Portraits and collection photography for EVB: Austin Green

Accessories and styling: Telfar Clemens
Boards and bikes: Model’s own
Models: Frey Mudd, Abiah Hostvedt, Noma Han, and Ambrose Carter at Red NYC; David Thomas at Adam NYC; and Tyler White (unsigned)

I remember faces really well. It’s a gift I never really asked for. It’s been said that I can spot a bit actor who had appeared on some random episode of Wings or Six Feet Under, walking down West 4th street, and remember exactly what show and episode he or she was in. Again, I never asked for this gift. But, if you were to ask me what their name was, or more accurately, if you were to ask me what 70% of the people I encountered names were, I’d not only draw a blank, I’d most likely shift the focus to New York City’s zoning laws or something equally drab. To put it plainly, when it comes to names, I’ve got room for improvement.

When I first met Telfar Clemens several years ago, I knew the name/face conundrum that had plagued me for years would be laid to rest. Telfar’s persona practically begged for single name recognition, not unlike Madonna, Prince or Strangé (Grace Jones’ character from the 1992 hit film Boomerang, naturally. C’mon, keep up with me people). He was young fashion hopeful that carried himself with an uncanny level of confidence and unwavering direction. At the time, I remember he was living in lower Manhattan, going to school and spending what time he had left over scouring the underbelly of Chinatown in search of materials to craft his designs. Over the years, I watched Telfar grow, not only as a young designer, but as a single-name-in-waiting.

A little while ago, EVB sent me on an assignment to chat with the Queens-to-Liberia-and-back-again New Yorker. During the course of our brief exchange, I got the sense that this drive, this need to design clothing, is a veritable “do or die” action for him. The mentality Telfar approaches design with is not unlike a bulldozer, blindly leveling ancient relics to pave the way to the future.

“In my life, (fashion) came before other aspects such as education or financial situations” he said. “I guess I had no choice but to give in to natural instinct and create my vision.” His vision is simple: the progression and redefinition of American sportswear. From dabbling in his very outsiders take on the suburban grunge aesthetic, to transforming American sportswear staples into avant-garde drapery, his collections recall and almost pay tribute to the past, while quietly putting it to rest.

Recently, while working on one of his own collections for a guerilla showing during New York Fashion Week, Telfar was asked by American Apparel to collaborate on a small limited collection of garments that were made only using contents from a box of used T-shirts and scraps.

The collaboration, titled UN.DER T by TELFAR  is his first collaboration with a brand of AA’s scale. And the task was welcomed with open arms. He said about it, “American Apparel was gracious enough to support a young designer… It’s great for a major company to support those who are up-and-coming”.

Though fashion is clearly in his DNA, it has not been the only industry to get his creative juices flowing. If you’ve been around downtown New York City in the past five years, chances are you’ve danced to the sounds of TELFAR, not the designer but the DJ. “I started DJing in 2004. My friend Melisa Burns thought I would be great at it”, he recalls. “Shortly after, I began my own party called ‘Something Tight’. The rest is Lower East Side history”.

But it was no Larry Levan bootleg nor Madonna studio outtake that he would sling as his secret weapon to get the crowds to a fever pitch. The clever (and shall we say ‘naughty’) young man would wait just until the crowds were swelling with sweat and hunger and drop trou, exposing himself to the crowd for the remainder of the night. I guess it was a rather literal take on the term “full frontal fashion”. “I think that’s history for me”, he said when speaking of hanging up his ‘naked DJ’ title. “I thought it was hilarious for someone to be completely naked at a club, which it was. But this was before party photo websites. It loses it’s edge if you see “IT” too much.”

While he still DJs regularly around downtown, his pants now stay up, and his shirt is safely buttoned. By conversation end, I sensed that there was little chance he’d renege on his descision to stop the strip show. And I don’t think it mattered to him one bit. There just isn’t enough time for Telfar Clemens to stop and ponder the past. He’s aggressively looking toward a future where his name is in lights, six letters long and recognizably solitary. Surname need not apply.

If anyone could take an art school studio, plop seven near-naked, tattoo-speckled boys in front of blank canvases, give them blank paint brushes and have them “perform” the act of “blank painting”, and actually make it work, (i.e. not bore the shit out of us), it’s gotta be Terence Koh.

Photographs of the launch event shot for EVB by Elizabeth Lippman

This past Friday, EVB fought torrential wind and drizzle and trekked over to New York City’s Cooper Union to catch a glimpse of the Terence Koh for Converse 1HUND(RED) Artists Chuck Taylor All Star launch. In typical Koh fashion, the event was exclusive, contextually odd and rather intimate (I think we knew everyone in the room… some of them, well, quite intimately). A select group of Downtown NYC so-and-so’s and who’s-who’s mixed, mingled and marveled at the spectacle that was Koh’s presentation of his vision of the iconic Converse Chuck Taylor.
Of course we staked out a spot equidistant between the booze and the boys and had perfect viewing of the arriving guests facial expressions. Ranging somewhere between befuddlement and childlike wonder, guests greeted friends and friends-for-the-night with kisses, bee-lining to the bar to prime their pumps for a night of possibility. While a few brave souls shed their inhibitions and danced to selector A-ron Bondaroff and his gang’s bizarre, albeit hilarious mix of early-90s house hits and chopped up opera records, most played voyeur on the sidelines.

Finally, after an hour of sizing up eye-candy and awaiting the evenings honoree to arrive, in walks the Koh Bunny, draped of course in a festive fur vest, stretch pants and his (now) signature shoes (everything white, natch). Cameras rushed to Terence, quickly snapping pics as he played the coy centerpiece - it was like that scene in La Dolce Vita when Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni arrive at the tea party in her honor, battling off reporters and photographers with effortless style and grace, except whiter and whole lot weirder.
As a contributor to the 1HUND(RED) project, which donates a percentage of the net sales towards helping fight AIDS in Africa, Koh took a decidedly reductive approach to his shoe design. “I wanted to keep the DNA of the Chuck Taylor intact, while reducing the seams, and smoothing out the shoe’s surfaces as much as possible”.

As with the design, the stock list is also quite minimal. Available Saturday November 21 at select stores worldwide. So, if you’ve got $150 bucks rattling around your pockets, are between a size 7 and a 13 (that’s SHOE size) and you’re gagging for a pair, we’d suggest getting your pretty little asses down to Opening Ceremony in New York or Los Angeles because these will be gone like bunnies in winter.

Let the frenzy begin…

Let’s first start by saying that not everyone loves Rufus Wainwright. I know, I know your brow just furled up in an “EVERYbody likes Rufus!” sorta way, but for “every body” that loves Rufus; there is an equal amount of haters on the other end of the spectrum. He is easily one of the more polarizing artist actively performing today. But in my opinion any artist worth the ticket price needs to be able to invoke an intense emotional reaction through their work that tugs at both ends of the rope. If not, we’d end up with a world overrun with Muzak and Everybody Loves Raymond reruns.

Today we bring you a track from Rufus that may (or may not) bring the two opposing, Pro/Con Rufus worlds to their knees and lovingly create singularity in this crazy world. I know it’s a long shot, but I’m a faithful person.

This ones been floating around for a little bit, but today EVB nails it down long enough to give everyone chance to listen. This is “Tiergarten” remixed by super duo Supermayer (respectively Superpitcher and Michael Mayer). Enjoy!

Since everyone and their mother love the living shit out of Animal Collective, I’ve concocted a plan of sorts that would need everyone and their mother in order for said plan to produce positive results (even if you don’t get along with mummy, swallow your pride, make amends and come join the rest of the group).

If you had the pleasure of catching them during their 2007 tour, you no doubt heard a little ditty now know as “Bearhug” ( it was originally titled “Walk Around You” but that’s neither here nor there). It was probably the part of the concert where you thought someone had slipped some minimal techno record in the mix and forgot to take it off during their vocal freak-out. Hell, you might have been too drugged up to remember, but trust me, that is exactly what it sounded like.

And though this concoction of sound sources may seem odd on paper, “Bearhug” totally works when materialized. The only problem with the song, is that it’s not available for release in proper record form.

So, this is where you all come into the mix.

If you see Animal in public, visit their myspace page or employ whatever weird stalker tactics you’ve developed in college to find them, just do us all a huge favor and bug the crap out of them to release “Bearhug” properly.

If we don’t do it, who will?

So, I wake up this morning and peer into my little “news box” (which is essentially an RSS feed, but I prefer to call it a “news box” because it sounds more appealing to me this Wednesday morning. Whatevs.) and read some nonsensical bullyshit about a mural in the ever popular (but rather style-deficient) Abercrombie & Fitch being yanked down in one of their Virginia Beach store locations by local police. The mural is a picture of some shirtless boys running in a field, and one of them is pulling his strategically ill-fitted jeans up to meet his waist. Pretty standard for A&F.

So, you wanna know the really mind-melting, future-ruining, pornographic element that caused a moral breakdown for one Virginia Beach police officer? OMG, you are soooo not ready for how sick and filthy this is, are you? It’s really bad, you sure you wanna read on?

Ok, here you go . . .
Dude is showing ass crack.

Actually . . . fuck I dunno, a 1/8 inch of ass crack.

YEP! That’s the depraved image that turned this police officer into a witch-hunting lunatic on a mission to wipe out the indecency of this mural (pictured above) in a beach town famous for drug trafficking and frat boy date-rapists. Nice to see our tax dollars hard at work.

Heres what USA Today had to say: “One depicts three shirtless young men from the back, walking through a field. The man in the lead appears to be about to pull up his jeans, which have slipped down enough to reveal his upper buttocks.” The other image features a topless woman whose “breast is displayed with her hand covering just the nipple portion,” Virginia Beach police spokesman Adam Bernstein tells the paper. Earlier in the week, Bernstein says an officer asked the manager to take down the photos. “We strive for voluntary compliance, but when they weren’t taken down we had to issue a summons,” he tells the Newport News Daily Press. “This is steps [sic] our city takes, because we have a reputation of being a very family-friendly city.” The Associated Press says it couldn’t reach the company. The manager faces up to a year in jail if convicted of violating the city code that makes it a misdemeanor to display “obscene materials in a business that is open to juveniles.”

Now, we all know the manager isn’t going to serve time, but c’mon, “obscene materials in a business that is open to juveniles”? Puh-lease! You wanna know what has “obscene materials in a business that is open to juveniles”? Google.

Remember mix tapes? Remember those? How great was it putting together a bunch of weirdo songs on a tape for you’re crush that said, “See, I told you I’m not just cute. I’m kinda smart too.” (Sigh)? If you’re too young to remember, then you’ll just have to take my word for it. They ruled. Well, sad to say, those days are long gone. But through some divine miracle, Parisian uber-duo Justice has attempted to make one. But unfortunately, it was for an unappreciative lover. That “lover” in this case is legendary London club Fabric.

The story goes, Fabric had asked the Ed Banger main boys to eh, “bang” out a mix for Fabrics’ on going mix CD series. Justice did what they wanted, took the freedom that should be allotted to all musicians and made a wonderful mix of songs that challenged any preconceived idea of what makes a dance mix dance-y. Well, Fabric didn’t like it. In fact, they disliked it so much that it became the first Fabric mix that was rejected by the club.

What happened? Was it too “mix tape-y” for them. Too campy? Too gay? I’ll leave those theoretical squabbles for you to mull on while I’m enjoying this great rejected mix of theirs. When you come up for air, you should make your day a little brighter and listen.

Enjoy!

Sparks – Tryouts For The Human Race – Virgin / Rondo Veneziano – La Serenissima - Universal / Goblin – Tenebrae - Cinevox / Daft Punk – Ouverture - Virgin / Surkin – Next Of Kin – Institubes / Symbolone – Love Juice - SymbolOne / Korgis – Everybodys Gotta Learn Sometimes – Angel Air / Midnight Juggernauts – Ending Of An Era – Mindight Juggernauts / The Paradise Ft Romauld – In Love With You – Vulture / Justice – TTHHEE PPAARRTTYY (Acapella) – Ed Banger / Chic – Everybody Dance – Atlantic / Frankie Valli – Who Loves You – Warners / Das Pop – Underground – Das Pop / Julien Clerc – Quand Je Joue – EMI / Daniel Balavoine – Vivre Ou Survivre – Barclay / Richard Sanderson – Reality - Barclay / Zoot Woman – Grey Day – Wall Of Sound / Fucking Champs – Thor Is Like Immortal – Drag City / The Rave – Mother – The Rave / Fancy – You Never Know - Fancy / Frank Stallone – Far From Over - Universal / Sheila – Misery – Warners / Todd Rundgren – International Feel - Warners