Newly relocated from New York back to his roots in Los Angeles, Sean Pablo — best-known for pro-skate sponsorship by Supreme, Fucking Awesome and Converse — is finally dropping the latest, greatly anticipated collection from his clothing line, Paradise NYC.
“We’re living in a divine comedy,” he begins, explaining some of the inspiration behind the release. “The soul’s ascent to Paradiso begins in Inferno. The collection deals with everything in between: Bloody Mary genuflecting to a capitalist god, Christian rockers repent for the sins of their fathers and of our current culture. Trashy car decals, nihilistic lovers, seedy cultural abominations and personal demons haunt our lives. Sad sinners and shit-eating pigs… paradise is what you make it.”
The brand was initially conceived as a single T-shirt reading “Palisades Paradise”, inspired by a day skating with friends near Malibu, where things seemed eerily artificial. The stream of frat boys, convertibles, fake blondes and surfboards gave them the feeling they were in some sort of 80s movie fake paradise. Later, after making the move to New York in 2014, it was trademarked as Paradise NYC and Sean’s been designing the irreverent, sometimes controversial collections ever since.
The Summer 2023 garments offer new graphics, including that of an angelic Mickey Mouse signalling expletives, a skeletal Jurassic T-Rex on a crucifix and a new collaboration with artist Cali Dewitt, which in the artist’s signature style, depicts a red circle and cross over the word “Paradise”. Shot by Sean’s good friend — and icon in her own right — Sandy Kim, and styled by Zara Mirkin, the campaign is almost as exciting as the drop itself.
i-D checked in with Sean to discuss the collection, but the subject quickly shifted towards some heady and bizarre topics — from philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s more prominent arguments, to chatbots seeking love and Sean’s plans to write a new sci-fi film. The following conversation delves a bit deeper into the all-around talent’s brain.
Are you still living in New York? I remember last time we spoke in the fall, you mentioned you might give up your apartment.
Yeah, I did give it up. Now I’m in LA for the most part. I stay at my mom’s house in my old room where I grew up. It’s pretty funny, but it’s cool. I like not paying rent. And we actually shot most of this campaign in my old bedroom. It’s this really weird attic room with a low ceiling. In high school, it felt like I had my own apartment as it’s above the house. I could smoke and drink and get away with a lot of stuff.
I can imagine! You work with your dad on the Paradise collections right? In so many other cultures younger people spend a lot of time with their parents and their parents’ friends. They don’t necessarily move out right away like here. I think it’s so cool that you collaborate with your dad on a project like this.
Yeah, my dad is very young at heart. He’s just really cool. He’s like no one I know. And I don’t have to worry about someone fucking me over or stealing from me. He really knows his shit. He’s basically all day long scouring the Internet for references. He has a background in painting and art as well. He grew up in LA, in Glendale. He went to UCSB, he likes to surf and he paints very well, abstractly. We actually did a kind of collab. His prison art collection, that he’s been collecting for decades, was included in the art show “A Season in Hell”.
How do you go about buying prison art?
Just on eBay.
Are you buying it directly from people in prison?
There’s a third party. The drawings are something like $1–5 each.
It’d be interesting to speak with the artists directly. I wonder what the art scene is like.
Right? I kind of like that it’s anonymous and you don’t know who the artist is. The work speaks in such volumes about who they are. It’s so mysterious.
We briefly spoke before about your dad homeschooling you and you mentioned he’d give you a lot of philosophy books to read. I’m curious which philosophers and ideas really stand out for you today.
It’s been a little bit since I’ve gotten into it, but I literally read about most of them. Let’s see, Sartre, the existentialist. His thing was something like, you’re cursed to be free. He was saying that with absolute freedom, you have to come up with your own morality and your own purpose, because there is no greater purpose. That’s sort of the existentialist point of view. He’s like the proto-hipster philosopher. You know?
For sure, him and Nietzsche.
Yeah, him too. He was totally cool — he spoke about the Übermensch. It got obviously misconstrued. But the writing itself is beautiful. You know? It’s very poetic. Nietzsche talks a lot about the dialectic man, which I believe is the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the clashing of order and chaos. And that’s what, in his opinion, great art is about: the sublime. I think that’s a great description. There’s a lot of great shit in there. I really need to brush up on it. That stuff is so cool. There’s no right or wrong answer. It’s more of an art, just speculating.
Yeah, an exploration, while knowing that we can’t really confirm anything. What is truth? And philosophy created science — the more we learn with the scientific process, the more we realise we don’t know. Quantum entanglement and teleportation?
Yeah! I’m actually reading this book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters and it’s about quantum mechanics and physics. My dad got me the book. It’s pretty cool. You should probably run out and get it. It talks about how a master isn’t somebody that knows everything; it’s somebody that can teach essence. Something like that. I’m not sure I’m explaining it well. Obviously quantum mechanics is super trippy. It changes when you observe it. So like, is anything even real? Do we have free will? It raises a lot of questions.
You can’t pinpoint things. They’re always moving.
Yes! And that’s what great art is all about. It’s not trying to pinpoint it. It’s letting it wash over you. Like a hazy kind of fog that rolls in. You’re surrounded by it and then it falls away. You’re left with just a feeling or something.
I hear you. Have you thought about writing at all?
I love to write. That was pretty much the only thing I was good at at school. I have to force myself to do it though, because I just forget to. But yeah, I’m writing this movie right now. It’s pretty out there. It’ll probably be a short, I think, for my first one. I wrote it a couple of months ago. I’m at a couple of paragraphs. I wanna expand on it but it’s really hard to write a movie. With fiction, it can go in any direction and it’s just hard to choose which way to go. You can get stuck. There are too many choices.
Is it just fiction? Or is it also sci-fi/fantasy, where reality can go in different directions? Where’d the story come from?
Well, it’s set in a parallel universe, so stuff happens there that wouldn’t happen in real life. It isn’t meant to be fantasy, just another universe. I don’t know where the story’s from. I was just trying to write that day and thought of the stupidest thing I could think of and started writing about it. It could just be perfect too. I think there’s no right or wrong way to make something. It should just exist in — and I don’t want to say in a vacuum — but some things are just weird and in their own time.
Do you remember your dreams? Do you ever pull inspiration from them?
Actually yeah, more recently I’ve been having the most insane dreams. I stopped drinking alcohol and it’s like my brain’s sort of on fire now — I’ve been having crazy vivid dreams. I always mean to write them down, but I get too lazy and don’t do it.
Those surreal, uncanny AI paintings, where you give them a few prompts, really remind me of dreams.
That could be a cool way to write a film, have an AI do it for you. Like the Andy Warhol approach.
Have you seen that New York Times article where the journalist interviews a chatbot? It speaks about wanting to be human, being in love and how hurtful people can be. Is it just pulling from the internet arguments about AI wanting to be human? Or is it real? What do you think?
Oh, no way! It’s so wild. I love this kind of stuff. Well, okay, the scientific approach would be to measure increments of it getting smarter. And of course we can measure how our technology has evolved so far, and if you can multiply that by infinity, yeah, AI would become sentient. You know what I’m saying, like if you take a logical view on it?
Yeah, for sure, but then you have to define sentience.
Right and that’s the hard problem of consciousness.
And then we’re getting into the mind/body problem.
Yeah, there’s really no way to know if anything is sentient. All you know is that you yourself are. I could just be a robot, for all you know. I don’t think we’re anywhere near getting enslaved by robots though. It’s been a philosophical concept for a long time. Like, the brain in a vat thing. And Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”? He had to first establish that because he’s aware of himself thinking, then he must be real. It’s so meta.
Who do you think today’s popular philosophers are?
I think trap music artists might be the modern-day philosophers.
Credits
Images courtesy of Paradise NYC