This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Ultra! Issue, no. 369, Fall 2022. Order your copy here.
It is not an exaggeration or an oversimplification to say that Shayne Oliver and Hood By Air revolutionised American fashion. To a post-Internet generation, Shayne is Ralph Lauren: a designer who recast the present moment through the mythologies of American history. However, unlike Ralph, Shayne’s mythologies were created in opposition to the dominant aesthetic, or as subversive attacks on them: double-toed cowboy boots, deconstructed Wall Street business drag remade as fetish gear, downlow preppy-casual assuming monstrous proportions.
The impact of these revolutionary new forms that Shayne and his collaborators created for Hood By Air were sometimes clouded by the hype that revolution generated, and by the difficult nature of the questions that the garments asked: What does masculinity look like? How is race appropriated by the Uptown fashion establishment? Can clothing be anti establishment? How do you queer the mainstream? It was fashion at its beautiful, aggressive, radical, transformational best.
Maybe the most shocking thing was how successful it was, how quickly it bent mainstream aesthetics towards it. But Hood By Air burnt brightly and burnt out, and in 2017, it went on hiatus. And then Shayne, after an absence of four years, returned quietly to the catwalk in London in 2021 with an under-the-radar show that eschewed fashion’s games of conspicuous exclusivity – there were no announcements, no runway pictures on Vogue, no photographers, no Instagram stories. Just the audience. Just the clothes. Shayne wasn’t even there.
Instead, the show played into a wider strategy of unidentification – the establishment of a second coming independent from Shayne’s persona. This is Anonymous Club: a rotating group of creatives working together on various projects and products. It is a less abrasive and more poetic take on the aesthetics of Hood By Air, still rooted in their political-fashion- iconoclasm. But this time that iconoclasm is turned inward, addressing the mythologies that Hood By Air had shaped.
Speaking with Shayne, and fashion director of both Hood By Air and i-D magazine Carlos Nazario, this is a conversation about what happens leading up to a revolution, and then what happens after the revolution is over…
Felix Petty: Hey everyone! It’s so good to speak to you both.
Carlos Nazario: Hey, guys. How’s it going? I’m on set as usual… Let me find somewhere quiet… So Shayne! How was Paris?
Shayne Oliver: It was really amazing. I fell in love with the city again. I hadn’t been since 2019. I really missed it.
Carlos: It’s crazy. We used to be in this international vortex of people and places and being travelling vagabonds really informed our work.
Shayne: Paris is where everything makes sense. It’s like a focus. In Paris it feels like people are interested in you for what you do. They want to see what you can bring to the table. Paris gives you something back: it loves you as much as you love it.
Carlos: In Paris, it’s about fashion for fashion’s sake. The prevalent culture in New York is hypebeast culture.
Shayne: New York is like living in a revolving door sometimes. It’s a fickle crowd. In New York it feels like half the people in the room at an event don’t even know why they’re there.
Carlos: For us, Paris was a place for the people who didn’t have a place. And historically, people who had a hard time finding a place to identify in America always went to Paris; it was a refuge. Paris has been a big part of the Black creative story. Do you know what I mean?
Shayne: I do.
Carlos: Felix, do you want to steer this? Else we could talk for hours.
“What I’m trying to do is reinterpret the historical moment of what America looks like now, our new normal.” Shayne Oliver
Felix: I’d love to start at the very beginning and talk about how you met and how you connected.
Carlos: This is a story that has been told a lot of times and in a lot of different ways and I think actually, the honest to God truth, and this is the definitive answer now: I don’t remember.
Shayne: We always just knew each other.
Carlos: I don’t remember a New York without Shayne. He’s an omnipresent figure. Back then, you had to know where to go and you had to look bad in order to get in, you had to have a crowd. And there was this vortex of like minded Downtown people: artists and designers and musicians… I’ve said before that we met in Happy Valley, but I don’t know if that’s true.
Shayne: Happy Valley definitely was a place where we all got very social. We were young and creative and free, the cliques just clicked.
Carlos: But we already knew each other by then. We knew Akeem Rasool and Jerome Williams then. I think we were still in High School, at Harvey Milk?
Shayne: I remember we’d sneak out and go for lunch in Chelsea. We were just kids. We had plans to do all these things but really we were just cultivating a movement of some sort at the time.
Carlos: We were young, queer and talented.
Felix: Did you immediately creatively click?
Carlos: No. It was just like: You’re cool, let’s hang out. It was loose. It was organic. We didn’t have strategies.
Shayne: But we got our shit together quite quickly though, quicker than some others in our friendship group, and we were able to understand and create some creative throughlines to make sense of what we did.
Carlos: Shayne started making clothes and everyone immediately knew it was going to be fire although there was no expectation of it being commercial. There was a very clear divide between Uptown and Downtown then, and we were the Downtown kids with no budgets. It was us against the people who showed in the tent at Bryant Park. So instead of doing something very commercial, Shayne did something bold and new. He was making clothes that were against that establishment. So the chances of someone like Shayne rising to become this globally influential and recognised fashion designer? It wasn’t a goal because we didn’t think it was a possibility. The only powerful Black people in fashion were people like André Leon Tally and Edward Enninful, and in the media they were portrayed as having made it in spite of their Blackness.
Shayne: Let’s be real about it, the people who got Hood By Air first were people outside of fashion. They were musicians and artists and they were young and they wanted something new.
Carlos: It was really natural. Shayne, has always been so unapologetically free, and I was always obsessed with his ability to be that way. It’s really seductive because “fashion” tries really hard to make you conform and the more successful you get, the harder it tries to make you conform.
Shayne: Certain people just got where we were coming from, and for me it was really about trusting the opinions of those people to let me know what they felt. Because we were inventing a new vision of chicness within this industry and we weren’t sure how people would react to it.
Carlos: We were these young gay boys with our big egos and big personalities and undefined roles so there was a bit of bickering. There was a lot of infighting.
Shayne: All the girls are petty.
Carlos: For. Sure. I think we figured it out. Like any family there was fighting, but a lot more has been made of the fighting than is true. It was just a bunch of friends who had known each other for a long time. We were young and we were blown away by the speed of this success.
“I think the more people who are exposed to our agenda, which is to make people feel good, the better.” Carlos Nazario
Felix: How did the end of Hood By Air, or at least its hiatus, then lead to this new creative configuration?
Shayne: Everybody thought my identity was Hood By Air. It was very hard to break that association. I think of myself as the founder of a movement and the creator of a style of design. It’s known to people as a brand that is called Hood By Air. But to me Hood By Air is like hip-hop. People can take bits and pieces of it and they can reinterpret it. Anonymous Club is my way of moving that style into a more poetic space. Initially it began as a project that was solely about working on new designs but I’m actually using a lot of the archive for inspiration, but I’m working from things that have never been seen before.
Felix: Do you enjoy looking back at old work you’ve made?
Shayne: It’s about balance.
Felix: You’ve got to look back in order to push forward?
Shayne: It’s about moving forward, you’re right. But sometimes when I look back at that era of Hood By Air it’s like Ralph Lauren designing Polo – it’s not that it’s fake, but that it’s just, I don’t know, heritage? All the chaos of youth blocked the creative progress we made. What I mean is that by the end, it didn’t feel natural anymore. It felt like it required an intense amount of effort. It became counter-intuitive. I think I’ve now come to an understanding of what the different forms of Hood By Air are: the musical form, the performance form, the form of making original garments, the form of making the everyday wardrobe. I had to take time to realise and acknowledge that. That’s what Anonymous Club is about and that’s why it started as a studio. And now that it is becoming more of a brand you will be able to see it through product.
Carlos: For so long people projected whatever they wanted Shayne to be onto him. If you are even a slightly public figure you can become a caricature, which is very limiting creatively because you can get forced into chasing what people want from you. So it’s like, oh, he’s the young, wild, wacky guy who makes clothes for gender benders. Then you think, well, I have to do that every season. We’ve seen a lot of really incredible designers fall victim to that way of thinking. I won’t name names. But say you have this moment in your life where what you are trying to say aligns with what is happening in the world and it connects. If you’re smart you continue to allow your life and experiences to inform your work. And if you’re not, you keep trying to chase what people are telling you you are.
Felix: There’s also the fact that Hood By Air was so revolutionary, and I don’t know if we’ve really worked through how revolutionary it was yet because maybe the meaning of the revolution got lost in the hype it created.
Shayne: I still question that whole moment. I think that’s why it was important for me to reintroduce Hood By Air to the world again. I couldn’t let it go to waste, even if it’s just a reflection upon itself. I feel like forgetfulness is a very American value, so my hope is that, at some point, there can be a retrospective of the whole archive to put it in the context of what it did, which was to revolutionise how people looked at American fashion. I hate to say it so obnoxiously but it did. I think other people did that too. Like Telfar.
Carlos: Telfar is a really good example and he’s hugely important but I also don’t think he would be doing what he’s doing today without Shayne’s influence. Telfar is one of the few designers who has been able to commodify that very real Downtown creative energy. I’m not being pessimistic or anything here: I just think Shayne had a disinterest in the overtly commercial. With Shayne it was always, “let’s make it weirder and better and more interesting”. That’s not always the most commercial attitude. But Telfar can bottle that energy of the otherness of the underground and sell it. For example, I was in New Orleans and walking down Bourbon Street and I swear to God, this blonde debutante girl is walking down the street and she had on a pale pink suit with a lavender Telfar bag. I tried to take a picture of her and she caught me and I was like, “I’m so sorry, I know the designer.” I thought she would be like, “Oh, you know Telfar?!” But she was just looking at me like, “Huh, what?” It was very clear that she was like, “I just think this bag is fab.” And in a sense that’s mission accomplished, right? That is this generation’s legacy. I don’t think this generation has to find a new Ralph Lauren because that lifestyle, and that idea of American exceptionalism, American aspirationalism – well, it’s become very clear that it’s a façade and no one wants to buy into it. It is against what this moment is about seeing things for what they are: calling out racism, sexism, homophobia. But it is also about defining ourselves. That is the energy, and I think Shayne is the embodiment of that energy, but I don’t know that the first person to go is the first person to benefit from it. I think people were able to watch what people connected with, with Shayne, and they were like, “Okay, that works. I’ll do that, and then put it on a T-shirt, and then I’ll make a million bucks.” That’s not a bad thing because I think the more people who are exposed to our agenda, which is to make people feel good, the better. So, if that girl in New Orleans is carrying our version of a Make America Great Again bag, and she doesn’t even fucking know it, mission accomplished. Shayne has done what he set out to do.
Shayne: I take pride in that. I think what I am trying to do now is to reinterpret the historical moment of what America looks like now, our new normal.
Carlos: Well, you look at our era and it’s the changing of the guard. Things that we were shocking people with are mundane now. And I feel like, in a way, Shayne was the character who had to take the leap first, be the martyr, shock people. I remember those shows. As much as they were sort of celebrated for their creativity and boldness, a lot of people simply didn’t get it. But now it’s so blatant how people copy us. It’s hurtful.
Shayne: People think I’m a bitch or something, but I’m actually extremely patient and have been waiting for the moment when people can get my sense of humour, my sensibility, and begin to understand that I genuinely love doing what I do. I’m not trying to destroy fashion. I actually really care about fashion. I think my tactics make people nervous, and they think that I’m out to ruin whatever these companies are upholding, which is mainly just making more and more money every season, but what I’m trying to do is just to create something for the people who like what I do. I think they find what I do threatening because their world is so deeply rooted in these fashion hierarchies, but hopefully they’ll eventually realise that I’m not that scary. They can interact with me. I’m not a threat. I’m actually really sweet, and I really just want to work. I do what I do because I love creating. Because I have a passion for it. I just want a place where my product can live without it being so attached to my persona, so people can see it for what it really is.
Carlos: The one thing I would just really love to make clear is that we’re really lovers of fashion. We love everyone and everything. I think that that’s our vibe. We love a little bit of healthy competition. We love the dialogue. I personally think it’s really important to be honest about what we’re looking at, and give credit where credit is due, so that we can all continue in this conversation.
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Credits
Photography Pieter Hugo
Fashion director Carlos Nazario
Hair Anne Sofie Begtrup at Wise & Talented using Oribe Haircare
Make-up Adrien Pinault at MA+ World Group
Set design Aymeric Arnould
Digital operator Antonio Paradez
Lighting assistant Mathieu Boutang
Fashion assistance Ricky Saint and Kevin Lanoy
Tailor Sabrina Gomis Vallee
Hair assistance Xiaoyuan Yang
Make-up assistance Mouana Benouhoud
Production WEFOLK and Production Line
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING
Models Assa Baradji at Oui, Matthieu Plainfossé at Elite, Dries at Rebel
All clothing and accessories SHAYNE OLIVER FOR ANONYMOUS CLUB