FRIENDS & LEGENDS

With it being the three-year (which has flown by, as if to remind me how much I’m wasting my life) anniversary of the legendary MCA’s passing early last week, it seemed relevant to have a hunt for something with a Beastie connection. The House of Style interview with Adrock and Mike-D from June 1992 is fairly well documented, but I hadn’t seen the full version of the interview before. I’ve mentioned it here before at some point, but the Porkys1982 YouTube account is one of the very best channels dedicated to a band, and they upped a near 10-minute long version of a Check Your Head era chat about X-Large (in which nobody seems to have told the boys that the Gazelle preempts the Campus) and a certain era of clothing that resonates with them. It’s a great accompaniment to the MTV Sports appearance from the same year, Adrock’s 1995 Valentine’s shopping trip, the 1994 X-Girl fashion show segment, or the 1995 X-Girl film that Nowness unearthed back in 2013 (Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band has some good background on X-Girl too). This Pump It Up interview is also something I hadn’t stumbled upon before. It’s important that the whole Beastie movement’s subcultural role is reiterated time and time again, but it’s also worth underlining how important they were in defining streetwear as we know it now.



On that mid 1990s note, a shoe I saw then completely lost track of has made a reappearance on shoe-selling site, Klekt. I’m not down with blowing up eBay auctions because it’s ungentlemanly, but I’m not sure what the unspoken rules are with Klekt. The Friends SMU of the Air Edge completes the trinity (I know there’s actually more — like the gear created for the Martin cast — but trinity just sounds nice) of Nike TV specials that Nike created in the mid 1990s. The Nike Binford for Home Improvement cast and crew and the Air Seinfeld version of the GTS for Seinfeld cast and crew aren’t as nice as the 2nd Season edition of the Edge specifically for friends of Friends in 1995, even if Friends and Home Improvement are trash compared to Jerry and company’s antics. This is extraordinarily rare. A gentleman by the name of Joe is currently taking offers for these.

X-GIRL TO THE NEXT GIRL

Nothing to see here today. You’d be far better off heading to Papermag if you haven’t already and reading ‘An Oral History of X-Girl’ with contributions from Sofia Coppola, Kim Gordon, Eli Bonerz, Chloë Sevigny and Daisy von Furth. Can you imagine having Lyor Cohen as a babysitter? This is a comprehensive piece of streetwear history in an era and industry where womens’ gear is an afterthought and whatever crappy brand puts Kate Upton on gets the blog hits. The world needs another X-Girl — extra points to that brand for the clean Mike Mills-designed logo. To assume it was just a girly variant on X-Large would be far, far, off the mark. Prior to X-Girl, von Furth was writing for ‘Spin’ and the above Lollapalooza ’92 related piece from that magazine displays a proto (albeit significantly sluttier) X-Girl aesthetic at work.

That conversational piece answered a few questions about a brand that fascinated me before it vanished to Japan and seemed to become semi-mainstream like its male counterpart (it still makes my mind boggle that there was still an X-Large store off Carnaby Street until around 2006). It’s nice to see something with a little more mystique out ther too, like gardener-centric brand Sassafras who don’t make a replica of my grandad’s “gardening tie” (now that’s swagger), but make good gear that’s elusive on these shores and pretty much everywhere else. Their heather grey t-shirt is particularly direct, though I suspect it would be worn by an audience of less-than-greenfingered “crafted” gear fanboys. Now everyone’s shifting from parka fetishes to foodie inclinations, is horticulture the next sub-cultural exodus for the WordPressing and Instagramming masses? (Image taken from Doo-Bop)

Not from Japan, but appropriately otaku, Style Warrior making a Mighty Ethnicz t-shirt isn’t entirely unexpected but the execution’s very good. Mighty Ethnicz’s 2 Live Crew affiliations, 8+ year (excluding the Newtrament days) went from UK rap’s early era to that point when we all wanted to sound like Pete Rock or Muggs. The Bodé tribute character, complete with a star, machine gun, name chain, big shoes and fat laces is a good one and the tee’s available to pre-order right here. By the time I was utterly infatuated with rap, these guys, London Posse and the Brotherhood always seemed to deliver the antidote to fast raps about goblins and swords over corner shop Bomb Squad knockoffs.



On a Bodé note, I recently found a picture of a Ninja Turtle that Mark Bodé sketched for me in 1991.