D6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
was an art director for West during the early years of Yeezy.
Abloh and Preston have become a new kind of standard-
bearers by taking the DNA of street wear and rendering it
with luxury materials and prices. Along the way, they have
fundamentally reshaped the scope and meaning of contempo-rary high fashion.
Their triumph isn’t the endpoint, however. They have em-
powered a passel of younger talent, innovators and influencers
who are digging into, expanding upon and refining the aes-
thetic provocations of the hip-hop generation.
Below are profiles of five creators who embody the manyfacets of this movement: Bloody Osiris, a stylist and mood-
board inspiration; Brick and Du of Bstroy, post-street-wear
avant-gardists; Ev Bravado, who is innovating the texture of
street wear; and Tremaine Emory, a jack-of-all-trades who
hosts parties, designs clothes and serves as a kind of spirit
guide for these rising stars of tomorrow.The SilhouetteBloody Osiris
Talk to Bloody Osiris about shapes. He’s tried them all.
One recent afternoon, he was wearing the vomit body bag,
a wildly oversize bleached denim jumpsuit from Rick Ow-
ens’s 2016 Mastodon collection, and detailing his many
phases:
“Tight leather pants, see-through ’98 Helmut Lang sample
shirt, real tight.”
“A Western vibe, cowboy boots, cowboy hat, aviator
shades.”
“Vampire vibe, the long leather jacket, ski mask that
comes from me thinking, ‘What did Wesley Snipes wear in
“Blade”?’ ”
Over the past four years, perhaps no one person has fore-
told as many signature tweaks to the shapes of forward-
looking contemporary men’s wear 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 styl-
ist or a designer, but his true role is as a mood-board disrupt-
er, a natural talent who sees tomorrow clearly.
“When Vetements first came out, it was like baggy shirt,
skinny jeans,” he said. “So I went for baggy jeans, tight shirt.”
And then a funny thing happened: “That’s the norm, that’s
the fashion silhouette now.”
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 pri-
mary touchstone, the place where he first learned fashion eti-
quette, the way the tiniest of details could guarantee accept-
ance, or rejection.
When he began posting hyper-stylized 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 unre-
leased Nike collaborations and told him to post whatever pic-
tures he wanted, knowing that a well-placed shot was worth
more than any conventional marketing.
“He let me off the leash,” Bloody said.
After his work with Abloh, Bloody began working in vari-
ous 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 oft-maligned
later-era Air Jordan 15s, with their bulky spaceship curves,
Nike began releasing retro editions of them.
Occasionally, he releases projects — shirts, bandannas, ra-
zor 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.
But through all this, there remains Instagram, where every
week or two, he posts a photo rich with texture and imagina-
tion — getting a manicure in bleached denim, green patent
leather Prada sneakers and a sheet mask; dressed in a full ti-
ger-stripe bodysuit à la André 3000; in a hyper-pleated
multicolor-print Issey Miyake windbreaker with a hoodie
with cutout eyes in the style of Dumb Donald of the Cosby
Kids. A riot of colors, patterns and outlines. A mini-narrative
about fashion’s future in each shot.The ConscienceTremaine Emory
Tremaine Emory’s mother, Sheralyn, died in 2015. And each
year for the past three years, he has sold T-shirts with her
image at a pop-up event at the vintage emporium Procell, do-
nating 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’vegot to go tunnel vision to blow her up.’ ”
Street wear 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,
has done, with just a handful of gestures, is deploy the poten-
cy of personal narrative in this space that’s usually emotion-
ally chilly.
He has made shirts (with the artist Brendan Fowler) cele-
brating the artist David Hammons, and with the hippie spiri-tualists of Online Ceramics. When No Vacancy Inn, Emory’s
partnership with Acyde Odunlami and Brock Korsan, re-
leased a sneaker with New Balance, he announced a teen-
ager-only essay contest about reparations to win a free pair.
For Emory, 38, clothing is merely an easily distributed ve-
hicle for idea exchange. In the past, he has worked with
Stussy and Off-White. Up next are collaborations with Levi’s
and Champion.
Emory is from Queens and cut his teeth over nine years in
the Marc Jacobs system — “an ill cornucopia of people,” he
said — rising from the New York stockroom to London as-
sistant manager. All the while, he kept one foot in night life,
working for the restaurateur Serge Becker.
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.
“When I first saw Kanye perform,” Emory said, “I came
home and told my mom: ‘This guy’s rapping my whole life.
An art dude from the hood that sees something off in society
and is trying to break through.’ ”
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.”The DissentersBstroy (Brick and Du)
In the world of Bstroy, first will come the apocalypse, then
the post-apocalypse, in which people will be seeking ways to
survive. And finally, after that, the period they’re designing
for: the neo-native, in which those who have survived will
begin building things anew.
That means fashion as problem-solving with punk im-
pulses. For several years, Bstroy — Brick and Du — has
been figuring out ways to make improbable gestures proba-
ble, with clothes that anticipate needs that are primal, poly-
valent 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 to-
gether 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 be-
tween.
“It’s like when your mom would say, ‘Pull your pants up,’
and you say, ‘Well, they are up,’ ” Du said. The designers have
sold about 25 pairs at an average price of over $1,000.
And there’s plenty more. Last year, they showed a hoodie
with two hoods stitched side by side, walked down the run-
way by two models (though the garment is meant to be worn
by one person). For the brand’s recent pop-up shop in Atlan-
ta, they dipped Nike Air Max Uptempo ’95s in a concrete so-
lution, a commentary on remaining grounded in your history.
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 theylearned how to sew to make clothes they wanted but couldn’t
find.
“In the hood, if you use a sewing machine, you’re gay,” Du
said. “It was weird to be us.”
The first Bstroy fashion show, in 2013, was in an Atlanta
subway station, unauthorized. In 2015, they moved to New
York, and in 2017, they took over an East Village funeral
home for a collection called “Will You Bury Me.”
Though Bstroy has remained independent, Du worked
with Matthew Williams (another West alum) on the 2019 fall-
winter 1017 ALYX 9SM collection, and their work also landed
them in Calabasas, Calif., where they spent several days
working alongside West (as captured on an episode of
“Keeping Up With the Kardashians”).
Each Bstroy collection is a blend of high-concept pieces
and sly tweaks to more conventional forms, like graphic T-
shirts that nod to preppy interests like tennis and fencing,
but with the sports gear replaced by guns.
“We are making violent statements,” Du said. “That’s for
you to know who we are, so we can have a voice in the mar-
ket. But eventually that voice will say things that everyone
can wear.”The MissionaryEv Bravado
Over the past two years, Ev Bravado has become well known
for his assaultive approach to denim — distressing it, embel-
lishing 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 vari-
ous colors, at various angles — “like a mad scientist writing
on a wall,” he said.
His clothes, teeming with tattered-edge slashes, rhine-
stone messages, multicolor appliqués and threads flying
loose, are vividly three-dimensional without being bulky.
When Bravado, 26, was growing up on Long Island, his fa-
ther 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.
“To this day he still helps when I need him,” Bravado said.
He first started making clothes of his own design in highschool. He gained some traction on Tumblr and Instagram,
“making clothes to sustain a lifestyle,” he said.
For a time in the mid-2010s, he would fly out to Los Ange-
les, rent a flashy Airbnb and host parties, thinking it was the
way to further his career. “I was doing all the wrong things,”
he said.
Humbled, he began anew, focusing more on message. “You
should be provoked by clothing,” he said. After connecting
with Preston on Instagram, the two designers collaborated
on a pop-up rhinestone workshop in Paris last year. Shortly
after that, Bravado began working with Abloh as a designer
for Off-White.
At the same time, he has been expanding his own brand,
now renamed Who Decides War by Mrdrbrvdo. Recently, for
the online luxury retailer Mr Porter, he designed a capsule
collection reviving some of his earlier hits and introducing
new items, including bondage pants tie-dyed by hand, at his
parents’ house.
Bravado is a father now, too, with a 1-year-old son, leading
him to reflect even more on personal responsibility, a pre-
occupation he inherited from his father.
“He had to do his thing as a tailor to make ends meet, and
now I’m here living out his dream,” Bravado said. “I can’t
just be here and ruin it for myself, and then, by doing that, I
could ruin it for other people.”CONTINUED FROM PAGE D1After Kanye, Virgil and Heron: Lines of Succession
‘He’s almost like a psychic reader of designers. He has an ability
to not see fashion as just objects or garments. He’s like Iverson
— “I don’t wanna practice, I just ball.”’
VIRGIL ABLOH
ON BLOODY OSIRIS‘Tremaine is drawing parallels with actual moments in culture
that are 30, 40, 50 years deeper, and ultimately recontextualizing
the black image. His clothing won’t simply be stuff for the closet.’
VIRGIL ABLOH
ON TREMAINE EMORY‘The most daring in street wear. I think they’re trying to do
something you won’t normally find on a rapper’s back. Every
time they do something it’s always out of the boundaries, just
a bit different.’
HERON PRESTON
ON BRICK AND DU OF BSTROY‘He’s pushing denim in a really interesting, unique way. And how
the denim stacks over the shoes — it’s not really bell-bottom-y,
but it’s a little flared. It feels like the new New York fit.’
HERON PRESTON
ON EV BRAVADO
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIONCARLO VALENTINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES