Photo Illustration by Alex Cook

The ads on Facebook’s sidebar make it easier than ever before to buy clothes, handbags, and jewelry. Unfortunately, some say they also make it easier to sell knockoffs of name-brand products, even though Facebook officially bans ads for phony merchandise. In October, an NFL-apparel retailer in Albuquerque, New Mexico brought a lawsuit against Facebook for what it says is the website’s duplicitous inaction when it comes to advertisements for counterfeit jerseys. That lawsuit, which is still being litigated, brought a smile to Eric Feinberg’s face. Eric isn’t directly involved in the case, but he’s the founder of Fans Against Kounterfeit Enterprise (FAKE), a nonprofit organization that aims to wipe out counterfeit jerseys. I called Eric to learn why he cares so much about knockoff sportswear.

VICE: How did you become an activist against counterfeit jerseys?
Eric Feinberg: I was handling social media for my PR clients, who were paying me to create word-of-mouth advertising via photo contests and comments through Facebook. I found that when I posted pictures of specific things, like NFL games, my photos were being tagged by sponsored ads for counterfeit jerseys, which would appear on everyone’s timeline. Facebook targets ads based on your preferences. So how could I, in good faith, handle a client’s social-media marketing when I know that my marketing would appear next to counterfeit ads? And when I would talk to these companies [who were selling legitimate merchandise] about these ads, they didn’t know what I was talking about.

It’s easy to say that counterfeit merchandise is really only detrimental to giant corporations like Nike or Reebok. Why should ordinary people care? How does it affect them? 
When you go on a counterfeit website, you are giving them your personal credit-card information. So if you feel it’s worth the money you save to give your information to a website out of China, then go for it. Privacy is a whole other issue. How are these ads showing up? Is my information being sold to China? Counterfeiting costs between 750,000 and 1 million jobs [in the US] annually [this number is disputed]. The consumers trust Facebook to deliver legitimate advertisements, and that’s not happening.

Do you think people who knowingly buy counterfeit jerseys should be held accountable?
The ones who should be held accountable are those who retail them. There are people who buy these things in bulk and resell them. It’s not against the law to buy counterfeit goods; it is against the law to profit off of them. 

More from this year's Fashion Issue:

Anarchy in Hi-Hop

Snoop Through the Ages

Denim All Day

Michael Hoban jacket, Wrangler jeans, Tony Lama cowboy hat

PHOTOS AND STYLING BY OLIVIA BEE

Photo Assistant: Cooper Campbell
Models: Lillie, Max. Rory, Tuesday
Horse Wranglers: Jan Campbell and Suzanne Losh
Horses: Blue, Harley, Tristan
Special thanks to Susan Aromaa, Corinne Hunt, Brooke McLeod, Courtney Reid, Holly Stirncorb, Shady Springs Farms

Vintage dress, Justin boots, Carolina bandana

The Fig Leaf dress, Durango boots, Carolina bandana

Tony Lama cowboy hat

Vintage vest, Vikni Crochet top, vintage pants, Nine West boots, vintage necklace

Vakko New York jacket, Roper shirt, Wrangler jeans, Durango boots, Tony Lama cowboy hat

American Apparel top, Male pants, Jeffrey Campbell shoes

Want more from our Fashion Issue?

Anarchy in Hip-Hop

The World's American Dream

Do People Really Dress Like Shit in Buffalo?

All photos by Miyako Bellizzi

Patrik Ervell wasn’t supposed to be a fashion designer. The American-born son of Swedish immigrants, who studied poli-sci at Berkeley, had plans of being a diplomat and traveling the world. But things change quickly for guys like Patrik—men who have an unshakable will and precise notion of who they want to be and what they want to do. When he made up his mind to do fashion, as he explained to me in his home a few days after his brazen 2013 fall/winter show at Milk Studio's MADE Fashion Week, the overarching aesthetic of his eponymous brand was already clear-cut in his mind. If you take a look at his early collections like his runway debut in 2006, there is an unmistakable link between those wares and what he’s doing, today from the use of futuristic fabrics to his lean tailoring. 

Unlike most designers who fall into the burn and churn of trend whoring and swagger jacking, Ervell isolates himself and focuses on refining and perfecting his singular vision. It is in this steady evolution, that I find his work so compelling. His latest collection, which is titled “Sylvan” and evokes a nighttime forest vibe, is both familiar and revelatory. Since his fauna-filled SoHo apartment also serves as his showroom and design studio, the designer coolly walked me through the entire new collection pointing out the slight innovations of his classic pieces. There was the woven wool that looked like luxurious fur but felt a bit more masculine, which he used for some of his new cossack hats and outerwear. And the black sneakers he designed in collaboration with Aldo RISE, which took cues from the high-tech synthetic foot sleeves of old school Nike Huaraches and the articulation of expensive hiking sneakers. But my favorite element was the Real Tree-inspired custom camouflage print the designer adorned his signature pieces like his club-collared button-downs, flight suits, and bomber jackets with. The print is so elegant, it almost looks like a monogramed Japanese woodblock print.

Patrik has been a favorite designer of mine for years. It has been a thrill for me to watch as he grows pushing his patented mix of high-tech fabrics, classic masculine silhouettes, and romanticism forward every season to even more impressive results. His methodical development is so intriguing to me, it led me to pick his brain on how it all began. We talked about his early days in the fashion industry, what it was like being part of the Berkeley movement that also birthed Opening Ceremony and Rodarte, and why being a tech nerd works for men’s fashion.  

VICE: If you started off as a political science and art major, how'd you get into fashion back in the day?
Patrik: I had inklings of it in high school the way everybody does when you’re starting to experiment with  how you dress and what subculture you belong to and what music you listen to. That’s something all teenagers do. I didn’t start looking at fashion—as in the fashion industry—until college. There were a lot of people who I went to college with that ended up working in fashion, which is weird because Berkeley doesn’t have any fashion program. Like, there’s Carol and Humberto from Opening Ceremony and Kate and Laura from Rodarte. None of us studied fashion, but we all ended up working in the industry.

Were you guys a tight knit group of friends?
Humberto and I were close friends. Carol I didn’t meant until a few years later. Kate and Laura—I would say we were friendly, but we weren’t buddies. I remember studying for an art history final at their house. We were in a lot of the same classes, because we were both doing art history stuff.

What was Humberto like back in the day?
I’m four years younger than he is, so he had already left school, but would sometimes come back for parties. He had this crazy loft in San Francisco that seemed like the coolest thing. It was a big open space in the Mission, when the Mission was still kind of bad. There would be hookers and stuff outside. This was around the time I started thinking about fashion. I think he was, too. I mean all of us kind of were.

So you wanted to be a diplomat, right?
Yeah, I was going to join the diplomat corps. I went through the whole process. I took the Foreign Service exam, which is this intense written exam. If you pass it, you have to go to Washington DC for a second interview. I passed it, but then I decided not to pursue it anymore. Instead, I moved to New York City a week after graduating.

Did your folks freak?
For them moving to New York is like what you do if you’re young and ambitious. They didn’t object to it or anything.

What are your parents like?
They met in San Francisco in the 60s, which always seems like a crazy time and place. They met there; they didn’t meet in Sweden. So they were these two Swedish people in their 20s in San Francisco during the 60s when it was this weird capital of counter-culture. I wish I could say my parents were counter-culture, but they weren’t. They were pretty buttoned-up people. In a weird way, I feel like San Francisco during that period drew a lot of normal people who just thought it seemed cool. I think maybe my parents were those people.

Was there a defining moment when you were like “I don’t want to do this diplomat shit”?
I think I always knew it wouldn’t happen. And all my friends from my year moved to New York. Every year there would be this wave of people who would leave for New York, like immigrants in a way. I just went along with all my friends,.

So how did you land the gig at V?
I had been an intern there the summer between my junior and senior year. It wasn’t something I was planning to do. I moved to New York without a job, and was just hanging out for two or three months, which was the two or three months right before September 11t.h When that happened, every company just stopped hiring for a good couple months. I had already done this internship at V and they were like “Oh, do you want to work here?” So I started working there. Mainly because there was this hiring freeze for every single company, so there were no other options.

What was V like back then?
It was much smaller. It was basically three people who did it. Me and two other people. A small company like that, you end up doing a little bit of everything. My title was associate editor, but it was a little bit of everything.

Did you dig working at a magazine?
I did at first. It’s a good thing to do after you finish school. You learn a lot and you meet a lot of people. But after a while you start getting frustrated with it. I wanted to make things and I had plans to do other things and it got more and more frustrating for me. I was working with other people’s clothes and other people’s ideas, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.

So I read that your line started as a graphic T. What were the graphics like?
It was marble statue heads, just details of them. They were really faded and printed on white. It was like a ghosted image of a marble head shot from a beautiful angle. There was a series of three of them. And I think there were some that were an image of a nebulae, something from the Hubble telescope. They were printed on washed out T-shirts. This was when Opening Ceremony first opened, and I think it was one of the first things they sold there. I was still working at V then. I don’t even know what the label said. I don’t know if it was my name or something else. But it was more like a project. It was casual. I don’t know if I have any, but I remember them being very beautiful.

It’s interesting you brought up the nebulae, because it seems like there’s a lot of technology and science in your work. Was that always an interest of yours, and where did that start?
I always thought the things that were the most beautiful were images that come from science and science fiction. As a menswear designer, there’s not that much room for fantasy and extreme dressing up. But in this weird way, science fiction has this narrow little path you can walk on where you can do that and it’s still very masculine. That always interested me.

Did you have telescopes when you were a kid?
I was nerd, yeah.

How big of a nerd?
I remember I was second place in the county science fair in middle school when I lived in in Marine County. It was something about biodegradable garbage bags. I tested them and buried them underground for a month, and some of them were left underwater for a month and then I compared the results.

You spent most of your youth in California, right?
My formative years, sure. I moved there in second or third grade, and then I was there all through high school and I moved to Berkeley after that. Before that it was London for three years and before that Sweden.

So what did your parents do that allowed them to travel?
My dad was in the container industry, which are those big metal boxes that go on ships. Shipping containers. My mom was working with the company also, but I guess she didn’t really have a career of her own.

Since you’ve talked about the early, formative years of OC, what was it like being there when it was first starting?
When it first opened, it was really like a mom and pop shop. It was Carol and Humberto, and they were literally manning the cash registers. And that’s changed so much. They’re a great success story of my generation. They are especially impressive since that store grew so exponentially during a bad recession.

How did the line move from T-shirts to Patrik Ervell?
Very gradual. I was figuring out how to do it and do it correctly. And it wasn’t a full collection until three or four years later. I didn’t have a show until at least five years after starting. I started right away with doing a show, then I did presentations for two or three, and then went back to doing shows.

How do you design?
Sometimes there’s drawings, but it’s menswear, so we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re using forms that we all know. A lot of it is about details and fabric and print. We’ll make the first sample and then apply the details and apply the fabric. It’s not like women’s clothes where you’re draping and fitting something and pulling ideas out of thin air. It always has one foot firmly rooted in reality.

I love that a lot of your stuff is made in New York, and I was wondering if that was always a vision from the beginnings.
That’s just how I started, because I was figuring it out myself. A lot of people in New York who start a fashion label will have already worked at Ralph Lauren or a big company like Club Monaco or J. Crew. Those companies manufacture overseas, mostly in China. So being a designer for them, their training ends up being preparing tech packs to send to China to get the samples back. Because I started learning by doing, I had to do that here. There was no other option. But I’m happy I did. I think a lot of people are now moving back to manufacturing here. You can still find things that are high quality here. It’s a little trickier, but it’s improving all the time.

As the collection has developed, was there a moment when you really found your voice?
It was there from the beginning. There was always a specific approach. I feel like my growth has been gradual, and slow by industry standards because it’s not exactly for everyone.

I love how your pieces evolve in your runway shows, ranging from more basic at the beginning of the show to more experimental at the end. Is there a thought process behind that, or is that just coincidence?
There are different approaches, but I like shows to build slow, like a narrative that grows naturally into a crescendo. I could put my shows from the beginning back to back and have like a 300-look show and it would make sense. I don’t make drastic shifts each season. It’s its own narrative; it stays within its own kind of trajectory. It’s not about seasonal trends or anything like that. It’s more about this brand and the aesthetic.

Do you get more enjoyment from creating your more extreme pieces?
I started doing this is for that aspect of it. However, menswear is so much about the product and the physical thing. It has to be grounded in reality. If it’s not grounded in reality, it loses its power.

Are you cool with people calling your stuff minimal?
I can see why people would say that. But I don’t see it that way. A lot of it is romantic and hopefully has a lot of soul and feeling. I’ve never been into soulless minimalism, or minimalism for the sake of being minimal. That’s not what I do. But compared to an American menswear look, it feels minimal. But that’s changing, too.

Is it hard trying to be a part of the schedule of fashion and fall in line with that constant turnover?
It’s so hard. But it’s also a luxury to have the opportunity every six months to re-invent yourself. I have a lot of friends in other creative fields, like writers and filmmakers. They don’t get second chances, let alone every six months. It’s amazing to be able to turn your back on what happened six months before. Fashion people only remember the last thing you did. They don’t remember before that, which is kind of great, but also kind of scary. 

If you're in NYC, visit the Patrik Ervell sample sale Friday March 1st through Sunday March 3rd, at 35 Howard Street, Buzzer #6. Or visit PatrikErvell.com to shop his spring/summer 2013 collection.

Read more fashion articles by Wilbert:

Black Man in a Dress

May Streetwear Keep You Forever Young

A$AP Rocky and Jeremy Scott Schooled Me on How to Be a Pretty Motherfucker

Photo Courtesy of Amendment II

In December, the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, threw the country into a deep depression, followed by a fiery debate about guns. As January brought the US six more school shootings, many “solutions” were proposed, from arming janitors to banning all guns, while companies hawking bulletproof blazers, suits, and even children’s clothes saw sales skyrocket. One of these vendors, Amendment II, has bulletproof backpacks starting at $300. I called the company's president Derek Williams to ask if business was still booming.

VICE: I assume from your company’s name that you really love the Second Amendment?
Derek Williams: We’re trying to develop products that save lives, but we all are concealed-weapons carriers, and we all believe firmly in the right to bear arms.

Do you feel that selling body armor somehow encourages people to buy more guns?
I can see that from outward appearances, it looks like we’re promoting the Second Amendment by selling body armor. But there is really no causal relationship between body armor and shootings other than the fact that the increase in shootings has caused people to want body armor. The reason I stress that is that we’ve had a lot of hate mail from those who say that we’re contributing to the problem of gun violence. 

You sell something called “designer armor.” What does that mean?
We can bulletproof anything you’ve got: jackets, dress shirts, things like that. Prices are high—some items cost $2,500. We sell to people like celebrities; anyone who wants to look good and be protected.

Could you bulletproof a beret? Or a cravat?
Yep, absolutely. 

Tell me about the children’s backpacks that have caused all this controversy. How did they
come about?
At trade shows I’d have people come up to me and say, “Hey, this armor is lightweight, I’d love to have a vest or a backpack for my kid so I can take him hunting,” or, “My kid was at Virginia Tech during the [2007] shooting, I don’t want to risk anything else like that.” After the Connecticut shooting everything just exploded, and we now have a four-week backlog on orders for the backpacks.

Aren’t parents also worried about protecting their children’s chests?
Well, any body armor has gaps. I did get an order the other week from a woman for a purple bulletproof vest for her six-year-old. But with the backpacks, if you’re running away from a situation then your back is protected. If you’re trapped, you can get in a corner, lie down, and put the backpack in front of you. Hopefully, it gives you decent odds.

Should we arm children too?
I don’t know. We try not to get into the politics, but I’m personally a believer in the Second Amendment.

Yeah, I think that’s pretty clear.

More crazy American fashion from our Fashion Issue:

Disasters Made in Bangladesh

Snoop Through the Ages

The World's American Dream

PHOTOS AND GIFS BY AWOL ERIZKU
CREATIVE DIRECTION AND WORDS BY WILBERT L. COOPER
Photo Assistant: Adrian Phillips; Hair: Rico London; Makeup: Stephanie Clouden
Special thanks to Levels Barbershop in New York City

Innumerable hours of my life have been spent in barbershops that specialize in cutting black people’s hair, and the majority of my visits had nothing to do with getting my hair cut. The black barbershop is one of the last American sanctuaries and an American tradition. It’s where you go to catch up on the news, debate about butts, play the numbers, watch the game, buy stolen sneakers from a hustler or bean pies from a black Muslim, and generally just shoot the shit. In other words, a barbershop’s clientele is what makes it more than a place you go to get fresh.  

Arriving at the barbershop with a cool crew is paramount—how else could anyone endure standing around for hours while dudes get their hair styled into pagan symbols and geometric anomalies? So to exemplify just how crucial the black-barbershop experience is to American style and culture, photographer Awol Erizku and I assembled a cross section of notable heads and hosted the flyest striped-pole powwow ever. We enlisted the help of Tribe NYC, a creative collective of young people bound by their love of black youth culture and art from the late 80s and early 90s; Joshua Kissi, cofounder of Street Etiquette, a website that is pushing street style in a new direction while still honoring the fashion lineage of African American men; and twins Bruce and Glen Proctor, fashion designers with their own line of high-end bracelets called BruceGlen who also help run Sunday services as ministers at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. 

The following photos of young, intricately hairstyled brothers showcases the latest wave in a long lineage of ever-evolving ways in which young black men express themselves and pay respect to their history through their follicles. 

Click through to the next page to see all the photos from this shoot.

For more fashion photo shoots, check these out:

Colts and Fillies

American Gigolo

Snoop Through the Ages

Vintage stole from New York Vintage, Ann Demeulemeester jacket, Georgette top, Reformation dress.

PHOTOS BY SAMANTHA RAPP

Stylist: Cristian Stroble at Walter Schupfer Management
Stylist's Assistant: Victoria Cameron
Hair: Ramona Eschbach, using Oribe Haircare at Jed Root
Makeup: Valerie Gasparis
Model: Jamie Bochert at Elite

Diesel Black Gold coat, Ssense cardigan, Reformation top, Ann Demeulemeester leggings and boots

Bass jacket, Acne Studios shirt, Reformation pants

BLK DNM coat, Glenn Martens top, Ann Demeulemeester leggings

Vintage stole from New York Vintage, vintage coat and brooch

BLK DNM cardigan, Acne Studios top, Reformation pants

Avelon coat, Reformation drew

Ann Demeulemeester coat

Vintage stole from New York Vintage, vintage coat

One thing you should understand before you reblog that Margiela mask is that you’ll probably never ever see it in person, let alone purchase it. And if you are fucking with that sort of fashion, you probably have better things to do than waste away hours in the dark on Tumblr. (See: Real life.)

I know it sounds stupid, but high fashion is art, and art is a spectator’s sport. I know you’re probably thinking that you don’t fit into this paradigm, but let’s be real for a second—you own one piece of ready-to-wear that cost you a month’s salary and a few of the welfare H&M designer-collaboration pieces. I treasure the few expensive garments I own, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world, but the gap between the fashion players and the fashion fans has created a monster. People despise sitting on the bench, so logically they have done what outsiders always do: They made their own game. Various smaller brands have started coming out with half-ass designs that combine some tongue-in-cheek remark with iconic imagery from major fashion houses.

These iconic-turned-ironic parodies seem to have stemmed from veteran streetwear brands like SSUR and its Comme Des Fuckdown* range. Now let’s get something straight, back when SSUR dropped Comme Des Fuckdown*, streetwear kind of meant something. In the 80s and 90s, OG brands like FUCT, Stussy, and SSUR organically promoted rebellious youth culture and blazed a trail for hundreds of other brands to follow. So those early streetwear brands pretty much get a pass for house ripping. It’s kind of like that first time Jackson Pollock decided to lose his mind in front of canvas... The first guy always gets a pass.

Then came the various Yves Saint Laurent rips—like the one that read "ASL." Instead of YSL, "ASL" was written in Adolphe Mouron Cassandre’s classic typeface, referring to the old school internet acronym for, "age, sex, location." The Chanel logo has been played on many times over and is by far the most nauseating. The worst might be instances where the classic Chanel logo is used twith classy words like "cunt" emblazoned in all caps on a garment. And then there is Les Plus Dores, the small NYC clothing brand whose name is French for “give us your money.” They started producing jersey team shirts adorned with designers’ surnames and their birth years, like "Tisci, 74," "Margiela, 57," "Slimane, 68," and so forth… Spanish fashion house Balenciaga got its own caricature from the brand Conflict of Interest, who tweaked the storied fashion house’s name to be "Ballinciaga"—the prefix referencing a catchphrase from Jim Jones’s 2006 hit “We Fly High.” Other one-hit wonders include Giraunchy, Ill Slander, and Brawlmain.

The awkward part is that these house rips are priced as if they truly were designer products. Should these lazy graphics that are probably printed on Gildan T-shirts really set you back about a hundred bucks? Should Les Plus Dores rake in cash on an idea that took them five minutes to think up and even less time to design? These con artists apparently have the same attitude as the people behind the super hyped Pyrex Vision brand, who were recently outted for throwing their brand name and the number 23, part of their log, on cheap Ralph Lauren Rugby flannel shirts and marking them up 700 percent. The case of swagger-jacking was so egregious that designer Mark McNairy poked fun at them in his latest fall/winter 2013 collection for New Amsterdam’s fall season by designing a similar flannel shirt that simply had the word "Tupperware" printed above an equally obnoxious number, 13.

What these house-rippers need to realize is that unassuming irony is what works, not the awkward “I know who Raf Simons is” vibe they’re giving off. But I have to applaud these brands for exploiting a bunch of girls on the internet who “like fashion.” Even though they are littering the world with more ugly clothing that will undoubtedly end up being worn by some kid in a third world country alongside those Livestrong shirts and Crocs. These house-rippers are basically the equivalent of the Garbage Pail Kids in the fashion world, but without the great art and thoughtful design. It was cool for a bit, but it’s time to knock it off—no pun intended.

Read more on fashion:

Is Facebook Getting Away With Selling Counterfeit Crap?

Because the Night

Chop, Drop and Roll

Burt Avedon poses with his Navy pilot's helmet at his home in Verona, Wisconsin. Portrait by Narayan Mahon.

Until the early 1900s, there was no such thing as “expedition” clothing, much less an outdoor-clothing industry. Explorers would simply find the most rugged gear they could get their hands on and hope it would suffice. In 1903, during an Arctic mineral-hunting expedition, an American geologist by the name of Ben Willis discovered that most clothing doesn’t hold up in 100 mph winds and -60 °F temperatures. Ben returned to New York and started designing garments that could withstand conditions in the frozen tundra from which he had just escaped.

A few years earlier, in 1897, C.C. Filson had begun making his eponymous clothing for gold miners looking to strike it rich in Alaska, and thus, with the two manufacturers and the nascent Manhattan retailer Abercrombie Co., the outdoor-clothing industry was born. In 1928, Willis took on Howard Geiger as a partner, and Willis & Geiger set to work outfitting the era’s most famous explorers: Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Roald Amundsen, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Tenzing Norgay, to name a few. They manufactured private label gear to outdoor brands like L.L. Bean, Abercrombie & Fitch (the “Fitch” was added after one of Abercrombie’s regular customers invested in the company in 1904), and Eddie Bauer. Despite the brand’s deep heritage in the clothing industry, Willis & Geiger—which Town & Country magazine once called the “granddaddy of outerwear”—is widely unknown today. So what happened? It was bought and sold over and over, by a variety of corporations, and the brand only lives on via eBay auctions and a few pieces of clothing from Lands’ End that appropriate Willis & Geiger in name only.

Burt Avedon (cousin of the famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon) revived the company two years after it went out of business in 1977 and helmed it until it was liquidated in 1999. Now 89 years old, Burt is one of the last remaining people to have hands-on experience with the brand. His bio reads like a Most Interesting Man in the World skit: He was a pilot by age 12, raced cars, played football for UCLA, fought at Iwo Jima, was awarded a Purple Heart in the Navy, went from Harvard Business School into cosmetics and fashion, married an Italian princess, and later led attempts to excavate downed World War II planes from Greenland ice. After a short search, I tracked him down at his home in Verona, Wisconsin, to find out what had happened to what many consider to be the greatest outdoor-clothing brand of all time. 

Illustration by Penelope Gazin

The 90s were perfect. That’s objective. Not even “the 90s,” really, but particular neon-gilded chambers of time within the 90s (like, super-ur-90s Sassy magazine before it began its slow death in 1995-ish) were perfect. This isn’t to privilege one set of nostalgics over another; the 1990s reverence felt by three small, semidiscrete generations (X, Y, Millennial) is, of course, no different from anyone else’s nostalgia for what came before, but seriously, the 90s were good for us. They were great sometimes. 

I don’t even care about “better.” What’s better? Does better matter, is better relevant, is better possible? But one particular aspect of the culture that is definitely not better right now, and will be no better, is the translation of fashion to film, to video, to TV, to the internet. 

I guess I mean this in an abstract and personal sense of “better”: There are a zillion dedicated segments and shows about fashion, on real TV and online, on blogs and the rest of it, that are doing what they set out to do, achieving everything they want to achieve. Every website I’ve ever been to (ever? Ever!) has featured a closet tour with some emerging or expiring It girl. Like the 90s, this is good and even great sometimes. And the epitome of 90s-fashion television, MTV’s House of Style, was revived last year, with ace model hosts and the familiar and correct cross-genre/high-low/daydreamy approach. 

There is, though, a real and important difference in quality—in nature and the value of that nature—between all that and what came before. The possibilities of fashion x internet x committed curatorial perspective are still beyond us, but what is gone for real—forever—is a loose, unformed intent: Back then, fashion on TV was without the now-ubiquitous gloss, practiced and known backward and forward by teenage amateurs; the self-seriousness and ironic remove; the media training and branding and messaging. When fashion was for insiders, not for Target shoppers, there wasn’t any reason for it. That’s all fine; that is a gradual move of one thing to its nth-degree, advanced-capitalism self, and it’s futile to be precious about it. 

Fashion, though, lost something particular when that 90s-style who-cares vérité faded and then became impossible because of new media. What was abandoned, because it had to be, during the inevitable professionalizing of fashion content on TV—brighter, tighter, more and more toward a style-smart and fully internetted audience that knew all the names and houses and cities and voices instead of just the faces—is the essential bedroom element, the nonregulation that once came through in an unstaged backstage (now impossible), a messy bed, homemade eyebrows. Fashion—style, actually—is forged in unmediated physical space and time, through posing and playing. For a hot minute, that’s what fashion was, and did, and felt like on TV, too.

In addition to House of Style, the 90s included the ad-hoc-ish era of Fashion Television, a Canadian show that was, improbably, exported everywhere else and lasted for like 25 years (and, much less significantly, there was Ooh La La, the sister show of FT, which looked like Party Girl and featured segments about, say, a girl selling smock dresses in her college-town backyard). “Cool” then passed through fewer regulating bodies, fewer people; content was more awkward, more comfortable with weirdness, frequently slow and often boring, an evocation more than a directive—such a decade, before three-minute music videos were truncated into soda ads—all of which lent itself specifically to the experience of creating and communicating identity, mutable and momentary, through fashion. This sensibility—where you were called on to engage, interpret, understand, and be alienated and offended by mean models and nameless skateboarders—was captured in any number of other shows then, about fashion or not: like Sifl and Olly, the late-90s sock-puppet parfait on MTV, and Comedy Central’s Hi Octane, which was a barely there and now lost-to-the-ages car show (?) from 1994 that was mostly/actually about musicians (!) and hosted by then dilettantes Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes (!) with contributions from Thurston Moore (!!!). It goes on, too: The impossible, wantable in-jokes that ran on Sassy spines are nowhere now; everything is easy, available, clickbait.

That television has largely abandoned content and style that embrace amateurishness and risk is, you know, whatever-whatever-whatever, another whole thing. That fashion is, as a result, left without a similarly, necessarily random, uncomfortable, unknown, and unknowable forum is culturally real, is felt, and is dangerous: When the onus of effort and decision-making moves from the shows’ audiences to the shows’ creators, it’s boring for everyone. When you can see, know, or be anything, instantly, it’s really not any better, is it?

Kate Carraway writes the weekly Obseshes column for VICE.com.

Previously - Selfies

Astrid Andersen jersey, Minimale Animale bikini top and bottom, Han holo earrings

PHOTOS BY BEN RITTER
STYLIST: ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Hair, Makeup, and Body Art: William Lemon for Temptu
Photo Assistant: Vincent Perini
Stylist Assistant: Andrew Courtien
Models: Chanelle Elise at Next LA, Melissa Stetten at APM
Special Thanks to Darren Tereul

Irina Marinescu dress

Patricia Field rain cloak, Assembly New York bodysuit, Pedro Garcia shoes

Mink Pink coat

Ashish dress, Han Cholo earrings

Patricia Field bra, shorts, and hat, Han Cholo earrings

Alessia Prekop bodysuit

Aqua by Aqua swimsuit, Mandy Coon cuff

More from the Fashion Issue:

Because the Night

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Monday's shower-curtain dress. Photos by Jill Thompson and Courtney Turnball.

I’m Canadian, but if there’s one thing I know about Americans, it’s that they love buying products manufactured by impoverished foreign people. Hardly any of the clothing sold in the United States is made there; everybody knows it and no one really has a problem with it except for a few uptight weirdos who dress either really well or, more likely, like an incontinent grandmother’s shitstains. But what if, one day, the crap-manufacturing industry collapses, and all of the indentured servants the US employs there are no longer able to produce an endless supply of cheaply manufactured flashy garments? What sorts of atrocities would Americans be forced to wear?

To illustrate this hypothetical predicament, I committed to hand-making my own wardrobe from scratch and wearing a different outfit each day of the week. Like most Americans, I know very little about fashion design or sewing, so this process was overwhelmingly tedious and took approximately 5,000 times longer to complete than it would have taken anyone who works in an actual sweatshop (that’s why the system exists, duh). I did attempt to make decent-looking garments so that I had a chance of passing as a sane person. If one of the Olsen twins can walk around in a furry trash bag, what did I have to lose? So I pressed on and am happy to present to you a rough approximation of how shittily Americans and other spoiled Westerners will be dressing in a future where sweatshops don’t exist and we are forced to improvise our own clothing.

MONDAY: SHOWER-CURTAIN DRESS

I thought it was important to use as many recycled fabrics as possible in this experiment, so the shower curtain I selected to make my first outfit with had been hanging in the bathroom of my parents’ house for several years. This explains why the inside of the dress was coated with furry black mold, but I just pretended it was lined with rabbit fur so it wasn’t a big deal.

It took a lot of cutting and sewing (which, again, I had no idea how to do), but I’d say the end product was quite a success, especially if you happen to be into the whole Sears-maternitysadness type of look.

Speaking of maternity sadness, my mother invited me out to dinner the night I finished the dress, and when I walked in the door she insisted that I change. I told her that it wasn’t a possibility because it was “my job, Mom.” A family friend dined with us and told me that my shower-curtain couture reminded her of when she was pregnant. My mother, of course, chirped in and said that I looked like I was on welfare and that she was embarrassed to be sitting across from me.

TUESDAY: TURTLENECK/OWL VAGINA

I know people are divided about wearing realistic pictures of animals and animal prints on their bodies, but fuck those toilet bugs. To me, wearing animal-themed clothing is the same thing as wearing a band shirt, because I’m a big fan of animals—I want to be around them, I want them on me, and I want them inside me, all the time, forever. This owl-print pillowcase was also unearthed at my parents’ house, where it had been banished to the back of a closet. My grandmother bragged about how she had bought it before there was a Walmart in the city, which seemed appropriate considering Walmart goes with sweatshops like owls go with my vagina.

The combination of the turtleneck and the owl skirt worked really well and made me feel more confident than anyone probably ever should, although I did catch myself in a mirror and for a second thought I had a pillow resting on my lap. I wore the outfit to a nursing home, where I felt extremely sexually attractive (if you’ve never felt like you’re hot stuff around a bunch of old people, you’re really missing out).

WEDNESDAY: ACCIDENTAL PAJAMAS

When people wear pajamas outside it feels like they’re saying, “I’d rather be sleeping than doing whatever it is I’m doing.” This impulse to turn your brain off is, to me, reminiscent of suicide. That’s the long way of explaining to you that I didn’t mean to make pajamas. When I was “designing” this outfit, I was just trying to make something easy to wear, comfortable, and plaid—what’s wrong with that? I used bedsheets and a piece of elastic to make the pants, and turned an old housecoat into a shirt. In retrospect, accidental pajamas were inevitable. How did I not foresee this? Do I secretly want to wear pajamas in public? What am I doing with my life? Am I a pseudo-adult degenerate? These questions were running through my head until I realized I wore this outfit to the mall, where I went to buy ice cream. I’m doing just fine, thanks.

PS: Every good stylist knows how important it is to accessorize, so I also sported this modest, lightweight purse, aka a brown paper bag. Looks like I’ve just created “mental-illness chic.” What happens now? Do I get famous? I hope so.

THURSDAY: FLORAL ONESIE

One-piece suits are great because sometimes it can feel silly to put conscious effort into mixing and matching clothes, especially once you consider that you could be thinking about other things like astrophysics or all of the genocides that are happening at the very second you are squinting at a pair of belts. So this onesie was the piece I was the most excited about creating. I used my favorite fabric—a bedsheet from the 80s that I had cherished for years—and made precise measurements, which turned out to not be that precise because, again, I had no fucking idea what I was doing. The end result was an awkward, camel-toe-inducing, slightly see-through, human-shaped blob of fabric that a slutty street urchin might wear in Charles Dickens fan fiction.

I couldn’t move my body without tearing the seams, and at one point it felt like my thighs were losing circulation. I went grocery shopping wearing this thing, and it felt like I was naked the whole time. This was especially confusing as grocery shopping, for me, also doubles as hotdad- hunting time. Ultimately, I felt too vulnerable to pursue any hot dads. But somehow I ended up spreading my legs too far and ripping the crotch out. I did it all for you, America!

FRIDAY: LACE-TABLECLOTH CIRCLE SKIRT

I made this totally cool skirt out of one of my mom’s tablecloths and paired it with a shirt from the thrift store because, fuck it, sewing is boring, difficult, and I didn’t want to do it anymore! There’s a barbecue-sauce stain on it that kind of looks like period blood, but I think that just adds a little edge to an otherwise delicate and girlish-looking garment that I am very proud of. The thing about wearing retarded stuff on Friday is that you can pretty much get away with anything and still get praised for it. I knew I looked like a poor Harajuku Girl, but next to normal women at bars I came off as too confidently crazy to participate in their primitive attractiveness competitions, which is exactly what I was going for. My reward? Great conversations, lots of laughter, barfing on a grown man’s penis in the bathroom of a drug den, and the sensation of a rash developing on my thighs—perhaps due to the barbecue stain seeping into my skin slowly over the course of a long Friday night.

SATURDAY: “I LOVE YOU” MIDLENGTH TEE

I found this fabric lying around my house emblazoned with i love you, and at this point I was getting ultra-lazy with the cutting and sewing. I just made a square for my body and only stitched together what was necessary to keep it from falling apart. I left the house with seams coming undone and strings dangling all over the place, which was actually beneficial because ragamuffin is such an “in” look right now.

I went out for a midday beer with a friend, and the bartender walked over with a pair of scissors, offering to adjust my outfit. I watched her cut the strings off as she shared her own fashion-design goals. A glimmer of sunshine entered my soul. Maybe this is how sweatshop workers feel on their days off? Oh wait, they don’t get days off. More likely, it was just what being drunk in the afternoon feels like.

Later on I went to a sex-toy shop to buy vibrators for my friends because I was feeling so generous and happy. Maybe the message on my shirt was flowing up into my brain. Or perhaps we should always wear things that we think are psychotic so we end up changing up our usual, boring behavioral patterns. Or it could be that I’m just full of spite and wretchedness, I don’t know.

SUNDAY: HOUSE TOGA

By this point I was so over this sewing-and-stitching shit that I literally just draped fabric over my body and tied it up like a toga. Oddly enough, this was also the most fashionable I felt all week. I have to admit, there’s something really decadent and elevating about swaddling your body in layers of cloth.

All I did on Sunday was loaf around. In jogging pants this “activity” would have felt disgusting and lonely, but in a fine, rich-colored jersey it felt queenly. A friend came over and told me I looked like Beyonce, which, I cannot emphasize enough, has never happened before. Maybe everyone should just walk around in loose, flowing fabrics all day. We’d probably be more relaxed, have massive orgies, feed one another grapes, and drink out of chalices, i.e., live in paradise. Plus, going to the bathroom is a cinch in a toga.

I would be perfectly content draping sheets over myself all day, every day, but this is impossible unless everybody is doing it—people would assume I needed medical attention. Just one more way fitting into society can compromise your value system. I guess when they say, “You have to suffer for fashion,” the “you” refers to a bunch of starving Southeast Asian kids in a factory. Oh, America, what a conundrum you are.

Read more from our Fashion Issue:

Fashion in the 90s

Because the Night

American Gigolo

I.D. Sarrieri bra, vintage trousers from Sick, Annie Phillips boa, Claire's Accessories hairclips, vintage bracelet.

PHOTOS BY VALERIE PHILLIPS
STYLIST: BERTIE BRANDES, CHARLOTTE ROBERTS

Hair: Claire Marie Grech
Make-up: Jessica Taylor
Nails by WAH Nails
Fashion Assistant: Lydia Morrish

I.D. Sarrieri bra, Annie Phillips bra, Claire's Accessories hairclips.

Adidas puffa jacket, Marlies Dekkers orange bra, Rokit Levi's shorts, Dominic Jones necklace, American Apparel necklace and earrings, vintage bracelet.

Marlies Dekkers orange bra, Rokit Levi's shorts, jewellery as before.

Rokit jacket, Charkviani shoes, jewellery as before.

I.D. Sarrieri bra and thong, American Apparel suspender belt, jewellery as before.

Playful Promises bra, Marks & Spencers underwear, vintage hairband, jewellery as before.

Vintage Prada top, Rokit skirt, Claire's Accessories hairclips, jewellery as before.

American Apparel t-shirt, Bas Kosters skirt, vintage jacket, Tatty Devine necklace, American Apparel earrings, vintage hairclips and bracelet.

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Portrait by Harry Langdon

In the pantheon of American fashion designers, Bob Mackie stands alone with his singular focus on sequined, bejeweled, and hyperbolic custom-made outfits for the world’s most ostentatious personalities. And even if you’re unfamiliar with his name (which wouldn’t be surprising, considering Bob’s never had a mass-marketed brand of his own), if you’ve ever looked at a photo of a famous person, chances are you’re familiar with his work. Over the course of his 50-year career, Bob has made clothes for the likes of Cher, Liza, Barbra, Britney, Michael, Madonna, Oprah, Dolly, Whitney, Tina, and just about everyone else who has reached first-name-only status. 

Bob, 72, started his career in Hollywood in the early 60s, working in various wardrobe departments. As a costume designer, he pioneered the over-the-top look that has dominated the flashier corners of American fashion for most of the past half century, earning him nicknames like the Raja of Rhinestones and the Sultan of Sequins.

Along the way, Bob designed fancy costumes for Barbie dolls, won nine Emmys, was nominated for three Oscars, started a furniture line, dressed the Mob, designed fragrances, developed a couture line, and accomplished a million other spectacular things. Currently much of Bob’s energy is focused on his QVC line of “wearable art,” which is much more in line with comfortable, consumer-facing fashion than its name and Bob’s previous work would suggest. 

VICE: What are you doing right now? 
Bob Mackie: I am just outside of Philadelphia. I’m doing a televised-shopping thing. 

For QVC, right? Is that what you’re mainly working on these days? 
It does take up a lot of time, but I’m also always working on other projects. 

Like what?
Well, there’s a cosmetics line I’m working on, and also a furniture line. Which is good because during the recession, I wasn’t making a new line of furniture because people weren’t buying it. You know, if you’re losing your home, why would you buy furniture? But now it’s all changing. 

Obviously, you’re a pretty busy guy, but are you so busy that you can’t even keep track of what you make? Do you have any idea how many different looks you’ve designed over the years?
[laughs] No! I’ve been in the business over 50 years, and I haven’t kept count. 

Do you ever see a piece that you designed without any recollection of doing so? 
Sometimes I see old tapes of television shows that I did a long time ago, and I see something and know that I did it because I designed the show, but I have completely forgotten it. It’s always a strange feeling. But it’s very hard to remember because I used to do two to three hours of television shows a week, and I just worked 24 hours a day. Once it was over, we’d just move straight on to the next one. 

Bob and Carol Burnett in her home, 1967

The television shows you designed wardrobe for back then were classic big productions like The Carol Burnett Show. It all seemed so cohesive. Were you responsible for designing every costume and look?
Well, not everything was designed. I would rent a lot of stuff like uniforms and period pieces, but we were doing 50 to 70 costumes per episode, and we had a show every week. 

I watched an interview with you during which you said that to get inspiration for sketch-comedy wardrobes, you’d walk around the mall and people-watch. You also said that you couldn’t believe what people thought they looked good in. Is strolling around malls or other public places something you still do? 
I don’t do sketch comedy anymore, but I definitely still walk around malls and airports—especially airports—and I think, Oh my God, look at her, or, Look at those ugly shoes! Today, a lot of women are wearing very unflattering clothes.

Yes, I think the worst-dressed people can be found at the airport because somewhere along the line everyone decided that unabashed comfort trumps any sort of decorum whatsoever. It’s crazy. You have people going on two-hour flights in pajamas with neck pillows and their bare feet stinking up the cabin. 
I know! But the thing is, you can be comfortable without looking like a pig. When I fly, I sit there and I watch people board the plane and I think, Where are they going when they arrive? Where can you go when you look that ridiculous?

Are there any specific current trends that you just can’t stand? 
Leggings worn on their own. It stops me cold some days; I just can’t believe my eyes! Just because it’s stretchy, it doesn’t mean it fits or looks good. 

And what about from the past?
Well, sometimes, when they’re happening you think, Oh my God, what’s going on here? And then after a while you start liking it. Like when minidresses came in, they were just above the knee and everyone was so shocked. Then all of a sudden they were barely covering the crotch. And now everybody’s got it all hanging out and we’re used to it. 

Does that happen with things you’ve designed in the past? Do you ever look back and go, “What was I thinking?”
Well, I look back and I say to myself, “That was 30 or 40 years ago and that was the trend at the time.”

Amethyst Aura Barbie, 1997

What decade do you think had the most style crimes?
The 80s. Everyone was rebelling against the 70s and got so overdressed and so garish with all that big, funny hair and those huge shoulder pads. It just didn’t look good. And it’s been long enough ago that, if it had looked good, we would know it did by now. But today, nobody is doing anything interesting or new. 

What do you mean?
I look around, and it’s all just the same old stuff regurgitated and brought back. You see a trend come and go, and then it comes back and goes again, and now it’s coming back for a third time! It’s getting kind of crazy. The fabrics are interesting now, though. There are lots of things you can do with them that we couldn’t do in the past. 

Is there anything that you’ve tried to make that was just too ambitious? Something you had to give up on? 
Not that I remember. I’ve always had a very practical side that would stop me from doing that. A lot of the time I would only have four or five days to get something together, and if you get to the day of the shoot and it doesn’t work or it’s not ready, you’re in deep shit. But then there are times when I’ve had six months or a year to get ready for something, and I’d do research and make all of these huge things with headpieces and back pieces and feathers—these are looks that have to be built. And they have to be lightweight and not break, and they have to move as though they’re made out of butterfly wings. And it’s very exciting to do, but it’s not something I would try when I only had a couple of days. 

Is that one of the things that drew you to working with Barbie dolls? Some of the outfits you’ve done for them would be impossible to put on a person. 
Actually, there’s a whole bunch of drag queens around who will copy a Barbie that I’ve done, and I’ll look at it and say, “Wow, that’s pretty good!” But then other times they’ll try and do it, but they don’t know how to build it; they wear it, and then all of a sudden it collapses.

I’d imagine drag queens must re-create your designs a lot. 
My entire career, people would say to me, “You have to go see this drag show.” And they wouldn’t tell me why, and I’d walk in and every performer would be wearing a copy of what I’ve done. Especially the things I’ve done for Cher. 

Cher in what Bob calls "one of her outfits," a costume from a 1975 television special. Photo by Harry Langdon

Are you still working with Cher?
I haven’t worked with her in several years because she hasn’t done anything. She just went to Russia to do one of those one-nighters where they make a million-zillion dollars, and she pulled out a lot of my old stuff and used it. But I don’t know if we’ll do anything together ever again; it’s a lot of work going out on the road and getting all dressed up like that.

I wanted to ask you about the infamous dress you made for her to wear to the 1986 Academy Awards, the one where she looked like a midriff-baring witch-queen with a spiky Afro. Is it true that it was her idea to do that and you tried to talk her out of it?
Well, she was giving an award to Don Ameche. And he was a man in his 70s who was receiving this wonderful award, so I said, “Do you really think you should dress up like that? Don’t you think you’re going to pull focus from what it’s really about?” And she said, “Oh, he won’t mind.” And of course the next day she was on the cover of every newspaper. And they still print those pictures. 

Over the years, has there ever been someone who you wished you could’ve dressed but it never happened for whatever reason? 
Not really. I like it if someone comes in and they’re 20 pounds overweight. If I can make them walk onstage and look like their old selves and look really good, that’s always fun for me. I suppose I would’ve loved to have dressed Audrey Hepburn. She just looked fantastic in everything; she was like a model. Real people didn’t and don’t look like her at all; she was breathtaking. She didn’t look like a man’s wet dream, she wasn’t terribly sexy, but at the same time she really looked amazing. In my teenage years, my two favorites were Audrey and Marilyn Monroe, who were the exact opposites of each other.

Did you get to work with Marilyn?
My first job in the movies was to sketch all the dresses she was going to wear in Something’s Got to Give. It was on that job that she died—she never finished the movie. It was very strange. I was 22 and so excited, and then Marilyn, my very favorite, was gone. I still can’t watch the movies about her, I don’t even want to look at them—I don’t want to see an actress play her because nobody can do what she did on-screen. She was so magical. Adorable and common and so sexy and so appealing. A very interesting creature, she was.

Goddess of Africa Barbie, 1999

What I like about your designs is that while they’re always pretty, many of them are also funny and shocking. Do you ever set about designing a costume with the goal of getting extreme reactions out of people?
I want to surprise them. Especially when I’m dressing performers. You want the audience to be surprised when they walk out. You want them to swoon or ooh or ahh or clap—all of that’s important, it’s part of the business of show business. It’s exciting. If a woman is going to do an hour and a half onstage, and she’s just in a little black dress, she’d better be Judy Garland. You’re there to see her, you’re not just listening. So there needs to be something visual. At the same time, if you don’t make them look good, you’ve defeated the purpose of putting something on them. It’s all about making them look thinner and taller and fabulous. 

Does the fashion world take you seriously?
The fashion world never really accepted me. I was always a costume designer, not a fashion designer. But because of the women I dressed, I was kind of dragged into the fashion world, which was fine, but the fashion press never really liked me.

What do you think about the fashion industry right now?
I don’t think anything of it. It’s a terrible business to be in. People are going in and out of business constantly—it’s really rough. And with the way the stores are reacting and the way they’re treating the designers, it’s very hard. It’s hard to make a good living there. I see young designers going into fashion and I say, “Please go work with somebody you really admire; don’t try and go into business right now.” Many of them think they can just go into business and start a workroom and be an overnight sensation, and it never works.

Are there any young designers you like at the moment?
I have to admit, I haven’t really paid that much attention. I work with fashion students in Los Angeles, and I think some of those kids are amazing. It can be so frustrating because they’re so talented, but I never hear of them again. I find it terribly sad.

Are there any designers whose work you’ve admired over the years?
I love James Galanos. He’s been retired for a while, but I used to think he made the most beautiful clothes. Oscar de la Renta is still plugging away. He really dresses women to look like women, and I like that very much. A lot of people, they keep going, but it seems like they’re squeezing out another collection just because they have to. 

Two models show off Bob's Fall 1988 collection. Photo by Gideon Lewin

You did a couture collection once, right?
I’ve done several collections. It wasn’t like the price of European couture, but it was still expensive. I think it was very wearable, though. I never did anything I didn’t think people could wear. The sad part is, you can’t control who buys it. Sometimes I just think, Oh, if I could tell that woman which one to buy!, because they’ll invariably pick the wrong thing. I’ll have all of these beautiful samples in, and then Aretha Franklin will come in and order, and it’s like, “Well, it doesn’t look quite the same now, does it?” [laughs] I’m going to get in trouble for that one.

Who have been some of your favorite people to dress? 
Well, it depended on what I was doing. When I was working with Carol Burnett, I could do all this funny stuff, as well as beautiful production numbers. She could look so many different ways. And I loved doing comedy; I loved making an audience laugh. A lot of fashion designers are like, “Why would you want to do that?” They don’t get it. Fashion people don’t have very much humor in them. 

No, they definitely don’t. 
Fashion is like a religion to them, but fashion has to have a little humor. I think some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen are showgirls, like in Vegas. They always make me laugh. Sometimes they’re beautiful, but they’re also so outrageous they make you laugh. And fashion can always be that way. 

I’d imagine you’ve had a pretty big influence on the look of Vegas, right?
I think I’ve had a huge influence on a lot of things, entertainment-wise. I watch Dancing with the Stars and I think, I did that outfit 40 years ago, and I did it better.

You’ve been massively influential. There was a joke about you on The Simpsons once.
At one point I was so notorious. I was being mentioned in books and on quiz shows and The Simpsons. It’s fun, I get a kick out of it. I went to see Best in Show with a friend, and there’s a part where Jane Lynch says, “Bob Mackie, where are you when we need you?”—and I had no idea it was in the film. It’s funny, I love it when that happens.

What’s your house like?
You know, because of all the glamorous and over-the-top stuff I do, most people expect me to live in some kind of marble nightclub with lights and silver palm trees. But I don’t, and I don’t want to. My house is a ranch house in LA, and there’s a pool and some cacti and some things I’ve collected from around the world. It makes me happy, to be there among my things.

Do you find yourself slowing down at all?
Not particularly. But there’s some things I used to do that, physically, I can’t do now. I could never do what I did in the 70s. Well, nobody could do it at that time! How I did it, I don’t know. Nobody worked as much as me. But I just loved it. And I thought at the time, Enjoy it while you can, because you’re not ever going to be doing this much at one time again. And I haven’t.

Archival images taken from the book Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie.

More from our Fashion Issue:

Colts and Fillies

Do People Really Dress Like Shit in Buffalo?

Snoop Through the Ages

This jacket is an example of the pride motorcycle riders have for their Schott Perfectos. Even after many long years of loving wear, the owner made sure to keep its tattered Perfecto tag intact.

American ingenuity is responsible for some of the world’s greatest creations. For instance, the cheeseburger is arguably the best all-around food ever and the internet is borderline godlike in its scope. The same goes for a garment that has been adopted by crusty gutter punks, beer-gutted bikers, and yuppies alike: the infallible leather motorcycle jacket. This timeless icon of utilitarian fashion came from the mind of Irving Schott, cofounder of a company now known as Schott NYC, who made history with his iconic asymmetrical jacket design, commonly called the Perfecto.

The scrappy son of Russian immigrants, Irving started his career as a patternmaker for clothing manufacturers in the early 1900s. In 1913, he opened a factory with his brother Jack under the name Schott Bros. in the dingy basement of a tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Irving’s first successful products were sheepskin-lined raincoats, which he peddled from door to door. Like any good business, Schott Bros. began to diversify its offerings, bestowing its top-of-the-line coats with the Perfecto brand name. Inspired by Irving’s favorite torpedo-shaped cigars, Perfecto labels were stitched on all of his best leather and wool-lined outerwear.

Stepping into Schott NYC's Union, New Jersey factory is like going back in time. They use machines that date back to the early 1900s, employ men and women who've been making jackets longer than you've been alive, and emphasize quality above all else.

At the time, motorcycles were probably the furthest thing from Irving’s mind, considering they had only recently become commercially available and he didn’t even know how to drive a car. Irving was introduced to the world of boss hogs by a friend who was a member of the Beck family. The Becks were one of the country’s largest Harley-Davidson distributors and published a popular catalog of their wares that was available at motorcycle dealerships across the country. Schott Bros. began manufacturing outerwear for the Beck catalog in 1920, including early iterations of what would become the modern motorcycle jacket.

Up until this point, there wasn’t a single piece of outerwear on the market sturdy enough to be synonymous with riding motorcycles. Wool jackets lacked the ability to protect the rider from the cutting wind at high speeds, and the leather coats of the day were not designed for the hunched-over, extended-arm posture necessary to drive a motorcycle; this was compounded by the fact that wearing either type of jacket on a motorcycle almost guaranteed that anything in the rider’s pockets would be blown into the air while barreling down the road. The advent of the zipper solved these problems and became a key element to Irving’s design.

Modern zippers—invented in 1913, the same year Schott opened its first factory—were at first prohibitively expensive for clothing manufacturers. But then World War I happened, and the US military found several ways to utilize the newfangled enclosure device, which helped drive down the cost and made zippers affordable to the consumer market. Sensing the potential of this new technology, Irving was the first clothier to put a zipper on a jacket in 1925.

In 1928, after a series of designs, Irving created what is now recognized as the modern motorcycle jacket, using the defining diagonal zipper to fasten the enclosure. The angle of the zipper was essential to blocking the wind, and it ensured that the jacket didn’t bunch up when the rider sat down. It was made out of horsehide, produced for Beck under the Perfecto brand, and sold for a whopping $5.50.

Back in those days, the motorcycle jacket was a total oddity, and those bold enough to wear them probably looked peculiar amid the longer formal coats popular at the time. Nearly everything about Schott’s jacket was designed for utility, disregarding style almost entirely. Two decades later, the design had become more common, and the modern mythos of the motorcycle jacket began to take hold. Its adoption into popular culture coincided with its appearance in films like The Wild One (1953), which depicted an angry and aimless Marlon Brando wearing a tightfitting Schott Perfecto as the leader of a motorcycle gang that terrorizes a small town. By the end of the 1950s, schools across the US were banning students from wearing the jacket, which of course only cemented its status as a fashionable symbol of rebellion. This explosion of popularity resulted in the Perfecto name becoming synonymous with Schott’s motorcycle jacket, superseding the brand’s other designs.

The steely-eyed, fuck-everyone cool Brando perfected continued to be embraced over subsequent decades by icons like James Dean, the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, and Jay-Z—all of whom donned some iteration of Schott’s black leather jacket. Like blue jeans, it is a classic American garment that has been reinterpreted by virtually every major fashion designer and brand: from avant-garde weirdos like Rick Owens to traditionalists like Ralph Lauren to no-name companies that supply cheap and inferior versions to big-box stores. But there’s still nothing like the original; no one has managed to best the motorcycle jackets made by Schott NYC, who continue to use turn-of-the-century machines and hand-cut leather in their manufacturing process.

This year, Schott NYC celebrates its centennial. We figured it was high time to pay a visit to their factory in New Jersey and share with you the ins and outs of this impeccable American classic.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article claimed LSD was invented by an American. LSD was actually invented by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss scientist. Learn more about Albert Hofmann here.

All photos by Noah Rabinowitz.

Follow Wilbert on Twitter: @WilbertLCooper

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A farmer shows off his trusty blue jeans in Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940. Photo courtesy of Russell Lee/Library of Congress

Before we had low-rise, straight-leg, skinny, selvage, stretchy, resin-coated, lotion-infused, or mom jeans, there was simply jean—the fabric. The name likely originated from gênes, referring to Genoa, Italy, where sailors wore a twill blend of cotton, linen, and wool that came in a variety of stripes and colors. 

Today’s jeans are made from heavier, all-cotton denim woven in a combination of indigo-dyed vertical yarn and natural horizontal yarn, resulting in the fabric’s white-speckled surface and pale underside. And although the original name for denim came from Nîmes, France—as in, de Nîmes—the fabric was most likely first produced in England.

Once the United States emancipated itself from British rule, the former colonists stopped importing European denim and began producing it themselves from all-American cotton, picked by slaves in the South and spun, dyed, and woven in the North. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by the textile trade, which almost singlehandedly upheld slavery. When the cotton gin mechanized processing in 1793, prices, already subsidized by slave labor, dropped dramatically. Cheap goods drove demand, and a vicious cycle ensued. In the period between the invention of the cotton gin and the Civil War, America’s slave population shot from 700,000 to a staggering 4 million.

After the Civil War, companies like Carhartt, Eloesser-Heynemann, and OshKosh slung cotton coveralls to miners, railroad men, and factory workers. A Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss set up shop in San Francisco selling fabric and work-wear. Jacob Davis, an entrepreneurial Reno tailor, bought Strauss’s denim to make workingman’s pants, and added metal rivets to prevent the seams from ripping open. Davis sent two samples of his riveted pants to Strauss, and they patented the innovation together. Soon after, Davis joined Strauss in San Francisco to oversee production in a new factory. In 1890, Strauss assigned the ID number of 501 to their riveted denim “waist overalls.” The Levi’s 501 blue jean—which would become the best-selling garment in human history—was born.

Initially, jeans were proletarian western work-wear, but wealthy easterners inevitably ventured out in search of rugged cowboy authenticity. In 1928, a Vogue writer returned East from a Wyoming dude ranch with a snapshot of herself, “impossibly attired in blue jeans… and a smile that couldn’t be found on all Manhattan Island.” In June 1935, the magazine ran an article titled “Dude Dressing,” possibly one of the first fashion pieces to instruct readers in the art of DIY denim distressing: “What she does is to hurry down to the ranch store and ask for a pair of blue jeans, which she secretly floats the ensuing night in a bathtub of water—the oftener a pair of jeans is laundered, the higher its value, especially if it shrinks to the ‘high-water’ mark. Another innovation—and a most recent one, if I may judge—also goes on in the dead of night, and undoubtedly behind locked doors—an intentional rip here and there in the back of the jeans.”

Around this time, jeans were a nostalgic souvenir from an increasingly closed and diminished western frontier. By the 1930s, the buffalo was all but extinct, the vast majority of Native Americans had been put on reservations, and western farmers had divided up and fenced off the once vast, wide-open land. Levi’s were unavailable east of the Mississippi, making them the quintessential California brand. To the rest of the country, it barely mattered whether the real cowboys wore blue jeans, when movie stars like John Wayne, Will Rogers, Gene Autry, and William S. Hart did.  

Workers on the Alexander plantation in Arkansas picking cotton in 1935. Photo courtesy of Ben Shahn/Library of Congress

In the South, as sharecropping was just dying out, jeans carried a different set of connotations. A 1941 fashion spread in Life magazine titled “Doris Lee Offers the Southern Negro” featured a series of the artist’s Maira Kalman-esque sketches of African-American women in midriff-baring halter tops, turbans, and colorful skirts, juxtaposed against photographs of white women in similar outfits. The text read: “[The artist] reports that these ‘low-country’ Negroes, more primitive than elsewhere, have a flair for color, a ‘proportion oddity,’ great resourcefulness and ingenuity especially in their adaptations of castoffs.” One pair of images included “faded coveralls… readily adapted into clam-digger-style blue jeans.” The spread suggests that, like the blues, American blue-jean styles were adapted—or stolen—from African Americans. It’s little wonder that jeans didn’t catch on in black fashion for decades. Southern blacks had no use for clothing that harked back to a brutal history of violence, oppression, and exploitation.

During World War II, off-duty American servicemen wore their jeans while overseas, exporting their appeal like Western-style democracy. From there, blue jeans’ allure continued to increase internationally. For instance, East German authorities noted the prevalence of “cowboy pants” at a workers’ revolt in 1953. Jeans represented a similar kind of rebellion in the postwar US. But brands weren’t ready to associate their products with antiauthoritarian delinquents like the 501-clad Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Instead, they viewed this semiotic shift as a disturbing departure from the clean-cut movie-poster cowboys of the past. The Wild One was, after all, based on a real motorcycle riot in California. Newspapers made sure to mention when criminals wore blue jeans, and high schools banned them. Rather than exploiting the bad-boy image and embracing what could have been an easily executed marketing campaign, denim manufacturers tried to whitewash it with slogans like “Clean Jeans for Teens” and “Jeans: Right for School.” They even formed an organization called the Denim Council to hold wholesome “blue jean queen” beauty contests and outfit JFK’s first Peace Corps volunteers. But it was all for naught. 

By the late 60s, actors like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Dennis Hopper smoldered onscreen in movies like Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider, while the counterculture assimilated into the mainstream, and teenagers became a market that wielded serious buying power. “That mass consumerism, with all the standardization it implied, could somehow be reconciled with rampant individualism was one of the smartest tricks ever pulled by Western civilization,” wrote historian Niall Ferguson in 2011’s Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Ferguson’s point was observable on an international scale, as a Cold War-era sociological conundrum: As cheap, widely available proletarian clothing, jeans were the ultimate paradoxical symbol of consumer culture for the USSR. He summed it up nicely: “Perhaps the greatest mystery of the entire Cold War is why the Worker’s Paradise could not manage to produce a decent pair of jeans.”  

When bikers and beatniks embraced jeans, denim companies tried to whitewash their image by showing clean-cut youth donning blue jeans. Photo courtesy of Levi Strauss & Co.

Life observed the results of this back in 1972. “Fashion-sensitive Russians might be forgiven for viewing blue jeans as an international capitalist conspiracy,” the magazine reported. A pair of contraband Levi’s could fetch $90 on Russia’s black market, and American travelers financed European holidays by selling extra pairs. Soviet officials even coined the term “jeans crimes” to describe “law violations prompted by a desire to use any means to obtain articles made of denim.” 

By the 70s, jeans began to enter the realm of high fashion. And the fit had to be perfect. American designers like Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Geoffrey Beene, and Calvin Klein transformed jeans into a status commodity and promptly cashed in on their handiwork. Klein in particular understood the sexual potential of a tight butt in an even tighter pair of jeans. After his first denim attempt failed commercially in 1976, he adjusted the fit: raising the crotch for emphasis on the package beneath and pulling up the back seam to accentuate the buns. Three years later, Klein had cornered 20 percent of the designer market. 

A 1980 Calvin Klein print and TV ad campaign infamously featured a 15-year-old Brooke Shields (“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?”). Klein quickly turned $25 million into $180 million. This was before stretch denim flooded the market, so these jeans were not only unusually high-waisted and skintight, they were also thick and unforgiving: so tight and rigid that women had to lie on their backs and use pliers to pull up their zippers. As distracting and perhaps painful as they must have been to wear, it was also the final realization that jeans could be more than just clothing. 

If a sexy fit defined the 70s and early 80s, the next phase in denim culture was all about the finish, achieved with an array of tools like stones, bleach and acid washes, scissors, and safety pins. The look may have started in the street, but soon enough, designers like Vivienne Westwood and Dolce & Gabbana sent punk-inspired denim down their runways. In 1988, Vogue’s new editor in chief, Anna Wintour, put a model in stonewashed Guess jeans on her first cover.

By the mid-90s, denim’s ass was outright owned by high fashion. Tom Ford embroidered, beaded, and feathered jeans for Gucci. Torn and slightly oversize, they hung from models’ hips and sold for more than $3,000. “Before they were even in stores, the first shipment sold out through advance order,” the New York Times reported. “Winona Ryder, Mariah Carey, and Helen Hunt ordered the skirt; Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett, the jeans. The singers Lil’ Kim, Janet Jackson, and Madonna ordered both.”

For all of its potential guido pitfalls, Diesel was the first brand to successfully bring Italian-designed, artfully distressed designer denim to suburban consumers. The brand paved the way for flared legs and whiskers (those faded crease marks that fan out from the fly) with $100 price tags. Seven for All Mankind, Habitual, Citizens of Humanity, Paper Denim & Cloth, True Religion, Chip & Pepper, Earl, Yanük, Frankie B., and too many more to name here followed suit with stretch yarns woven in, to better allow for low-slung, thong-exposing waistlines.

Calvin Klein may have sexualized blue-jeans advertising with Brooke Shields in the early 80s, but Gucci was no slouch either. Photo courtesy of Advertising Archives

And now, in the midst of the Great Recession, we have come full circle, with the fairly recent demand for nostalgic “heritage” jeans that recall the hardscrabble industrialism of the Great Depression: work shirts and overalls faded to shades of cornflower blue, and rough-hewn, no-nonsense, deep-dyed dungarees. Like their precursors from the 20s and 30s, these jeans seem imbued with a sad nostalgia for a bygone country (but maybe this time with a better fit). We’ve entered the Dorothea Lange era of fashion—clothed in flecked wool cardigans, formidable flannel shirts, and sturdy work boots, Depression-era from head to toe.

The look is cataloged in magazines like Free & Easy from Japan, which is where much of the aforementioned heritage denim originates. In the 70s and 80s, efficient American mills perfected cheap, voluminous product. The Japanese went the opposite direction, working with premium designers, employing old-fashioned shuttle looms and less consistent yarns. The resulting fabrics have the kind of selvage (the unfrayed woven finish along the material’s narrow edge) fetishized by denim snobs everywhere. They wear out with much more character than the fuzzy, overwashed denims of recent decades. A new breed of bloggers are obsessively documenting their jeans’ disintegration, extensively cataloging brands, ages, washes, and wears. The phenomenon is similar to the recent barrel-aged cocktail trend, observable at any number of artisanal “speakeasies” across the country. 

The vast majority of Americans cannot afford bespoke, ring-spun, resin-coated dream jeans, however seductive and special. Most buy their jeans at places like Walmart, where a two-pack of house-brand Faded Glory jeans can be had for around $22. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the same price the Vogue writer paid for one pair of jeans in 1928. Of course, these cheap jeans come with the hidden cost of US jobs. Cotton Incorporated reports that only about 1 percent of jeans available in the US were manufactured domestically. By 2009, most American denim factories had been closed, with manufacturing moving to plants in China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. 

Perhaps a nation of unemployed Americans in $11 jeggings is our dystopian eyesore of a future. Glenn Beck, of all people, addressed the issue last year by launching his own line of American-made jeans ($129.99 a pop) with a jingoistic PR campaign after he was upset by Levi’s ads he felt glorified “revolutions and progressivism.” Beck is by no means the first Levi’s customer to conflate his own values with his blue jeans’ branding, but no matter how nostalgically we clutch our denim, it’s no longer just about us. 

The US market for blue jeans has been left in the dust; Latin America and Asia drive the future of denim. That said, there is a small, healthy designer-denim production chain alive in Los Angeles, and one of Levi’s early suppliers, Cone Denim, still weaves fabric in North Carolina, where small-scale manufacturers like Raleigh Denim market their product. Maybe one of these operations will be able to grow to an economy of scale and make “Made in America” accessible to its masses once again. Or it’s possible that blue jeans will just live on as America’s greatest contribution to the global closet. Until then, they’re still here. Faded, whiskered, and stretched. But still here.

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I visited menswear designer Robert Geller at his Tribeca showroom and design studio only a few days after he presented his latest fall collection at New York Fashion Week. The 36-year-old designer had a brazen swagger about him, with hair coolly slicked back like Jimmy Darmody on Boardwalk Empire and the facial profile of a 1950s comic book superhero. I started talking about layering and Japanese manufacturing with the German-born artist, who worked on the revered Cloak line with Alexandre Plokhov in the early 2000s and has helmed his own eponymous brand since 2008. But it didn't take long for our conversation to veer off into more personal realms, namely how he found the love of his life. 

As Robbie tells it, he met his wife-to-be back in 2001, during the summer of his senior year at the Rhode Island School of Design. He had just started interning at Marc Jacobs, and everyone in the office was telling him about this girl. "Just wait until you meet Ana," they said.

In the first few days of his traineeship, Ana Beatriz Lerario—the company's gorgeous assistant designer at that time—was on holiday in Brazil, her birthplace. But when she returned, he recognized right away that she was something special. "She looked like all of my fashion illustrations," he told me.

But even though he was hit by the thunderbolt, he couldn't sweep her off her feet right off the bat: Robert was her measly intern, and they were both seeing other people at the time. She also thought he was into banging dudes because, well, he was a guy interning at Marc Jacobs…

Archival photo of Robert and Ana right before Robert won the CFDA Swarovski Award for Menswear in 2011. Photo taken by Tommy Ton.

As I listened to the CFDA and GQ Award-winning designer speak so sweetly about the love of his life, I started to think about his designs in a different way. In the past, I always felt it was lazy journalism that had caused Robert's work to get stuck with the "romantic" tag, because to me, his shit is tough and dark and street. But there was clearly another side that I had missed.

"I know it sounds cheesy, but love is a big part of my life, and all my life, I've been looking to find it. My whole existence, I've been trying to create beautiful things and to do that takes a certain sensitivity. You can see that mood expressed in my collections."

The juxtaposition of his machismo and his more sensitive side that came out when he talked about his wife gave me an insight into why his designs fascinate the arty fashion folks and the dudes like me who just want to look and feel cool. It's his ability to create things that are both emotive and rugged that makes his work powerful and puts it in a class of its own. 

I have a hunch that the Hamburg native inherited his hunger for creating beautiful things from his father—which is awesome considering most of us only get an unhealthy obsession with a failing sports team, an inability to show emotion, and the propensity to be an alcoholic from our dads. Robert's father, Peter Geller, is a discreet-dressing photographer who lives in a windmill. When Robert was growing up, Peter worked for a magazine called Madame that required him to travel a lot and report on everything from Japan's royal family to LA's most eligible bachelors. One of Robert's favorite things to do as a kid was to hang out in his dad's studio during shoots. "The whole atmosphere was very positive," he told me. "I loved the people, the lights, the music, all of that stuff. My dad had a huge influence on me and being there actually made me want to be a photographer."

Before Robert attended RISD in his late 20s, he worked as an assistant for two photographers in Germany. Fashion first captured his interest when his sister took him to London Fashion Week as a birthday present, but at that point he thought he just wanted to be a fashion photographer. It was at RISD that he realized he wanted to start making clothes. “Running and organizing a fashion photo shoot is frustrating, but you can sketch clothes anywhere at any time.” After taking a class in patternmaking, he made the decision to become a designer.

Even though he’s doesn’t work as a photographer today, Robert has retained a photographer's approach to designing clothes, by capturing moments in time and filtering them through his own perception. "When I start a new collection," he told me while pointing to sketches of his designs on the walls of his studio, "I look to something within the past six months that's stood out to me. It could be anything, from a movie to a genre to just a time and place. I'm trying to create an environment where my clothes fit."

His latest collection for fall/winter 2013 recalls German Expressionism and 1920s Berlin. Even though NYC was pummeled by a treacherous shit-colored snowstorm during New York Fashion Week, the bad weather didn't stop a horde of elite editors and bloggers from showing up to see how the designer's wares would fair when they were mixed with a little bit of Fritz Lang. The inspiration was evident even before the show started, the runway was adorned with art-deco diamond patterns. Then the models marched down the runway wearing swagged-out wide-brim fedoras, layered silhouettes of coats over jackets and sweaters over coats, ashen shades of plum and navy under gray and black vertical striping, and the kind of elaborate seaming and anatomical constriction that only Robert can get, thanks to producing his garments in Japan.

But as good as the show was, the most beautiful thing I saw on the runway that night might have been two-year-old Luna Geller, the oldest of Robbie's two young daughters. Like Robert did in his father's photo studio years before, Luna was having a blast in her dad's workspace before the show began, prancing up and down the runway like she owned it. She wore a canary bow and even had a bit of the patented Geller-layering swag, with a heather-gray blouse on top of a plum-colored long-sleeve tee.

Archival photo provided by Robert Geller of him and Luna sitting at his desk. 

Surprisingly, being a father to two little girls—Luna and her two month old baby sister, Anis—hasn't changed the way Robert designs. "It's more of a progression of life for me. I always wanted to have kids, and I wanted to be a father who could still relate to my kids," he told me. Being a dad has, however, changed his daily schedule. To make sure the kids only spend as little time as possible hanging out with nannies, the fashion couple divvy up the day. Robert gets to the office at 6 AM every morning, while Ana, who founded Fiftytwo Showroom in 2005 and now reps brands like Timo Weiland and Richard Chai, in addition Robert's, takes the mornings off. "My wife is in the industry, so she understands the timing of it," he explained as he pointed to her portion of the design studio. "She has her side, and I have my side over here. We go for lunch together and have our separate workday. It's perfect."

Although things seem practically perfect now, getting there didn't happen overnight. Robert wasn't able to woo Ana until after they had both left the Marc Jacobs. Ana left the company to become the head designer of TseSay, TSE Cashmere's diffusion line, in 2002, the same year Robert joined forces with Alexandre Plokhov to work on Cloak.

"The Cloak office was on Little West 12th Street, which was blocks away from TseSay. One day we ran into each other on the street and just started hanging out a lot, going to lunch all the time. It was stunning how we got along really well."

Typical of Geller's romantic streak, it was their trip to Paris that sealed the deal. "You know, it's the City of Love. There were rainy days when we stayed inside and just talked or took long baths. It was in Paris that I knew I wanted her to be my wife, and a year later we got engaged." The couple had their marriage ceremony in 2008 in a small church with only 350 people on the tropical island of Ilhabela, about two hours from Sao Paulo.

While Robert was falling in love, he was also building the foundation for his career. Even on that love-laced trip to Paris, he was buying fabrics for the brand that would eventually be obsessed over. Cloak famously started perfecting the skinny aesthetic that was started by Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane, by pairing it with a somber "goth" vibe and obsessive detailing. "It’s funny, I thought we were making really skinny pants. But they actually aren't skinny at all compared to what’s coming out these days. Perception changes.”

Though Robert left Cloak in 2004 (the brand finally closed in 2007, and Alexandre Plokhov started his own awesome self-titled brand last year), he can’t help but reflect on the work and its legacy, if only because people keep reminding him. “And even now, not a day passes without me hearing somebody saying, ‘Oh my God, those Cloak buttons!’ We made beautiful metal buttons for Cloak. But when they were cast, they left just a little lip of metal, and it cuts the threads.”

Today, people hunt down Cloak garments with the same fervor of comic book and record-collecting nerds. “Because Cloak doesn't exist anymore, and we never produced that many pieces, people go crazy about getting and finding those garments. What’s been cool lately is that I’ve been hearing more about people searching for the early seasons of Robert Geller, so I guess there's a certain amount of time that it takes to get there.”

After being blown away by his latest runway show, I believe the work Robert is doing right now for Robert Geller will have an even greater impact than Cloak on the way guys dress themselves. For one, he is helping pioneer a new silhouette for dudes that goes beyond the slim look he focused on with Alexandre. “I loved the sleek look, but that was a very long time ago, and I feel it is time to move away from it. I still love skinny pants and skinny silhouettes, but not exclusively. I like pushing and pulling.” You can see his new ideas play out through all of his collections, where loose shorts are styled over skinny tights or four or five tops are layered over one another to create an exciting new and masculine shape.

Although Robert’s brand is sold all over the world in hip and haughty stores—like Barney’s New York and Odin—and it has been honored with awards and accolades, keeping it thriving is a constant and exhausting challenge.

“There are so many things you have to do to keep a fashion house running. You're competing with the Diors, the Pradas, the Jil Sanders—who all have tons of money that you don't have. There are moments when a store cancels all your goods on the way to them. Then there are other moments when you have a show and a store comes to you that you've admired for a long time because they finally realize your product is right for them.”

But as Robert works tirelessly to push the boundaries and reach of his clothes by honing in on the perfect silhouette and expanding his business, there is one thing in his life that he is completely satisfied with: his family. The day after he wowed a room full of fashion muckety–mucks at NYFW with a runway show featuring some of the most stunning (and expensive) pieces he’s ever produced, he opted for a much more subdued scene with the people that matter to him most. He and his wife dressed little Luna up in winter gear, making her look something like a midget Michelin Man, and they hit the hills of Fort Greene Park near their home and went sledding.

When he talked about the specialness of this day to me, his face lit up. He then got up from his desk and took me through his entire new collection in his studio, showing off his new plum-colored Common Project collaboration sneakers, mixed-leather jackets, dress shirts with bleed prints, and dotted and stripped blazers. At the end of it all, referring to his designs, I asked him what he thought was the greatest thing he had ever created. The fashion designer didn’t hesitate to say, “The love I share with my wife and kids.”

Yeah, Robert Geller is a romantic, through and through.

All photos by Miyako Bellizzi, unless noted. 

@WilbertLCooper

For more fashion stuff from Wilbert, check these out:

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May Streetwear Keep You Forever Young

Continuum Fashion is a label that allows people to create their own designs using the hive mind of the internet as well as apps. It's one of those crowdsource-y, DIY companies that people learn about and then say, "The future is now!" So, uh, looks like the future is now, folks.

We got the chance to meet Mary Huang, the co-founder of Continuum Fashion along with Jenna Fizel. She's smart and charming, and knows a lot about designing clothes. Enjoy the video!

Read more over at The Creators Project.

Harley Davidson overalls, Topshop shirt, Vans sneakers, Shourouk bracelets; Lightning Bolt shirt, WeSC jeans, Zara loafers, Timex watch

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Stolen Girlfriends Club shirt, Mark McNairy tank top; Fred Perry shirt, H&M earrings

Schott jacket, vintage t-shirt, Topman jeans; Agyness Deyn x Dr. Martens jacket, American Apparel t-shirt, Court Shop pants, Shourouk necklace

There is a lot of stuff to do at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) beyond listening to right-wing politicos bloviate about taxes and the gays. You can eat free cocktail shrimp until you get iodine poisoning, drink one or eight whiskey and ginger ales, or test out your “wide stance” in the convention center's fancy lavatories. My favorite thing to do, however, has been to just sit back and admire all of the nice-looking ladies—they don't call it Fox News for nothing. I think conservative chicks get a bad rap for all being rigid, corny, and unstylish Stepford marms. While Republicans definitely have the CWG (corny white girl) demographic covered, I found most of the ladies at CPAC to have a pretty endearing swagger. What's better than a smart and politically active girl who might have a banana clip and a copy of the Constitution in her Louis bag? Plus, I love the style of these women because they mix the demure elegance of longer skirts and dresses with more form-fitting tailoring that highlights what you get when you grow up eating a red-state diet. So, to give you an idea of the adorable femi-cons I've been mingling with at CPAC, here are pics of some of the most fetching and fashionable beauts (from all races, ages, and body types) of the bunch.

@WilbertLCooper

See more fashion-y photo stuff from Wilbert:

Chop, Drop, and Roll

VICE's New York Fashion Week Photo Blog 

What Gifts Did Obama Give His America-Hating Voters?