Vetements Del Vol
Hip Hop and rap is probably my biggest inspiration for anything I create and this collection lives within that space. I wanted to probe the idea of a ”hood consciousness” as a result of rap music and culture. In rap music we constantly hear references to designer clothing and lifestyle. There are a few cities that can be tied to this idea of luxury but Paris, France is the main one that comes to mind. All the major luxury fashion houses have homes there: Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Balmain, Celine, and Hermes, just to name a few. Rappers have made a living name dropping these brands and subconsciously creating a new idea of luxury within their music to their large black audiences. I come from a community where the freshest one on the block held their pants up with a Louis Vuitton or Gucci belt and we just knew from the logo or print “oh they must have money.” These brands weren’t meant to be worn by people that look like me and come where I come from so I see it as an act of resistance. That’s why I respect the early work of Dapper Dan so much; he made these brands that were inaccessible to black people accessible, mainly to our hip hop heroes. His nickname of “Harlem’s Hip Hop Tailor” is one of the coldest ever. A lot of the inspiration for the clothing comes from how he was able to repurpose the monogram in the lens of hip hop. For the collection I basically wanted to say “fuck it let’s do more than reference these brands in Paris who truly don’t care for people like us, let’s take my niggas there.”
36% of African Americans have never flown on an airplane before according to a 2015 study. Thats 16,800,000 people, nearly 2/5 people. In contrast only 19% of white people within the United States have never flown before.
I wanted to give us the most luxurious travel experience I could, and that’s how I pinpointed the Conrcorde for the base of this collection.
The Concorde was a French-British turbo engine, supersonic speed commercial jet. The luxury airliner was in service from 1976-2003. Concorde could fly transatlantic from NYC to Paris in three and a half hours compared to the seven and a half hours it takes normal passenger planes. A roundtrip ticket from NYC to Paris would cost you nearly 12 thousand dollars in 2021, 30 times the cheapest amount for this route. Concorde only flew certain routes which also boosted the sense of exclusivity and popularity. The crowd that flew on The Concorde were the super powerful figures of the world, celebrities, and politicians.
“The atmosphere in the cabin was one of an exclusive club, and it was because these were the people who controlled the world, controlled the world’s finance and the world’s trade,” says Joe Cuddy, who worked for nine years on the Concorde fleet as a flight attendant and senior fleet trainer. “It was such an incredibly unique experience, and you were going faster than rifle bullets, twice the speed of sound. It was just a fabulous time.”
Click down below to view the look-book.
