QUIET AS IT’S KEPT…What’s on the radar of the dynamic New York fashion-stylist team, THE STYLEMONSTERS?
Hey XEX readers, we’re baaaaaack!!!! Since XEX Magazine will be dropping their men’s issue next month, we thought we’d concentrate on the testosterone-driven part of fashion this week. So…QUIET AS ITS KEPT- Let’s hear it for the Boy(s)…
1 – Quiet As Its Kept, the male supermodel is back on the rise- and his first name is Brian …
Joining the very elite club of male supermodel-dom is no easy feat: it literally takes balls for your visual work to be commensurate with Tyson Beckford (the Polo Prototype), Vladimir McCrary (the Gaultier God), Will Lemay (the Latin Chulo) and Marcus Shenkenberg (the Swashbuckling Swede). However, we’ve been watching Brian Shimansky since 2009 when he showed up in the D&G Spring/Summer campaign shot by Mario Testino and in some fabulous frames of him captured by Bruce Weber. Since then we’ve seen him smoldering for Saks, mugging for Moncler, flaunting it in FLAUNT magazine and officially gracing the pages of ‘L’Officiel Hommes’.
With that ridiculously-chiseled jaw line, sculptured yet-fashion-friendly physique and beautiful brow-bone framing deep, Bombay-Sapphire-blue eyes, its no wonder that Versace snatched him up to be the face of their Fall/Winter 2012 “Eros” fragrance campaign- shot by fashion photography’s bad boys Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.
Oh, and he also happens to have shot an editorial in XEX’s upcoming men’s issue (styled by guess who?).
From every indication, he is well on his way to being Mark Vanderloo 2.0 (who, incidentally, shot a Versace jeans campaign in 1996 and Versace Intensive campaign in 1997).
You heard it hear first, folks…
2 – Quiet As Its kept, you need to watch your ‘Behaviour’…
We’ve been keeping the existence of this one boutique to ourselves, fearful that if it were to get out that its one of the BEST places to shop for fashion-forward and avant garde menswear that it would be overrun by the fashion cognoscenti and we’d have to find another place to drop “coin”. However- quiet as its kept- menswear boutique champion Behaviour is slowly but surely etching out their footprint on a quiet sliver of NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood. Turning westward onto 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), its easy to become distracted by the modern condo buildings standing beside pre-war co-ops that dot the sidewalk landscape; until you are stopped dead in your tracks by a well-executed window display and decide to step inside of Behaviour’s menswear haven (the second of two brick-and-mortar stores; the original is on 9th Avenue). The racks, replete with covetable pieces by everyone from Allesandro Dell’Acqua, to Cy Choi to Damir Doma to J. Lindeberg to Rick Owens’ drkshdw to WooYoungMi, indicate that the boutique’s buyers concentrate on “must-have” items- without a lot of unfashionable fluff. They stock Y-3 pieces and accessories that you would be hard-pressed to find even at Y-3 standalone stores or online. Their clearance racks (which can be found by going all the way in the back of the store and making a sharp left) never disappoints. These boys mean business! Ask for Chad, the stunningly-stylish boutique co-owner/buyer of the Asian persuasion who dresses everyday as though he just stepped out of an editorial. You can thank us later…
While we’re talking about great window displays, can we direct our attention to the window of the Levi’s store on West 34th Street, between Broadway and 5th? Two male mannequins, wearing the Levi brand with the campaign slogan “Go Forth” below the Levi’s logo etched on the window pane; innocuous enough, right? Until you zoom in and catch what is REALLY going on in the window.
Now, we’re not sure if the window display was a result of the accidental placing of two mannequins too close together or an indication of the Levi Company’s support of the marriage equality initiatives recently voted into law in Maine Maryland and Washington State during the Presidential elections last week, but we are feeling it. Go Forth, indeed, Levi’s…
3 – Quiet As Its Kept, Fashion has plenty of “boy-on-boy” action
Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott are but one set of ‘mano a mano’ creative teams that are making their marks in the industry. Design teams Aquilano Rimondi, Costello Tagliapietra (who can do NO wrong in our book), Proenza Schouler, Viktor and Rolf, Dolce and Gabbana, and Duckie Brown immediately come to mind. Innovative image makers like old-school Stylists-extraordinaires Malcolm and Kazumi, style-svengalis Mathu and Zaldy (who made up Rupaul’s original Drag Race team) and-yes – Chad and Llewellyn from THE STYLEMONSTERS manipulate clothes in editorials to induce conspicuous consumption. Newbie designers Shane Gabier and Chris Peters of clothing line “Creatures of the Wind” are bubbling under the surface as “the new Proenza Schouler”. Menswear designers on the solo tip to watch include Antonio Azzuolo, Carlos Campos, Andrew Nowell and Alejandro Ingelmo. W magazine’s powerhouse of a Fashion/Style Director Edward Enninful and uber-stylist Karl Templer leave no sartorial stone unturned. So, let’s hear it for the boys that spin the fashion wheel “right round, baby, right round”…
4 – Quiet As Its Kept, this ‘Top Chef’ is serving up more than just fine fare…
Ladies…who doesn’t love an attractive, enterprising, intelligent straight man that can cook, throw a fierce party, AND dress to the nines? Always sartorially-turned out with his trademark flash of burnt orange somewhere on his person, Marcus Samuelsson is the modern-day ‘Harlem Renaissance’ man, straddling the “foodie-as-fashionista” fence; the kind that writes cookbook tomes that appear on the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list (his latest being the fantastic read, “Yes, Chef”), bests some of the world’s top chefs/restaurateurs on The Food Network’s reality cooking program ‘Top Chef Masters’ and ‘Chopped All Stars’, marries a beautifully statuesque Ethiopian photographer that could very well have been a model in her formative years (and, quiet as its kept, still could), and all of this while donating time and currency to charities that support up-and-coming aspiring chefs from educationally impoverished backgrounds.
Yet not only can he can BRING IT in the kitchen but also in the club. For evidence of both of these facts, go uptown to The Red Rooster Restaurant on 125th Street in Harlem- which we’ve dubbed the ‘Bar Pitti” above 14th Street’, because of the “see and be seen” atmosphere. Have the shrimp and grits- that is, if you can get a table in the restaurant, which is packed 7 days a week (they do take reservations, however- but sometimes they are an unbelievable 30 days out). Meanwhile in the space downstairs from the ground-floor restaurant (which is dubbed Ginny’s Supper Club), he throws the swankest soirees- the most notorious being his annual Halloween Party. The party he threw his year- which occurred during the decrescendo of Hurricane Sandy- was no exception. Fashion insiders from all over NYC, rife with cabin fever, got into their well-appointed costumes and clamored to get in the doors; we’re talking some of the hottest fashion stylists, face-beaters, wig-adjusters, fashion television luminaries and designers alike rubbing shoulders with hedge-funders, lawyers and musicians in a Dionysian dance scene reminiscent of Studio 54- minus the door policy!
It was, for all intents and purposes, the Uptown version of Marc Jacobs’ notorious Halloween bashes. When we left, there were STILL people waiting to get into the already-overcrowded Halloween blowout, hoping to register for the Best Costume prizes. Besides straddling the foodie-as-fashionista fence, Mr. Samuelsson throws a mean shindig; whether its in Harlem, at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week or for President Obama! Truthfully, he’s made Harlem, New York into his own image of Haarlem- away from his Scandinavian roots in Sweden (by way of Ethiopia)…But don’t believe us, get thee Uptown to 125th Street and see for yourself…
5 – Quiet As Its Kept, there are some artists who take ‘Killing” Fashion seriously…
There are artists out there that have a cogent understanding of fashion, both as a form of expression and as an industry; either as a way of communicating who you are to the world or as a cut-throat business with ridiculous mark-ups. Some use their art to elicit either thought-provoking discussion or pangs of panic and disgust. Graffiti artist Erni Vales got our attention during a showing at the Chelsea Market last spring with this anime take on label-hunters entitled “Fashion Assassins” ( If you look closely enough, you should be able to make out the logos of 10 fashion houses on the body of the “assassin”). Take your time…
Vales explored the interconnection between fashion and anime, but controversial photographer/visual artist Tyler Shields discovered the same between fashion and animus. This past May he sat behind the lens, clicking the shutter button to capture the sequence of events when his girlfriend Francesca Eastwood (yes, daughter of Clint) took a chainsaw-and then a blowtorch- to a crocodile Hermes Birkin bag, reported worth “100,000.
The project was widely panned as anything but art (“arrogant”, “wasteful”, “insensitive”, and “crass” were just a few of the glowing reviews). Shields says he bought the $100,000 purse out of his own pocket and that he destroyed it because he “wanted to immortalize it.” The backlash throughout the art and fashion worlds was FIERCE, raising the couture-level ire of current and aspiring Birkin bag owners all over the world. Shields wasn’t the only target of criticism in the project; Francesca subsequently received death threats. Quiet as its kept, we are torn; as self-professed voluptuaries that also realize that material things are just that-things. We don’t know how we feel about this. Was it was a “homage to Hermes”, a societal commentary on the value we place on materialism, or an act of virtual violence against those that cling desperately to the ubiquitous trophy bag- Upper East Side doyennes, Basketball Wives, and/or even Jane Birkin herself. What say ye?