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I pull up to a popup on East 3rd Street, it's the end of the day and clouds are gathering, it smells like it’s about to rain, hard. Hanging out in front of the storefront, I stand with a small crowd of men all wearing the same brand, Barriers— I'm here to check out the popup, and interview the designer behind it all, who I have yet to meet. I’ve had a long day and I’m feeling a little antisocial; I’m waiting for my colleagues at office to stop by so that I can get an easier intro. Eventually, it starts to rain and we all rush inside the store. It’s a recreation of a New York City Subway station, complete with a life-sized recreation of the façade of a subway car. On the wall is a memorial to fallen heroes of Black popular history: 2pac, Biggie Smalls, Pop Smoke, and Nipsey Hussle, done by a New York artist I know, Omi, aka “StfuYouTalk2Much,” along with impressive sculptures of New York housing projects that are popping out of the walls.
While waiting for the imminent interview, I start checking out the clothes. The moment I touch one of the shirts, my attitude completely changes. It feels special. The material of the clothes is fine, heavy cotton. The patchwork, the embroidery, it’s all incredibly well done. I start pulling out some of the shirts and I’m taken aback by the careful architecture around the iconography of the shirts. Malcolm X. Maya Angelou. Rosa Parks. W.E.B du Bois. They have the energy of thrifted iconography shirts, but the respect and care of talismans.
I start looking around. Who could be the designer? Was he even here? I look through more clothes. Denim collaborations with Murder Bravado’s "Who Decides War". Yankees snapbacks in collaboration with Omi. And it all feels like high design wear. The most care possible was put into every single garment, a refreshing and settling feeling.
Eventually, my colleagues from office arrive, and I’m introduced to Steven Barter, the designer of Barriers. He’s a cheery, calm, and bashful man born in Brooklyn, raised in Far Rockaway and Long Island, and grown in the mid-2010s SoHo scene. He devotes the next hour to chatting with me after I gush to him about his clothes. By the end of it, I wish I had been recording, and we decide to meet after he gets back from a trip to LA to work on a drop he’s working on with Converse. When we meet a few weeks later at his mentor’s restaurant “Aunt and Uncles” in Flatbush, Brooklyn, I figure out the root of his hands-off approach to his brand presentation: he wants the clothes to speak for themselves. His main mission is to “give light to the voices that came before [him].”
Make it new. Make it experimental. Make it different. Make it unlike anything else. It seems within the design world this is the memo circulating from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just make it new. But Barriers is Barter’s refusal to force a trend, drawing instead from his own history. “Artists, we try to find inspiration from outside of our culture and outside of our homes,” he says, “but when I started my brand I really stared to double back and think about the stuff in and around my house. The portraits from Africa, they’ve been in my home my whole life and I never paid attention to it, but when I started my brand, I went back and wanted to tap into it.”
Barter grew up not only surrounded by Black history but also with deep roots in Brooklyn and a familial dedication to Black history. “My aunt is the principal of the Al Malik Shabazz School in Brooklyn,” he explains. “We talk a lot these days. Instead of looking outside of your house, you need to dive into your house first before you source information on whatever you’re doing.”
Before he was selling clothing to cultural legends like Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug, and the late Pop Smoke, a fellow Brooklyn Panamanian, he was like a lot of us, young, creatively inclined, and hesitant to work for anyone else. “I was working jobs and was getting fired, quitting, because I didn’t feel happy with it.” He remembers. “I found [my path] from being around people that inspired me a lot.” After graduating high school, he started working retail at Nike in SoHo and attended art school before dropping out, feeling that SoHo and the friends he met in the art scene and Nike were teaching him more than school could. “When I started my brand, I wanted to be storytelling like Nike and Polo.” It was around this time that Barter began his brand Barriers and began to take the jump to follow his higher calling for art and creation.
He fell into the now mythic SoHo scene, spending time with legends, his friends Glyn Brown, Jovon Henderson, Ade Oyeyemi, Alex Williams, Jedi, Biggs, Ken Rebel, and Swoosh God. “We all just stuck together and found ways to monetize our art,” he remembers. “We helped each other. When I moved from Long Island to New York, it felt like a different state. Chilling in SoHo, one, two in the morning, sitting down, talking, getting a dollar pizza. I miss those days and it feels like it was just yesterday. And everything I’m doing now I dreamt of back then.”
I ask Barter if he thinks that era of New York is still around. “It’s over,” he says with immediacy, “Not in a bad way. It’s evolution. It’s growing. But in 2015 you had to prove yourself before you did anything. Before I was a designer, I was a driver and I had to drive these people that inspire you around. I wanted to do it. I had to learn about the fashion scene and New York before anything. I wasn’t getting paid, I wasn’t getting gas money, but I was hustling.” He believes that era has been sidelined by the Internet. “In 2015 people were genuinely friends because we didn’t have anything,” he explains, “so we built a bond but with Instagram it’s all so fast and you don’t know what’s genuine anymore. You guys aren’t going through these genuine experiences, and if you are it’s probably people you grew up with.”
After finding his community in SoHo and building the foundation for Barriers, he flew to Los Angeles with his friend Swoosh God. “It felt like how immigrants must feel coming to America,” he says. “I had nothing when I got there and had to completely restart.” He and Swoosh stayed with the now legendary photographer and filmmaker Aidan Cullen, who at the time was only sixteen. “We clicked immediately,” he says with a smile, “He’s real clumsy like me. His parents opened his doors and arms to us. They believed in us and gave us space.”
It was also around this time that he started living with A$AP Bari and Nast, helping with VLONE art installations. “Living with them taught me a lot about fashion but also about life, being comfortable with who you are as a person,” he remembers, “Without them, who knows where I’d be now.”
Armed with the knowledge Nike provided him, a community of creatives in SoHo, and the mentorship of the established fashion legends, he was able to dive headfirst into creating not just a brand in Barriers, but a dedication to providing idolatry around histories he believed deserving of a modern revival.
“We didn’t learn about our history,” he says. “We learned about the slaves but not the great things which is how the system is set up. But after college I found interviews that I’m inspired by.” After finishing college, he read “Revolutionary Suicide” by Huey P. Newton and began to carry it around with him, “like how people keep a bible in their back pocket.” After that, he was hooked—he was inspired by other Black revolutionary figures like Bobby Seale and Malcolm X and looked to reading as necessary exposure to histories kept from him. “Reading can do a lot for you,” he advises. “Even if reading isn’t your thing, start small, read articles online, it’s fundamental man, just do it.”
After moving to LA, he started noticing the city’s thrifting culture and the appreciation for graphic T’s of figures come and gone. “I would see people buy a 2pac t-shirt or a Bob Marley t-shirt and I’m like, ‘What the fuck? $1,000 for a t-shirt?’” He remembers. “But they’re not paying for the t-shirt, they’re wearing it for what’s on it and how they make them feel and that’s how I want people to feel when they’re wearing my brand.”
While some brands depend on the logo or the name or the status to inflate the value of individual garments, Barriers centers its identity around every single piece and the history behind the figures. Duke Ellington. Mansa Musa. Marcus Garvey. Barter and his brand don’t need to convince you of their worth—the value comes from a mutual appreciation between brand and buyer of the legends we choose to bring to life in what we wear. “People wear Louis [Vuitton] without knowing who Louis is,” he points out, “and when they wear my brand they don’t even need to know me. It feels luxurious.”
I ask Barter if he wants to keep Barriers focused on Black history or if there are other realms of history he wants to explore. “I’m interested in all history.” He says with an eager smile. “There’s so much Black history I have left to learn, but I want to know about all people. I have so many friends with so many backgrounds and I want to learn about them all.”
I ask if anyone knows where Barter is and they tell me he’s across the street. I step out and find him, surrounded by young fans asking him to sign their sneakers. One person comes up, nervously but passionately telling Barter about his brand. Barter smiles up at him from his chair, tells him to bring by some of his clothes tomorrow, and asks for his Instagram. Years of hustling, dreaming, and succeeding has led to a sense of stability where he now is able to receive someone with the same desire to tell a story to as many people as possible through his clothing.
“Signing shoes, signing comics, signing babies,” he says, jokingly, though, there are people standing around on this hot July day, pacifying their babies, chatting with each other under the calming New York evening sky. “You look around, you think you’re in Harlem. We brought it to SoHo. But it’s not even a Black thing. Obviously it’s Black made, but I make clothes for everyone. That’s why there’s the North Star on the show. It’s important to Black history, but everyone can see the North Star in the sky, everyone uses it. I want to be a North Star to everyone.”
We get a couple of slices of pizza together and discuss the article. “Really at the end of the day, none of this is about clothes,” he says. “We need to make clothes to make the real dreams happen. I’m about to go to Africa, to Ghana, I’m going to give away as much as I can, that’s why I’m still doing it at the end of the day. Next step is figuring out how to move beyond clothes. We have enough clothes—we need to find ways to help people with the excess. That’s the next mission.”
And at this pace, I don’t doubt he’ll get there.
Japanese loungewear brand Gelato Pique just released their first collection with Medicom Toy’s “BE@RBRICK.” Featuring 17 pieces all adorned with unique BE@RBRICK designs. This...
Creatives Willy Watson and Ebifoh Kagbala sit outside of their NoLita storefront, with the open door letting in a breeze and letting out music.
The welcoming and inherently artistic hub of HQ223 is a breath of fresh air from New York’s summer heat. The home of Death to Tennis is packed with pieces from the partners' independent and collaborative brands, featuring their personal art that fills the in-betweens.
As the duo invites us to join them, they turn down the music and begin to share their visionary world, personas, and processes that make up the Death to Tennis universe. Characters like Dr. Death and Mr. Tennis, compared to Holmes and Watson, allow the brand to play with fashion through storylines.
Inspired by the ever-changing future of fashion and technology, Death to Tennis is following its own ideals with odes to the past while testing the waters of another generation through their new collection VLLNS.
What is the overall philosophy of Death to Tennis?
W— Well, when we first started it was just about making good clothes. When we started doing the brand, everyone was doing Americana. The shops were selling cut leather bags for your ax to carry in Williamsburg, and everyone had a big beard, a checkered shirt, and skintight pants, and that look wasn't really us. We kind of do streetwear, but it’s a little bit more adult, you know, elevated. That’s always been the fit so, that was always really the plan, just to kind of make the nice clothes that we wanted.
So you mentioned the word “adult”. What do you think makes something “adult”?
E— I think the level of tailoring, you know. It’s not too flashy in terms of overtly logo heavy. The way we use colors, the way we use shapes and forms, I think it speaks to a higher you. I’m doing 50s, but I'm also doing new romantic, I’m also doing a little David Bowie, I’m doing a little Miles Davis, I’m playing with eras. Your ability to play with eras and reference makes you grown up. Your ability to stay away from too much BBC and too much egoism makes you a little off of the beaten path. You get me? The road less traveled.
What would you want someone to feel when they are wearing your clothes?
W— Well, I want everyone to feel good, right? You want people to feel good, feel comfortable, feel relaxed. We don't do anything skin tight, seams, and shit. It’s very much comfort-based. That's kind of the fit that we're referencing when we talk about streetwear. We grew up in a time where no one really wears suits anymore. In the last two years, everyone wore sweatpants. When we say adult, it's more elevated, because (with) a lot of streetwear brands, you know, you see a guy in a streetwear brand and he looks like a 12-year-old boy. We are just trying to give you that fit but in a way that's a little bit more sophisticated.
Is there a specific type of person you see wearing your clothes?
W— We welcome all. We used to have a saying “welcome human”, but now it's just “welcome.” We don't want to define you if you're a human or not a human. When we first started it was menswear, but then so many women wore our clothes. With the last job we did, we pretty much were like, well it's September, it's women's week, so most of the people we had walk were women to show the versatility of the brand. It didn't look like women wearing menswear, it still looked like womenswear.
E— There's a sense of androgyny in the clothes. I feel women have the power, they control the market. Who runs the world? Girls. So it's kind of like if they pick and say “I want that”, that thing goes out the roof.
So you never expected the androgyny to come out of what it is now?
W— No, I mean I could sense it early on because I would go to find something (to wear) and I’m like “where the hell is that piece,” and I call my wife and she's wearing it. So we got a couple of seasons in and I was like “alright, you need your own set so I can at least wear what I'm trying to find.” So then as we kept doing it, more and more women gravitated to it too. I mean now anyone can wear anything and be anything, so now it's just welcome to any buyer. We’ll sell you anything.
E— It’s like playing with characters, you know?
W— That's what clothing is.
Do characters have a lot to do with your brand?
E— I think so, cause already with the name, right? Death to Tennis. I feel like there's one guy who's Dr. Death, and there's one guy who's Mr. Tennis. A little bit more like, “Alright mate, Fuck off. Were saying fuck off to the establishment, two hands in our pockets.” So it’s that little balance. One seems to be very gothic, and one seems to be a little cheery. I think we both work well.
W— Yeah we have a couple of characters which are kinda like alter egos, characters that we play with. If you look at everybody walking around, it's a costume.
E— It’s a famous saying he has, “all fashion is fiction.” It’s on a t-shirt.
W— I mean it really is. Were just trying to have fun with it, you know?
You're working on the fine line between reality and fantasy.
W— Now that leads us to the metaverse, which leads up to the future, which is kinda blurring the line completely. People already think this is not the real world, people already think this is the metaverse.
E— We’re hopefully creating a world of D.T.T. Basically you're walking into HQ223NYC, you can get the jewelry by Shelia Lam from Eternal Peace Studio, you can still get my art, you can get his sculptures, while you're in the metaverse.
What made you want to step into that world?
W— It seemed like the next, not necessarily market, but the next frontier. You know now crypto, and N.F.T’s, and everything in that whole world is truly like the wild west. I feel like it's the very early days right now, so if we get in now, there are huge possibilities, and I know that a lot of other brands are going in, but a lot of them seem to be going into the Facebook world, and I think that the differences between the Facebook world and Decentraland are what ideals spoke to us.
Sounds like you're moving away from the capitalist idea of N.F.T’s and the Metaverse.
W— Well, you know what it feels like, it feels like N.F.T’s are basically Wall Street without restrictions. I think that artists are kind of thinking that if you get it there and you do the work, you could make money as an artist, but I also think that it's really that people are now working like a stock thing.
E— It takes away from the accessibility of what art should be. Once we know that what we're doing is accessible to Tom, Dick, and Harry, then, it's better.
W— I’ve realized that everyone needs to have an avatar in that world, and they all need clothes. You know how it is, people want to flex in the real world, so I saw that as the real market.
Is that where you see fashion in the metaverse?
W— Yeah, like right now we're selling Death to Tennis archival pieces and we’re also flexing hard because we're doing the most expensive piece in the metaverse right now, because we know that people want to spend all that money and want to show off. It’s like when people go to stand in line waiting for all those sneakers, it's the same kind of flex, so we were like, well let's really flex. We invented a gold in the metaverse and it's one of one. You can buy it for 1.5 million dollars. But yeah, I think wearables are where it's at.
E— It’s interesting times. Death to Tennis is a cheeky brand that says “Fuck the establishment” without the middle fingers. It's kind of like if you don't ruffle feathers, what are you doing? Were not here to please people, we've done it so far so good. We're so thankful that we never belonged, cause now it's working to our advantage. We still think fashion is a little bit too cliquy and a little too racist, and a little bit too classist. That's why Death to Tennis says Death to Tennis, get your thoughts replenished. It's not against the sport, it's the club, love, it's the club.
How do you think your conceptual art and videos work hand in hand with your clothes?
W— Well I've always been interested in film, always, always, always. So how we come about the film is we actually care less about the clothes in the film, but more about the film. It’s more about storytelling and that's what I've always been interested in. Secretly I'd like to be a filmmaker myself, but clothes really provide the backdrop.
E— That's how I started working with them. They gave me a small role. “Untitled” is a story about a ballerina that goes to an audition. She doesn't get the part, but on her way home, she starts dancing in the park, climbing up the fences, and really being amazonian. In comes a smoker, Ebie. He sees her, says “fucking hell,” and claps for her. So she may not have gotten that role, but I know it's a struggle, it's like a metaphor. That girl is every one of us. That's how I got into DTT.
Considering your conceptual design, the metaverse, and bringing women into the picture, where do you see menswear going in the future? Do you see change?
W— No, not really. I feel like we know what's going on in the world, we know you can be anything, but I feel like there's still a huge part of the population that's going to dress like “men” and want menswear and the same for women. There are pockets of people that want to dress however they want, and I think that's totally fine, but I think as the gigantic fashion business, I feel like there is a certain amount of exploration in the middle. I fear for the long term, there will still be menswear and womenswear, but there will be the section that floats.
E— Some brands these days are all about ticking the boxes, while we just make the clothes, let the clothes do the talking.
W— If you like it, you can wear it. Doesn't matter to me who you are, as long as your card does not get declined, we will accept your money gladly.
You’re willing to live in the middle.
W— I mean that's the world we live in. You can't roll with that, there's something wrong with you.
We love sustainability. And knitwear. So does AERON. We love AERON.
To keep it simple— AERON is about a few things: purpose, innovation, and tradition. Broken down, to the Budapest-born brand this means the use of sustainable materials, which are crafted with Shima Seiki wholegarment technology, a new and green manner of making garments. It's tradition, but married to modern technology.
Having been built on the idea of time-tested craftsmanship, the latest collection ZERO focuses on knitwear— but the twist this time, to stay current and sustainable, is that while traditionally made knit clothing is made of separate panels that are constructed manually, the ZERO collection pieces are assembled in one entire piece.
The creme to electric red color scheme in the modular wardrobe includes an assortment of stretch and structured ribbed knitwear that breaks the boundaries of basic essentials. ZERO works with the customer to arrange a personal wardrobe while participating in the sustainable renaissance.
The brand is staying true to Áron’s youth and DNA by utilizing the heritage craft of yarn, knitting, and crochet production to innovate and expand the possibilities of modern knitwear as a canvas of individual creativity.
With models Abeny Nhial, Olivia Belgrave Ruse, and Jess Maybury shot by Laura Jane Coulson, the new ZERO campaign perfectly compliments both the collection and cast in its range.
"We wanted to double down on putting our women front and center again. In the pandemic, we questioned how luxury had changed. For years brands have followed the same formula, but we understand that today’s luxury customers want more than just fashion.
We need to understand that for our customers, Aeron isn’t the only thing in their universe, so to really understand them we need to know more about her. We achieve that by speaking more to our audience and not being in our ivory tower.
Our purpose is to dress the women of today through responsibly sourced, climate-friendly materials of great quality, creating durable pieces that can be passed on to the next generation."
—AERON Founder and Creative Director Eszter Áron.
Presented alongside their Pre-fall 2022 collection, the span of essentials will be available via the brand's wholesale retailers around the world.
Visit the AERON website to learn more.
As seen in the SS22 Tokyo runway show for COMME des GARÇONS HOMME PLUS, the highly anticipated Nike Air Max Sunder shoe done in collaboration with CDG is finally set for its official global release.
Slightly reminiscent of an English Bull Terrier, the shoe itself is weird in all the right ways, and with the help of CDG, the release features three minimalist color ways that each play with black and white in its own chic, unique style.
Puffy, zippered, chunky, yet still super simplistic— there's something about this model that makes it especially modern and fresh, with a wry nod to the idea that "fashion is cyclical" in the ways it references signature aspects of some of the more retro styles from each brands' decades of design.
First released in 1999, the Air Max Sunder still remains to be one of the oddest shoe designs that Nike has released, making it the perfect canvas for the eccentric Comme des Garçon. The artful, gritty, and elegant campaign by Ari Marcopoulos gives this thoughtfully designed shoe the treatment it deserves— placing the new product in a '90s-inspired aesthetic time warp against the city that never sleeps.
The sneaker launches exclusively at all Dover Street Market stores globally (with the exception of Japan) as well as DSM E-SHOPS, followed shortly thereafter by all Comme des Garçons’ best wholesale clients.
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