, 25, an up-from-Instagram dynamo with a sterling eye and an innate gift for mythic self-presentation. At times, he has been a stylist or a designer, but his true role is as a mood-board disrupter, a natural talent who sees tomorrow clearly.
In his late teenage years into his early 20s, he was a “high-fashion hood rat,” he said. The Harlem of the 2000s is his primary touchstone, the place where he first learned fashion etiquette, the way the tiniest of details could guarantee acceptance, or rejection.
When he began posting hyperstylized outfit pictures on Instagram, he found himself in the cross hairs of the fashion world.
“I didn’t understand why people liked me so much,” he said. “‘What do you guys want from me? What do you see in me?’”
In 2016, he was one of the favored models in Kanye West’s Yeezy fashion show at Madison Square Garden. In 2017, Abloh flew him to Paris to contribute styling inspiration for the Off-White runway show. Abloh also gave him as-yet unreleased Nike collaborations and told him to post whatever pictures he wanted, knowing that a well-placed shot was worth more than any conventional marketing.
“He let me off the leash,” Bloody said. Following his work with Abloh, Bloody began working in various capacities for established companies and insurgent brands: “Modeling, creative direction, runway walking, styling, ghost designing.” Sometimes the labor was virtual: Not long after he began publicly wearing the oftmaligned later-era Air Jordan 15s, with its bulky spaceship curves, Nike began re
leasing retro editions of them.
Occasionally, he releases projects — shirts, bandannas, razor blades — with his longtime friend Bloody Dior under the Jerome Jhamal brand, and has just introduced Murd333r.FM, a clothing line and record label. He is even a character in the recently released NBA 2K20 video game.
Tremaine Emory
Tremaine Emory’s mother, Sheralyn, died in 2015. And each year for the last three years, he has sold T-shirts with her image at a pop-up event at the vintage emporium Procell, donating proceeds to Every Mother Counts, a nonprofit focused on improving conditions for mothers around the world.
“The final part of my Jedi training was losing my mom,” Emory said. “That pushed me over the edge. I thought, ‘I’ve got to go tunnel vision to blow her up.’”
Streetwear is full of winks and references and posturing, and from the standpoint of longevity, that is its weakness. What Emory, who works under the moniker Denim Tears, does is deploy the potency of personal narrative in this space that’s usually emotionally chilly.
For Emory, 38, clothing is merely an easily distributed vehicle for idea exchange. In the past, he has worked with Stussy and Off-White. Up next are collaborations with Levi’s and Champion.
But his primary role has been a kind of spirit guide — a “creative gardener,” he said. He is a big-brother guru to the younger people in this scene and has also worked with Frank Ocean and André 3000, as well as with West, for whom he served as a creative consultant and brand director from 2016 to 2018.
A little over a decade later, he received a call saying that West wanted to meet.
“I walked in the room the first thing he says to me is, ‘You ready to change the future?’” Emory recalled. “And he meant it.”
Bstroy (Brick and Du)
As Brick and Du of Bstroy conceive it, first will come the apocalypse, then the postapocalypse, in which people will be seeking ways to survive. And finally, after that, the period they’re designing for: the neonative, in which those who have survived will begin building things anew.
That means fashion as problem-solving with punk impulses. For several years, Bstroy has been figuring out ways to make improbable gestures probable, with clothes that anticipate needs that are primal, polyvalent and sometimes mutant.
Perhaps the signature Bstroy garments are the double-edge jeans, a sculpturally graceful trompe l’oeil experiment that gives the impression of two pairs of jeans stitched together at the ankle hole, and which can be worn multiple ways: one pair flooding at the feet, the bottom pair pulled up over the top pair and zipped up at the sides, or any way in between.
Brick, 29, and Du, 28, met in high school on Myspace, two Atlanta teenagers — Brick from the west side, Du from the east side — with robust interest in high fashion in a city with barely any access to it. They would skip school to meet downtown and hang out at the Polo store. Eventually they learned how to sew to make clothes they wanted but couldn’t find.
Though Bstroy has remained independent, Du worked with Matthew Williams (another West alum) on the 2019 fallwinter 1017 ALYX 9SM collection, and their work also landed them in Calabasas, Calif., spending several days working alongside West (as captured on an episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”).
Ev Bravado
Over the last two years, Ev Bravado has become well known for his assaultive approach to denim — distressing it, embellishing it, embroidering it, giving it layers of depth. His first signature pairs were staggeringly skinny, with “Do you think I’m crazy?” stitched multiple times across the front in various colors, at various angles — “like a mad scientist writing on a wall,” he said.
His clothes, teeming with tattered-edge slashes, rhinestone messages, multicolor appliqués and threads flying loose, are vividly three-dimensional without being bulky.
When Bravado, 26, was growing up on Long Island, his father was a tailor, with a shop in Farmingdale. And when he began making clothes of his own and was still learning the ropes, his father would sew his samples and cut his patterns.