The Band of Outsiders article I wrote for the September issue of Blend magazine was in Dutch, so what I can share with the global attick is the original Q&A we did in early August this year. Enjoy.
A selection from the accompanying shoot in Blend magazine by Thomas Whiteside
We spoke last year around the same time. You just won the CFDA award and were about to present your new collection. You were planning to expand Boy & men’s accessories. And mentioned some ‘retail projects that won’t seem much like retail’ starting in Tokyo? So how did all that go?
It’s been a pretty great year. Boy. is now produced in Italy with a really fantastic production facility, so most of my time has been spent going back and forth and working with this amazing team, getting to know each other, developing two collections. And the men’s is continuing its story organically, finding great customers along the way. Sadly the retail project in Japan is still stalled. It’s a long story, but I’m trying to take a very old piece of machinery from the U.S. and re-wire and re-work it to do something entirely different, in a different country where the electrical, err, stuff is different.
Your homepage features a series of Polaroids of LA homes. What’s the relation to Band of Outsiders? They look like crime scenes to me. Or at least invoking fantasies about who lives there, how they live and so on.
Ooh, I like the idea of them being crime scenes, although that wasn’t the point. I decided we needed a home page, and the most logical subject for the Polaroids on a home page seemed to be homes. There are some pretty great ones around Los Angeles, so that worked out nicely. Speaking of, I need to get out and shoot some more – freshen things up. In terms of what it says about the brand, I would throw that back to you. For me, all of the imagery and ideas we’re putting out under the Band of Outsiders brand don’t necessarily have to be of clothing or directly related to fashion. It’s all about a feeling, an approach, and a way of looking at things.
What is essentially Band of Outsiders? (you called it ‘fetishized American Sportswear’ on Style.com) Overstating the understatement? If something matters, everything matters?
That’s a big question. And there’s two directions from which to answer – the clothes, and the brand around them. Let’s stick with the clothes for now. The men’s clothes are about looking at the classics and making them feel new, fresh, and completely covetable; the women’s are about that too, but a little more conceptual in their approach, with a heavy anchor in menswear. Boy is also a bit about playing off of trends, re-working them into our language. Both have a strong focus on tailored clothing and offering something new and fresh in that category.
