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FASHION INTERVIEW
“Today everyone is becoming a brand, there are no
more designers.” Interview with Shayne Oliver
With his label Hood By Air, the New York-based designer invented a way of combining
streetwear and fashion that spoke to a whole new generation. Invited by fashion label
Helmut Lang to be artistic director for a season, Oliver has revisited the house’s heritage
with wit and brio. Sunday Trends asked him all about the experience.
ST: Why did you decide to put your label Hood By Air
on standby? Was it before or after being contacted
by Helmut Lang?
SO: I put HBA on standby in January 2017. We were trying to
figure out what the next steps would be for the brand, thinking
about moving to Paris. There was a lot of miscommunication
between the business side of things and the management – a
lot of the decisions were made in this very panicky way, and no
one created a real business system within HBA. We could have
moved to Paris and become a sort of intimate brand, close to
the customer, but we didn’t really have a sales director. Everyone
began working on personal projects. It was the right moment to
pause and figure out internal problems. And a lot of insiders in
the fashion business have started to… not steal, but become part
of the market that we’d created. These people had a business
structure, and that wasn’t part of the DNA of HBA. I felt I was
just putting ideas out there, creating new brand theories, new
ways of thinking about marketing, about the meaning of fashion,
without gaining anything, not only financially but also in terms of
recognition. It became really discouraging for me to want to do
something new, upgrade the game, while no one internally was
taking advantage of it businesswise or creating a guideline for
people to speak about the brand. It was the right time to take
a break. Especially given how things are now – I didn’t want to
get involved in this weird streetwear thing that’s happening at
the moment. Those are ideas I grew up with, things I know. I’m
not doing it because I want to take advantage of the streetwear
market. Where HBA is concerned, the next step will be finding
a structure for the brand that lets me do what I need to do as a
designer. I want to do something I’m comfortable with, something
I feel is new. As a consumer, I don’t feel like I want to buy – I’m
lost. Because everything looks like gimmicky clothes. It’s all about
statement, there’s nothing that’s really designed.
ST: Your role at Helmut Lang, where you produced a
collection called Helmut Lang Seen By Shayne Oliver,
was very much like that of a curator. Did you approach
it in that spirit?
SO: Yes, absolutely. Because if I am working with them for just one
season, it doesn’t make sense to create something new. You just
curate. It was like both Helmut Lang and myself in this conversation,
about creating a taste level for myself based on the history of
Helmut Lang. That was the most organic thing to do.
“Today everyone is becoming a brand, there are no more
designers. I don’t think that’s a problem, but I just think that you
cannot call things fashion when there are no designers. No one is
saying, ‘This is what I designed this season, you can buy into it.’ It’s
the other way around: ‘Look what I am implementing into these
criteria, buy into this because this is actually just a brand.’ People
forget that the aesthetics that someone created are for a reason.”
ST: As a designer, you have been strongly influenced
by Helmut Lang in your HBA work. What aspects of his
oeuvre did you focus on in this collection?
SO: I wanted to explore the sensuality of what he’d done in the past.
There was very little physical archive for me to explore, so the idea
of working with his oeuvre became very fetishized. I began to think
about how he’d been a sort of fashion pornographer, and created
a new fetishism based on fashion, on how people dress in codes.
I began to think about bras, socks, underwear, undergarments,
lipstick, ritualistic hairstyles, and essentially just pulled and plucked
at the archive that I had. From what little there was I picked three
coats, and all the basics: a pair of slacks, a pair of jeans, a tank top,
a men’s shirt, a women’s basic dress. I wanted to follow a storyline
of keeping it sensual and focusing on his eveningwear. Because I’m
sure that some of the designers who come after me will focus on the
bomber jacket, but I feel this is something that has been exhausted
by the current generation. I’m not trying to sell Helmut Lang to this
generation – I want them to understand the attitude and the vibe he
put out. So I took whatever they had and restyled it – made the waist
lower, made it higher, pulled the jacket to the side, pinned the dress
up. And we created new patterns from that. Nothing was created
from scratch. It was only about using old things, pulling and tugging.
Except for the accessories: the collection was heavily accessorized
because it just felt right. I was trying to distil what I felt about the
clothes. That’s where the bra bag came from, and the folders based
on a school-uniform idea – we created fashion binders, as though
you were going to school but with a clutch.
ST: HBA and its runway shows were conceived as
performances that critiqued fashion. Has this critical
and performative aspect found its way into your work for
Helmut Lang ?
SO: A lot of the things that I put out on the table over the years are
now trendy topics, and I wanted to step away from this false political
aspect that everyone has in fashion right now. I think it’s great that
people are starting to un-train consumers, but it’s almost another
version of entitlement, being able to say something like that. So I
wanted to move away from that and do something that’s romantic,
and not political. To me, in fashion, doing a collection and giving all the
profit to a cause, that’s political. You can’t be a major brand and have
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