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- [00:00]
A
Today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Fashion is never just about clothes, is it? It's about identity, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. For those exploring design concepts or questioning what drives our choices, Claude can be your thinking partner. Claude is the AI collaborator that helps you dig deeper into the questions that fascinate you, whether that's understanding cultural movements, exploring creative concepts, or working through complex problems. Try Claude for free@claude aifashionneurosis. Hi, come in. Welcome to Fashion Neurosis. Arthur Jafer.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Can you tell me what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes?
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B
Yeah, I'm wearing my pretty standard for me at this point. Vis Vim, it's a Japanese label I like a lot. A little bit like, based on American workwear, I guess, but, you know, but like on steroids. It's something I think the, you know, the designer has a ethos of making things that last and that, you know, you can wear into. So I just, I generally, you know, one of the things I love, love to wear and just be honest, just jeans, you know, T shirt.
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A
How about the earrings?
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B
The earring is a Balenciaga. It's funny, I was like, dimna era.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Now that he's moved on. But Balenciaga earring, it's not the kind of thing you can wear every day. I always. It's funny, I think, like, it's a little too large maybe or something, but I don't know, I guess that's half the point, you know? So I used to have this. Dang. It was a chain earring, Bottega earring. When Daniel Lee was there and I lost it. And I tried everything to get it replaced. Was never able to get it replaced. And I just sort of was running around one day and I saw this and I was like, I don't know. And I bought it. So now I wear it on occasion, so. Seems somehow apropos for this.
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A
It does. It seems special. So I'm glad you're wearing it. You're an internationally acclaimed artist working with film, painting and sculpture. I became obsessed with your work when I saw a show in the Museum of Modern Art in Portugal.
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B
Oh.
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A
And you've talked about transposing and you said, what does it mean to cross breed a Turner painting with a Coltrane song, or if Kind of Blue or Electric Ladyland was a house and what would that look like and what is transposing?
- [03:19]
B
Well, you know, on a certain level, it just means to Move one thing from one place to another. But, you know, you know, in some ways, it's about how context shapes a person or people, but it's something else, as in the case with, you know, African people in the Americas, if that transposition was, you know, coercive or, you know. And so I'm very interested in. Well, at core, I'm really interested in mixing, honestly. And transposition is just a mechanism that produces mixing. Because, you know, ultimately, you know, anytime you confront a. A new situation, a new context or a new person, that's mixing of some degree or another that's going on. You know, you stand in a room with a person, you're breathing an air that may have passed to their lungs, you know. So I feel like I'm very, very, very interested in the intricacies and the complexities of just mixing in general. You know, like, in my show, I have this. I don't know if it's properly a painting. It's a picture, a big picture of Larry Levan, who was the DJ at Paradise Garage, you know, which in itself was a place for mixing. You know, lots of different people came there, and he is, I mean, oftentimes recognized as the greatest DJ of all time. And, you know, and mixing music is. I mean, I was just starting to think about this recently because somebody asked me a question and I was saying, if you look at DJs, like, to me, there's an aspect of what they do that is not so much theoretically, but like, there's a way what they are doing is the beginning of a sort of where I think everybody's going to kind of transhumanism, you know, like, to me, like with Michael Jackson, like the plastic surgery. That's transhumanism to me. Okay, but. But you see it in the DJ, the art of the DJs, you see this whole thing where the boundaries are between one thing, like a discrete thing and another thing start to dissolve a little bit. You know, you end up with these things, mixes, you know, and black Americans are. And black people in most places in the Americas are mixes. You know, we're like ad hoc, non consensual, crossbred things, you know, Like I think of early, like, sort of, you know, documented by Elvis Presley. They would always have this shot of these sort of community groups and they would have a sign that said, you know, no dogs, niggas and Elvis Presley. You know what I mean?
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A
Really?
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B
Yeah. You know, it's funny. And they always show those shots as if to say, these people were, quote, unquote ignorant, you know, like rednecks or something like that. But they weren't ignorant. They understood that rock and roll was an alien cultural form, you know, and that it was gonna. Had the potential, and maybe more than their worst fears to radically transform how they're actually off. Their children understood the world, you know.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which it in fact did do, you.
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A
Know, And I read that you had an astrological reading when you were young and that the person said that you wouldn't come into your full being until past the age of 50. And I wondered if that influenced you when things were difficult. And what's your star sign?
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B
Well, my star sign is Sagittarius. And I'm not actually a big astrological person, but, you know, but I have my ex and one of my closest friends. They are. And they get, you know, I've been given readings as gifts, you know. So the two things I do remember from the first reading, which I got when I turned 30, was what you said, the one thing that I wouldn't come into my own until I was 50, which at the time I was like, fuck that terrible. No fucking way. Like, I'll jump off a building before. But the other thing that I remember, and I remembered this actually a lot more intensely than I remember the first thing, which I had to be reminded of by my ex, actually. But. And the first. The thing I mostly remember is the astrologer. His name was Carlos. I never met him in person. He was in Baltimore or something. But, you know, it was, you know, I sent him my information, he did it, you know, and then we talked about it on the phone. But I remember him saying if he had to characterize this life based on my past lives, because he had this whole past life thing, he said that he saw me as a Hell's angel on the road to Mecca. I'll never forget that. Yeah. I was like, wow, okay, that's kind of interesting. Remember that? But. So I was like, yeah, I like that part, but I don't like this part about 50, which seemed, you know, like a million miles away at the time, you know, so. Yeah, and I look back on it and think, wow, it's way in my rear view mirror, you know.
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A
I know I used to get loads of things and psychics, and then I realized I followed their advice and their kind of spell they seemed to put on you, especially about romantic involvements. And I just sort of abdicated my own sort of, you know, now my instinct for what seemed to be going wrong and thought, well, they said this was the one. And now I never do that. Apart from my. I look on a headlamp, I. I'm. I'm the same as you. I mean, I don't really believe it, but I quite like anything that sort of says anything about what you are. But now I. Now I never. I'm afraid of being influenced by stuff like that.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not so much afraid of it as. I mean, maybe it's the same thing. Maybe I'm just wary of it, which is the same thing, I guess, as afraid. I mean, I find it to be fascinating on a certain level. Like, one thing I do know to be true is, like, at one point I started to realize that, like, I had a lot of Libras in my life. Like, so whether you believe like, in astrology or not, I was like, wow, I got a ton of Libras. I think I made a list of, like, 20 people I considered, you know, like, close or, you know, have been over my life. I think it was something like 16 or 17 out of 20 were LIBRAs, which is kind of, you know, even if you don't believe in astrology, that's like, what's the odds of that? Yes. I mean, first girlfriend, my wife. First wife. Only wife, actually. I guess best friend. My oldest best friend. My best. Best friend. Favorite sibling. Just like, down the line. And even, like, I remember sitting in my studio and we. I don't know, this came up some kind of way. And my design director, Connor, who I get along with like this, I just said. I just stopped. I turned to him, what are you. And he said, libra. So it's weird. I don't know. It's not. It's not. It's not even just that I process Libras. They seem to be somehow to be able to process me, you know, it's mutual. So it's a Libra thing.
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A
Quite nice.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You began collecting pictures and collaging them from a young age. And you described it as basically a form of ocd. And you said, it's not whether you're neurotic or not, it's whether your neurosis is productive or not. And that was really great because plenty of people collect stuff. But how did you make it be productive?
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B
You know, I mean, one of the things I would say, like, in some ways, what's directly tied to my traction, let's call it in the art world, it's just, you know, just an increasing, like, unmovable sense that if I'm interested in it, it's legitimate, you know. You know, anybody knows my work knows I'm very preoccupied with like black aesthetics, I would say. But it's not like an exclusive, you know what I mean? It's like you wouldn't. I mean, somebody asked me about the Peter Townsend thing and Sadie's show and you know, it's like I didn't make it because I was trying to be an exceptional negro or anything like that. You know, I didn't make it to be like, oh, look at this, I could be interested in these other things. Not like it's like I don't, you know, I don't, I don't. Just in the same way I don't do black art because I'm trying to be, you know, socio politically relevant or anything. It's what I'm genuinely interested in.
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A
You know, I suppose I was thinking of when you were a child because so many collecting is a full, you know, people's whole lives who do nothing with it. But as a child it seemed like you were collecting this stuff with a purpose rather than just for the sake of it.
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B
I don't think so, no. I mean, I think I was just collecting it for the same reasons that people collect anything, you know, almost been shown. Collecting is always somewhat neurotic, you know, But I was collecting it because I wanted to be able to access things that I found interesting when I, you know, when I wanted to. And I can remember one time like, like in my late, late teens, this is, I mean, and just the fact that I removed this is almost as much evidence of how something seemingly, you know, not a big deal, but I was in Georgetown in D.C. and I just randomly walked into like they used to have like international newsstands and stuff a lot. I spent a lot of time in like magazine stores and stands and stuff. This is pre social media, but I always loved magazines. I mean, the same way I love the Internet now. It's the same thing, like scrolling, you know, like flipping through magazines was like doom scrolling, you know. So I happened to walk into this newsstand and I picked up a. I just sort of, for whatever reason picked up an issue. I think it was disturbed, this German newspaper and it had a long. Or it had a feature on Fela Kuti.
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A
Oh yeah.
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B
But it was all images of his wives. You know, he married like a hundred women or something like that. And it was just incredible. Like, I mean these images were like really amazing. Full bleed, full page spreads for each face, you know, and I was like, wow, this is incredible. I had to get this. But I think it was like, 17 bucks or something. Like, at the time, the idea of spending $17 on a magazine was so crazy. I just was like, I'm not gonna spend. I mean, you'd be like, spending, like, 50 bucks, you know, on a magazine or something. I was like, I can spend 17 on a magazine. And I. And I went away and like, for two, three days, all I could think about were these images, you know, so eventually, like I said, I just need to go ahead and buy. And I went back, and of course, it was no longer on the stands, and I've never forgotten it. And since that moment, I was like, if I have an immediate, intense response to something like that, I mean, like, in life, like, you could see something once and never see it again. And so again, like, that's probably inherently neurotic on some level, to never to. You know, to the whole idea of not wanting no longer have access to something you've seen. But since that point, I've always just followed my, you know, my gut on stuff like that. Like, you know, even today, like, if I'm on Instagram or something. One of the things I hate about Instagram, and I love Instagram. Like, people come up and say, you don't post. You never post. Yeah, but it's the first thing I do in the morning when I get up and look at Instagram. But the thing about it is, it's such a tricky app. Cause, you know, you can't go back. Oftentimes you can't go back to things like if your fingers misfumble and you hit something and it's gone and you can't. There's no, like, backspacing on Instagram, you know, so it's a little terrifying. So I've developed all these strategies. If I see something, the first thing I do is screenshot it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then I'll try to, like, record it or something like that afterwards. But, you know. But of course, you miss a lot of things. Like. Like, just yesterday, I stumbled on this post somebody had done, and it was an interview with Tatiana, who was the model in the Michael Jackson video the Way youy Make Me Feel. This is a classic. She's walking, strutting, and he's running, you know, running around her. And she was talking about, like, basically what happened to her afterwards, you know, and it was really, really interesting. But I just sort of fumble, fakely hit something and couldn't. So I've spent the last 48 hours, like, obsessing about it, you know, like, will I ever be able to find this video clip of her talking, you know, about her inaction with Michael Jackson because she basically got banned from the show when she sort of ad libbed and kissed him on the cheek doing a routine and it wasn't planned and you know, it's like that was the end of her, you know, it's really funny.
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A
God. And you and your brother slept in bunk beds when you were living in a trailer and you'd tell each other stories and make drawings and hand them up and down to each other. And you also talked about being brought up with different members of your. By different members of your family. And I wondered how important your siblings were as allies in your, in your childhood.
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B
Allies? More like band of brothers, you know, like, like people who've been to war together. Yeah, I mean my relationship, my siblings is close, but like any kind of relationship bearable, you know, changes as I've gotten older. I've gotten closer to one of my brothers, you know, a little bit closer than with the other two, but the other two are twins so.
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A
Oh really?
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B
They have their own kind of thing, you know what I mean? Like they're a little bit of like a two headed person in a certain respect. So, you know. But when I was growing up, to me it was more like my sibling who's under me, who's three years younger than me and them were clot, like they were a thing. And then it was me. I was a little like isolated, you know, I mean the eldest but, you know, but a little bit of an outside. I felt like a black sheep, a little bit, I guess a little bit of an outsider. I'm sure that was somehow shaped by the fact also too that when I was five, my parents had me stay with my grandparents for the year so I could start elementary school because my birthday came later in the year. And typically, at least in Alabama, where we were living at the time, you had to be six years old at the beginning of the school year. And I didn't turn 6 until November 30, which was of course almost at the end of the year. But in Mississippi you could start as long as you turned six before the end of the year. So rather than have me spend another year in kindergarten when it was clear I was bored, the they had me stay with my grandparents and I was close to my grandparents. You know, it wasn't like I'd always grown up around my grandparents, but it was, you know, strange. You know, being away from my family that year was interesting. I mean we would and this was a different time than now. Cause I can't imagine like putting, like with my kids for four or five. I can't imagine putting them on a Greyhound bus by themselves. You know what I mean?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And sending them off to, you know, like a five hour, three, four, five hour bus ride by themselves. It's like, I don't even know, like now I don't even know if that's legal. You know what I mean? It might be considered like, you know, child abuse or something. But any event at the time.
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A
Yeah.
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B
My grandparents would put me on the bus, like on a Friday, you know, after school, and I'd take a bus ride from Clark, from Tupelo, Mississippi to Russellville, Alabama, which is at least three or four hours. And my parents would meet me on the other side, you know. But I don't know, it definitely contributed in some way. Way. I mean, you could say it contributed to my sense of independence or you could say it contributed to my sense of alienation.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, I mean, I remember being very envious of my brothers and their, you know, relationship to not just my parents, but even. There's a young lady named Rhonda who used to babysit me. You know, she was maybe four or five years older, maybe she was like teenager. And when I was 4 or 5 and when I came back, she had shifted her allegiances, her affections to my brother. And I was very, very, very envious.
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A
Yes. There's something about being the eldest, which I found anyway. I'm the eldest in my family and feeling quite like the sibling is behind you. You're the one that's facing the world always.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And. But then my sister used to trade me stories, except for I never traded her back, but she would tell me these stories and she became a writer and she was an incredible ally. She was a sort of like a great soldier. That's what she felt like. And I was the general, but it was kind of a strengthening thing. Even though, like when you described them being a unit and you being the satellite and the kind of loneliness of that too.
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B
Yeah. I mean, think about also just growing up in Mississippi and particularly. And I've talked about this a little bit before, but like. Because I kind of grew up in two places. I was born in Tupelo and that was like, at the time it's, you know, mid-60s. So that's. It was sort of the model, sort of liberal new Southern, you know, town in that respect. I mean, not that, you know, black people were in the press there or you know, white people controlled everything and, you know, Klansmen, the whole thing. It's not like it was some utopia or anything like that. But relative to Clarksdale, which was segregated even after laws changed, it was. You know, there was black high schools, white high schools. Even when they integrated Clarksdale High, they had a prom for the black students and a prom for the white students in the same school, you know, But I definitely have realized as I got older how much not only was I shaped like everybody shaped by where they grow up, but not only was I shaped by growing up in Mississippi, which is a very particular place to grow up. I mean, if for no other reason, but outside of maybe the Appalachians, the poorest region in America. So not only that, but it was this constant flux between these, you know, for most part a year, between, on a weekly basis between Tupla and Clarksdale, which was. You know, it was like growing up, you know, if you move back and forth between Mozambique and South Africa doing apartheid, you know what I mean?
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A
It's just really.
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B
It was a head, you know, snapping kind of movement back and forth in terms of, you know, just how you sort of exist in the mind. But one of the consequences of it, you know, use that word again. Alienation. It made it sort of abnormalized. Both environments. You know, neither one seemed normal somehow or natural. So I was, like, a little alienated in both environments. You know, when I was in Clarksville, it seemed like, unfortunately regressive or something. But when I was in Tupelo, I just didn't buy the whole Kumbaya of it, you know, it made me very, very cynical and skeptical about it, you know?
- [26:05]
A
So today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You know how certain pieces of clothing can haunt you. That vintage Saint Laurent blazer, the perfect pair of jeans that represents an entire decade's Rebellion, or the 150-year-old shoe style we're all suddenly obsessed with. Claude is right there with you. It's a thinking partner that helps you explore the deeper psychology behind what we wear and why it matters. When you're trying to understand why certain designers become cultural lightning rods, or examining how fashion reflects our collective anxieties and desires, Claude helps you trace those invisible threads. Together, you can explore how a simple hemline shift signals social change or why certain aesthetics resurface when they do. What's compelling about Claude is how it works with your curiosity. Whether you're analyzing the cultural influences of a particular era, exploring the business behind the beauty or Working through your own relationship with style. It becomes a collaborator in understanding fashion as language, as history, as neurosis. Try Claude for free@claude aifashionneurosis and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. But your grandparents home in Alabama was burned down by the kkk.
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B
My parents home. Your parents home? Yeah, the actual home that my parents lived in. As a matter of fact, they were away visiting me in Mississippi, and the house was burned down while they were away. Neighbors saw guys because my. The integrated high schools. My father was a football coach at the time. He was coaching the black high school. And when they integrated the high schools, they made him the head coach of the integrated high school. And I think in some ways, it was a response to that, you know? And so once the house was burned down, basically my parents had been recruited to become professors at a small black college in Clarksdale. And so they just never went back, you know?
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A
Yeah.
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B
So we just relocated. We were in Tupelo for a short time, and then we relocated to Clarksdale. And that's pretty much where, you know, like I said, I grew up.
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A
Yeah. And do you remember the first piece of clothing you longed for as a child and that you felt that it would somehow change things for you?
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B
Wow. Interesting. The first piece of clothing when I was really young, maybe three or four years old, I was my hero, Roy Rogers. I don't know if you know who Roy Rogers was. He was a cowboy in movies and stuff. He had a horse called Trigger.
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A
Oh, yes.
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B
And he had wrinkles in his forehead. Like, that was one of his character traits. And I used to sit and look in the mirror and burn my brow to get these wrinkles in my brow.
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A
That's so amazing.
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B
Just today, like, of course now. And I was like, no, don't do that. But I wanted to look like Roy Rogers. But in any event, I wanted a pair of cowboy blue that I thought were Rajah's. Like, so maybe that's about the earliest thing I can remember longing for, you know? Yeah, yeah. Maybe a pair of cowboy boots.
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A
And you. You said of your work, I don't do the uplift thing. I'm definitely an undertaker. I'm like, let's go down. I'm interested in where the bodies are buried.
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B
And.
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A
And I've accepted this. And is this how you find out if something's trustworthy?
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B
Trustworthy? What do you mean by trustworthy?
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A
Well, like, when I read that, I thought, yeah, I like to look under the bed. I want to find I want to know that everything's horrible so I can figure out how to handle things. And I wondered if it was that sort of sentiment.
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B
Yeah, I'm not so sure. I guess I'm just. I'm not sure about the term trustworthy. I'm not sure if I trust. If anything is worth trusting. You know, it's like things are what they are, and when trust comes into it, it's more like that's a narrative about the thing, you know, and then you decide the narrative is accurate or not. And I tend to not. You know, I'm skeptical of narratives, even though on one hand it's a big part of what I do is make narratives, you know, by myself. You know, one of the things about that's sort of oftentimes felt about black artists is that, you know, we're doing the uplifting. You know, we're like, here to inspire and to, you know, sort of rally the troops and things like that. I mean, all of which I think are legitimate and necessary things, you know, they have. I mean, I don't think black people, such as it is, particularly in the States in the US Would have survived. Not just survive, but thrived without, you know, mutual aid and mutual uplift and things like that, you know, I mean, if you're born black, in a way, you were born into a kind of original sin, you know what I mean? You're born into a state of lesser or deprivation, let's say. And then the idea is that one would be lifted up out of that state, let's say. And that it was always a collective and ongoing endeavor. And that is completely legitimate, you know, but like, everything. And this is tied to some of the stuff I was saying about, you know, just increasingly accepting who I am, you know, not to say I don't try to be a better version of who I am, but, you know, but at least accepting, like, fundamentally what. What is my impulse? And one of the things I know is that that function to uplift people, to inspire people and things like that. I mean, it's not to say I don't do it. I'm just saying it's not my primary intention. With something like love is the message. A lot of people are inspired by it. But I mean, a big part of it is like, you know, a rendering of all the horrific things that not only have happened to black people, but continue to happen to black people. So in a certain respect, I would say, why is that uplifting? You know? Now, of course, like anything you could say it's uplifting precisely because it's showing it as it is, as opposed to how we might want it to be or as opposed to how people might want to pretend it is or be in denial about. And maybe that in itself is uplifting. But, you know, it's not generally my impulse to do it. My impulse to do it is a little like my impulse to see anything that I find interesting slash troubling. You know, I'm not sure that troubling and interesting aren't, like, intricately, you know, intertwined so well.
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A
There's something about acknowledging something that's changes something, or at least it's not just an avoiding of knowing what's happening that, you know, that thing hiding in plain sight. I always find one of the most deranging things. And I suppose, is there some sort of a freedom that comes with just that? Just knowing, you know, not trying to see something that's gotta be. Well.
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B
I like to say one of the classic superpowers of black folks, again in the context of the stasis at least, is our ability to see things as they are. I'm not even sure if it's still a superpower. Maybe it's just a waning superpower. But I do think classically black people wouldn't have survived our circumstances if we didn't have a very, very highly developed resistance to being in denial about what a thing actually was. Like, we. I don't. I think, like, classically, we never really confused, like, how we wanted it to be versus how it was, you know, so in churches, you know, in sermons and stuff, so much of it was about rallying. And maybe this is the uplifting or embolden people to confront what it was, not like, encouraging denial, you know, and in some ways, that stance or that state of being put us almost inherently, like, inherently radically at odds with, you know, society in general, which certainly in the context of America is all about denial. How can you believe in the rule of law on a certain level, when the law said you weren't human for several hundred years? I mean, it's absurd, you know, So, I mean, I think that so shaped the fundamental sense of difference that black folks have, you know, and also means that when we come into circumstances or into situations, you know, our point of departure from understanding it, it's just different, you know, it's just different. And it doesn't mean we're less human or alien or anything like that, even though I do think we're pretty alien. But, you know, like, you know, oftentimes, like, it's Something I lean into a lot, you know, like black, black, black, black, being black, seeing black, all of this. But then I do also have to remind people, and black folks, too, like, yeah, but we human too. You know what I mean? And so if you say, like, my friend Kerry James Marshall has this incredible show at the Royal Academy, now known, Carrie, since the early 80s, he might have mentioned the Royal Academy. He might have. He did mention the Royal Academy to me, you know, in the 80s, as an ambition of his. I didn't even know what the Royal Academy was. But, you know, and. But one of the things that we talked about from the beginning was like a complete and total refusal of the idea that in order for your thing to be universal, that it had to somehow be less black. You know, like it could both be as black as it was and still be universal.
- [38:04]
A
Yeah, that.
- [38:04]
B
The refusal or the notion that those two things don't meet, that if your thing is black, like I used to say a lot, I don't say it so much now, but I used to say, you know, if you have a sculpture of a human being pointing at the stars, you know, everybody can say that's man's aspiration, humankind, man's aspirations, you know, but if you paint that same sculpture, black, same exact sculpture, all of a sudden it gets narrowed down somehow to black man's aspirations, or if you put breasts on it, women's aspirations. You know what I mean? Yeah. Why can't a sculpture of a woman be a stand in for humankind the way a sculpture of a sisterly white man can be a standard for all of humankind? It's, you know, that's, again, like just another one of those things. Like, Cornel west has this great thing. He always said, there's certain things you cannot not know as a black person in America, you know, and so it's a complicated, like, series of maneuvers you end up having to make to account for the discrepancy, in a way, between how a thing is seen or responded to when it's black versus not black. You know what I mean? Like how the default position is always somehow bound up with some sort of diminishment of one's humanity or feeling or intellectual capacity or whatever. You know, it's like sometimes I would say you always get penalized as a black artist for subtlety. You know, if you try to have your work be subtle, then it's somehow understood as not doing anything. And so there's a certain kind of pressure to make your thing be overt.
- [40:08]
A
Right.
- [40:10]
B
And you know, and loud and you know, I don't, it's like I do a lot of things, but like I said, I'm not really oriented towards uplift things so much. I'm not oriented towards the protest thing. I'm not protesting shit, you know. And even like somebody said, oh yeah, you make, you know, you want to make art about black people. And I would say making art about black people is important, but it's not really what I'm preoccupied with. I'm more preoccupied with making art like black people. It's a distinction I make, you know.
- [40:47]
A
How do you mean?
- [40:49]
B
I mean like the impulse is not necessarily sociological or something, or it's not about addressing a lack of representation to a certain degree, even though that's a legitimate thing. It's support, but it's more like, I think like blackness is a new thing. And I don't even mean it like as a racial category. I think blackness is a new kind of being that's been shaped as much by absences of understanding who you are or where you're from. It's like it's a paradoxical truth that the violence of being non consensually separated from your NATO context is also an opportunity to be a new thing. Right? Yeah, it's both. It's paradoxical. And that new thing which, you know, we can try to think through under like the rubric of blackness of which black people have a privileged, so called black people, people of African descent in the west have a privileged relationship to it. But as you know, as friends who say it, but we don't own it, you know, we don't own it. It's a new way of being in relation to the world. And oftentimes myths are uncredited as a basis for so many new ways of being in relationship to the world. It's like people, you know, it's like, you know, just from the music alone, they just make these new categories so that, you know, look, I love Led Zeppelin like everybody else, I'm obsessed with Led Zeppelin, but it's just black music. You know what I mean by white folks? And you know, I just said recently a couple kind of crazy thing, you know, I was at the ICA having to talk with, with Mary. We were talking, you know, as often times I get going and I'm riffing, you know, I was saying, shit, I don't know half of what I'm saying. Sometimes it's like a kind of, you know, conceptual improvisation or something. But I'm just talking, you know, and I was just Saying stuff. And people were like, yeah, yeah. You know, the crowd was with me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I said, england is the black Japan. And everybody said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, what does that mean? Fuck does that mean? Even I. Yeah, I'm saying you could see it on my face. I was, like, processing it. Like, my eyes were, like, rolling up in my head. I was like, yeah, right. England is the black Japan. What the fuck does that mean? England is the black Japan, you know? And I knew it meant something. Something, but I had to unpack it. You know, I had to unpack it and all it meant, like. And it took me a month to be able to say it like this. It's like, england is this fascinating petri dish where you get to see black aesthetics, essentially, this thing that's supposed to just be of black people, like, run wild. That's where Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and the who and Rolling Stones and even the Sex Pistols. I understand Malcolm McLaren saw the name the Sex Pistols on the back of a gang. A gang in the Bronx jacket. You know what I mean? It's all black aesthetics, you know? And it's fascinating to see it permutate, independent of black people. It's amazing, you know, it's fascinating, I feel, like, to the degree that I believe, like, this is all assimilation anyway. It's like, why would I want to be anything other than black? It's so fascinating, even though it's horrible and horrific so often and depressing and. I mean, it's a paradox, you know, like, how many brilliant insights about human life have happened in the context of radical constraint. Like in prisons, people have these incredible insights. Gramsci or something, when they're literally in prison, where, you know, being black is like a mobile prison you carry with you all the time.
- [45:22]
A
Yeah.
- [45:23]
B
And it does generate very particular kinds of insights about humankind and society and human relations and stuff, you know, and it's all in the. It's in the art. It's definitely in the music, because the music is a place where we've had so much relative freedom to do our thing. But it is potentially, you know, like, one of my great quests is, like, what is a cinema like, that, you know, is modeled on the music look like. It's not to say it'd be better than what's been done. I love cinema, you know, But I do think it would be different. And it would offer some very singular and discreet and particular ways of being cinematic, you know, that are in some ways aligned with or true to Black being in general.
- [46:21]
A
So because you said the Godfather Part 2 is in your top 10 films, but Coppola's in five. Top five. But Coppola's not in your top five directors. And I wondered who is in your top five directors?
- [46:36]
B
Well, my favorite director is Andre Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky, Godard. The one black filmmaker would probably be Oscar Michaux, who made 30 feature films. Over 30, depending on who you ask. First one, 1918.
- [47:00]
A
Amazing.
- [47:01]
B
Yeah, really amazing films. Like, to me it's a sign of how like undeveloped black cinema, at least black American cinema is just a degree to which people don't know Oscar Michelle's work. I mean from when I was in my early 20s and discovered Oscar Michaux. Certainly more people know Oscar Michelle's work now, but it's a little bit like being a jazz person, not knowing who like Louis Armstrong is or something. You know, it's like a sign of just a collective under development. But you know, in his work are the DNA of what black cinema could be. It's all there, you know, and I believe like it's there because you have to make it there. Meaning, like I like to say sometimes that, you know, you look at somebody's work and you make a claim for that work or you valorize that work and people say, ah, that's an accident. Well, my thing is, like in the case of Oscar Michaud's work in particular is a great example of it. If you do it once, it's an accident. If you do it twice, it's. It's a coincidence. The third time you do it is culture. It kind of doesn't matter what it is if you repeat it and it becomes an auto aspect of what you do in this culture, you know. But that's just part of, like I say, my ongoing sort of desire and investment in being radically self authorizing, you know?
- [48:42]
A
Yeah.
- [48:43]
B
So I like the Sex Pistols. I always thought the Sex Pistols were incredible. Like they check off a lot of the box of what makes great a great rock band, you know, it's like not just the music, it's how they look.
- [48:56]
A
Yeah.
- [48:56]
B
Attitude, you know, the philosophy that's implied by their stance, all these kinds of things.
- [49:04]
A
Support for today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I'm not exactly an early adopter, rarely first out of the gate with new tech, but you don't have to be a tech person to be curious about AI. So I teamed up with Anthropic to try Claude. I'm building a real Budget for fashion neurosis. It includes paying people, planning seasons and not guessing cash flow. I opened Claude dropped in last year's costs and sponsor forecasts and asked it to help me think. Not right for me. It turned my chaos into a zero based plan with clear buckets, production, post and marketing. It modeled best and worst case revenue. It helped me build a monthly checklist for invoices, payroll renewals plus 10% rainy day reserve. It even flagged sneaky line items like platform fees and insurance. And if you want to see what it can do for you, you can try Claude for free at Claud AI fashionneurosis. Miles Davis is someone you cite often. And the way I love the way he dressed. Even his Brooks Brothers phase was so hardcore.
- [50:29]
B
Hardcore, that's the thing. Iconoclast, you know, was a.
- [50:33]
A
Is there a look of his that you particularly.
- [50:37]
B
I'm attracted. Like, it depends on what look, what you mean by look? Like, like, like I would try to immolate or like. Or just like, oh, I like them in the 70s. Yeah, I think the 70s is interesting because I mean the Brooks Brothers period is cool as hell when you see it. It's undeniably elegant, but in some ways it's, it's perhaps you know, a bit more conformist, let's say, you know, it's like I'm going to be more elegant than you are, you know, your shit. So it's badass. But it's still conformist. Where yeah, I do think in the 70s you started to see. Cause like, you know, there's even the evolution in terms of like the sort of nomenclature around like the progress of black people. Like, so you go from like something like black power, you know, in the 60s to black consciousness in the 70s. And I don't know what's beyond that. I like to say black being is beyond black consciousness. But in the 70s you really start to see the fruits of people. Like I can remember as a kid, you know, six, seven years old, said, you know, black is beautiful. Or even with James Brown. I can remember like the record say it Loud on Black. And I'm proud even as a six or seven year old you just like, you knew that was like, that was radical. It was a radical articulation in a popular sphere, you know. But I hear the same way that I hear like, you know, God save the Queen, you know, from the sex pills. It's the same kind of thing. Or Fuck the Police from nwa, you know, it's the same thing. It's like, it's like the magic part, it's the part of conjuring, you know, when you assert something that's interdicted or something that is taboo, how it cracks space. It remakes the world. Just articulating it, singing out loud. Remakes the world.
- [52:50]
A
Yeah. And so, yeah, because you walked away from the art world for a while.
- [52:56]
B
And, well, like, slithered away.
- [52:59]
A
But when you returned in 2016 with a piece called Love Is the Message, the message is death, you said, I didn't choose the art world, it chose me. And I wondered why you thought that it suddenly got you and chose you.
- [53:16]
B
Well, it's like now I fold back up into my own, like, particular narrativizing and rhetoric around it. But I mean, I just said that in response to the idea that somehow it was some intention on my part, which it wasn't, is the furthest thing from my mind. It never even occurred to me that a video, per se, could be entree into the art world, you know. Yeah. And I wasn't thinking about it as art when I, quote, unquote, made it. And even, you know, even though I've told the story of like putting, you know, making it, let's say in two hours, people say, oh, you edited in two hours. I say editing sounds way more intentional than just I strung some shit together. You know what I mean? Yeah, I symboled it, assembled it. Like if you had Lego blocks and you put them together, you wouldn't say you edited the Lego blocks or, you know, you just, you know. It was more intuitive than that. Compulsive. Yeah, it was a linear or sequential compilation of things, you know. And for whatever reason, you know, I started off putting, you know, just stringing together like, footage of black people being murdered and stuff. And then it was like, eh, I may want to counter that, you know what I mean? But it was much more intuitive than like, I'm trying to compose something, you know. And then, you know, I made it. And then I was sort of confronted by what I had made, so to speak, and I was like, wow, this is kind of intense. And I shared it with Chris Mitchell, who was actually editing a job that we were working on at the time. I sort of just had done it on the side because I got bored with what was happening with that job, you know, and. And so I showed it to Chris first and said, fuck, man, that's kind of fucking intense. And that was like a Friday. And then that Saturday, Kanye was on Saturday Night Live and he performed Ultra Light Beam. And that Monday I just laid the music down on top of it. It was totally kind of, you know, random, honestly.
- [55:47]
A
Amazing.
- [55:48]
B
God.
- [55:49]
A
I mean.
- [55:49]
B
And, you know, and then there was a whole history of how it got saw seen. But, you know, my friends, I just wanted to put it on YouTube, honestly. And my friends were all saying, don't put it on YouTube. I was like, don't put it on. It's like, I guess they saw something. Yeah, yeah, in it that I didn't even see. I just wanted to share it with people, honestly. And I've told us a thousand times, a good friend of mine, Khalil, took it to Art Basel where he'd been invited to show his. He directed Lemonade, so. Oh, yeah, he was invited to show his cut, which is a little bit different from what came out. And he had a copy of it and he just showed it before his thing. And my dealer, Gavin Brown, saw it and, you know, was struck by it and tracked me down and, you know, two weeks, three weeks later, it was being shown in this gallery. And.
- [56:45]
A
Wow.
- [56:46]
B
And then I was like, back in the art world. It's like back in, you know, back in Oz or something. I was like, I thought I walked away from this place, didn't I click my shoes and go back home away from this place? And there I was again. So, you know, and unlike in the past, I was older, maybe more desperate. You know, there's certainly more black people, more people of color in the art world than previously. And there was something, you know, like 15, 16, 17 years earlier that had just worn on me greatly, poisoned it, you know, it many ways for me. So, like I said, I found myself back in the art world and because.
- [57:42]
A
I was reading something about you and the title was Beauty Through Horror, and in your work you show these disturbing images of, in this very matter of fact way, people on the edge of extreme violence. And you don't direct people how to feel when they see this. And how did you learn the value of not being sentimental?
- [58:08]
B
Well, in a way that's not that different from what I said before when I said, you know, seeing things for what they are, not how we wish them to be. And so I always feel like a big part of what I'm doing is making apparent.
- [58:28]
A
Yeah, Yeah.
- [58:29]
B
I have a pretty wild imagination, so I have definitely imagined some things that are pretty horrible, but I don't necessarily think they outrun horror that actually exists.
- [58:44]
A
No, I totally agree.
- [58:47]
B
And it's something about being in an environment where people tell you, like if people tell you, or the society itself would lead one to Believe that you are somehow less attractive. And then the attractiveness here is just a metaphor for being or a mark of being less legitimate, you know, less civilized, less human, less worthy of accolade, less worthy of opportunity. You know, beauty is just a stand in for that. So if you're told that you're somehow less beautiful and you have to develop a strategy or a modality that allows you to understand yourselves, that beauty, even though it may be in opposition to what society is telling you at large, one of the almost side effects of consequences of that superpower. Right. Is to be able to see beauty in almost any. Anywhere.
- [59:48]
A
Yeah.
- [59:49]
B
And even under there or in the most horrific of circumstances, you can still find beauty or humor or life or, you know, like, it's like one of the craziest things I had ever heard. And it's very dark. About as black a human as you could have, but person say, thank God for slavery or there wouldn't be no jazz, you know, or something like that. I mean, it's so weird because it's so distorted, you know, it's like the distortion of it is part of why it's mesmerizing as a notion. You know, I mean, I thought about this for years, like, how come everybody loves black music when clearly everybody doesn't love black people.
- [60:42]
A
Yeah.
- [60:43]
B
You know, even the Nazis like black music. Everybody likes black music. You know, And I think one of. One of the. So it's more like a conjecture than anything, because who could say it in the day? But one of the reasons, I think, is because, like I like to say, black folks are like the canary in the mineshaft, you know? You know what I mean? A western civilization. So all the maladies and horrors and defamations of it, we experience them first and more intensely. But ultimately everybody's gonna come down here with us.
- [61:23]
A
Yeah.
- [61:24]
B
And one of the things that black people have demonstrated, not even necessarily intentionally, is that despite all of that, there is life. There's not just surviving, there's thriving. It's like black people refuse to be emblems of abjection. If anything, we're emblems of resistant life force.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [61:49]
B
And that's what you hear in the music. So I think the music, even for those like the tech bros who, you know, want to bring into existence AIs that will negate human beings, like death wish shit, but they even like black music, you know, because it kind of is like it's counter to their death wishes, you know?
- [62:11]
A
Yeah. In your interview for the New York Times style magazine in 2019. You, you wear dark lipstick and eyeliner in the portrait and it looks really good. And I wondered why you wore makeup for that photograph.
- [62:28]
B
I don't think I had any eyeliner on. I did lipstick. That's my natural eyelashes, you know. I don't know. I mean, I wear it quite often. Really? Yeah, definitely.
- [62:40]
A
I mean, you know, it was the only way. Because when I Google you, that's the first image that comes up.
- [62:48]
B
I mean, most times when I'm wearing it, I'm not necessarily being photographed, you know, per se. I don't know. I associate that with more like Mick jagger. That's the 70s for me. Yeah, I mean, not like boys, more like Jagger. Yes, than anything. It was a little heavy, you know, I should have looked in the mirror, maybe in the New York Times thing, but, you know, I don't know.
- [63:15]
A
It's great.
- [63:16]
B
It's an age thing.
- [63:17]
A
Fantastic.
- [63:19]
B
Yeah. I like also think of like the Maasai, the Fulani, sorry, it's African tribe, Fulani. And all the men have dark. I remember when I first started going to Africa, I had this idea that I was going to get my lipsticks, my lips tattooed.
- [63:39]
A
Tattooed, right.
- [63:40]
B
You know, and somebody. I remember the woman who used to give me my shots, she was like, don't do that. But then I read something that said when they do that, they have to tie up your mouth because your lips could drop.
- [63:57]
A
Oh, goodness.
- [63:58]
B
And then that sort of disabused me. I said, yeah, maybe I'll just stick the lipstick.
- [64:03]
A
Yeah.
- [64:03]
B
You know, But I like the idea of having my lips tattooed or something. Kind of badass about it, you know? Yeah, but I. I just never kind of, you know, got around to it, I guess.
- [64:17]
A
And if you fancy someone and don't like something they're wearing, does it kill your attraction?
- [64:25]
B
That's a funny question. Kinda. Kinda, maybe. Kinda. But by the same token, and I had a girlfriend once, she got upset with me. She was. Well, she was upset with me and she. She just got in her mind that I was gonna like, get with somebody else or she started talking about models in Hollywood and all this. And I was just like, what is. I mean, it just didn't have anything to do with reality, you know. And then she said something like, when I look in your books, I don't see anyone who looks like me. And I was like, huh? And I was kind of like, well, in my books, like, everything is, by the very nature of it, objectified. You know, I think Michelangelo's sculpture is quite beautiful, but I don't have sex with it. You know what I mean? Like, so the whole idea of like what I find beautiful, you know, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily equate that with who I want to be with. I mean, I mean, the thing about it, that's actually one of the more fascinating things when I became sexual kind of late, actually early 20s, I mean, late relative to everybody else around me at least, is the discrepancy between who you're attracted to, like optically.
- [66:05]
A
Yeah.
- [66:05]
B
Versus who you actually get on with sexually, you know?
- [66:10]
A
Yeah.
- [66:11]
B
Like when it, when it, when it dawned on me that they weren't the same thing, that somebody you thought was super attractive, super beautiful and you're attracted to them, then you have had just no vibe with them sexually or somebody who you didn't even necessarily think was that attractive, but you had a vibe with them sexually. It's, you know, it's interesting.
- [66:33]
A
Yeah.
- [66:34]
B
This relationship between what shit looks like and what shit is, you know. Yeah. It's like one of my first big, like, confrontations with something that's been. Become fairly central, you know, I've sort of narrated it before, but fairly central in my life in terms of thinking about beauty. And not just beauty, but beauty, horror, ugliness. The whole thing is this notion of discrepancy, which obviously I knew what the word was, you know, from early on, but. And like I said, I've narrated this before, but once my friend Cary came to town when I was living. He was in Chicago then and I lived in New York. And if he would come to town, we would offer to have dinner. And we were having dinner and I had been thinking about this whole photography versus painting thing. And I just asked him properly, I just said, hey, what's the difference between photography and painting? Without hesitation he said, discrepancy.
- [67:38]
A
I don't understand that because I read, I saw you talking about that and, and I was gonna ask you what does that mean?
- [67:47]
B
Well, that means like in a photograph, you point a camera and you get a thing that relatively speaking, is a one to one relationship between what you're seeing and what you get. Like an image. Like there's an image and then there's a physical like, manifestation of image. That's the picture. Right. So you get a picture that has, like I say, relatively a direct correlation, one could say a mechanical correlation between what you saw and what you got as a picture. Whereas in the painting you don't get that. Yeah, you know, you don't get that. And as soon as photography came into being In a sense, it traumatized painting and it pushed painting to do more what only it could do, which is to lean into discrepancy. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously I'm looking here at this Francis Bacon reproduction, and your dad's paintings and drawings are all over your space, so, you know, nobody would confuse those with reality. You know, they're more like, like, they're more like what a thing is like than just what a thing looks like. It's just coming through the, the register of the visual, you know?
- [69:07]
A
Yeah, I, I, I understand now, but.
- [69:12]
B
The whole thing between the disjunction or discrepancy between who looked the best and who fucked the best or who you got on with the best was startling. You know, when I first realized it, like, wow.
- [69:29]
A
Yeah, it's a good thing to know as well.
- [69:33]
B
Yeah. And I remember saying to that girlfriend, I was like, well, that would make me quite a shallow person if I only got with people who I thought were pretty or something. I mean, not that you want to be with somebody that you think is unattractive, but even pretty and attractive and ugly and unattractive are not the same. Same thing. No person could be quite ugly and very attractive.
- [70:00]
A
Yeah, I completely agree. You know, so, weirdly so.
- [70:04]
B
I mean, like, even with Peter Townson, like, when people ask me about Peter Townsend, like, one of the things I find I found utterly fascinating about him as I start to read is when he says something like, he always thought he was ugly growing up. And, and like, to me, like, in many ways, he's the most, I mean, I could just say beautiful rock star ever, but I could also just say he's the most interesting looking rock star ever. The great rock stars, they're interesting looking, but they aren't necessarily handsome, per se. I mean, Robert Plant. Does anybody consider Rob Flynn handsome? Even peak Rod Flynn sexy, maybe, yeah. But handsome, not so sure. Like, I think James Brown is the most Olympian musical figure of the 20th century.
- [71:07]
A
Yeah.
- [71:07]
B
And part of that is not just musical, it's just also what he looks like. He just looks incredible. He's got, he's probably the only person I think looks more incredible than Miles Davis. And that kind of leaning into a look that's so uncompromised, so unmixed. So I'm not into the purity thing so much, but so uncut. Like in a time in which you're dealing with one of the great paradoxes and discrepancies of Western civilization, which is, like I said, everybody loves the music, but nobody loves the People like, one of the things that's incredible about Miles Davis is how African he looks. He doesn't even really look African, honestly. It's how black he looks, you know, how un. Miscegenated he looks. You know, and the same thing with James Brown, who, if anything, looks sort of black and Native American. Actually, he looks like Geronimo. Actually.
- [72:20]
A
He's incredible. I saw him when I was 19. He's amazing.
- [72:25]
B
Truly amazing. I mean, musically, like, you know, I'm obsessed with Miles Davis, but James Brown is the greatest. James Brown generated Michael Jackson. He generated Prince. I mean, look, Miles Davis listened to James Brown. I don't know if James Brown listened to Miles Davis. I don't know if Miles Davis had much impact on what James Brown did, but James Brown certainly had an impact on what Miles Davis did.
- [72:55]
A
Wow.
- [72:56]
B
You know.
- [72:56]
A
Yeah.
- [72:57]
B
And it's hard to think of, like, he was one of the great R B artists, you know, made some of the greatest R and B songs ever. And then he totally reinvented this shit.
- [73:08]
A
Yeah.
- [73:08]
B
And created, you know, what we term funk or whatever. It's just, you know, even, like, with Cold Sweat, you know, like that song. If you read about it, they just said. Even the jazz guys were scratching their heads. They were like, on paper, this shit should not work. You know what I mean? Like, technically, everything they knew about harmony and all these things, it should not work. But it works. I used to always say, like, people ask, this time, you play into music. You obsessed with music, you play music. Nothing. Like, my brothers got all the musical talent, you know, they could tap out rhythms and all this kind of stuff from when we were young. Mean nothing, you know, But I used to say, if I could sing a little, I wouldn't be fucking with none of this other shit, man. I would have been like the black David Bowie or something. Like, I would use plastic surgery to make myself darker than Miles Davis. Like, can you imagine Michael Jackson at Miles Davis's complexion?
- [74:12]
A
But you've done some great covers for fashion and art magazines, and I. You look great in photos and.
- [74:20]
B
You mean photos of me?
- [74:22]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [74:23]
B
I was like, photos?
- [74:25]
A
No, no.
- [74:26]
B
I was thinking, like, the rage on the COVID of Ide.
- [74:32]
A
Fantastic man is your ultimate goal. And.
- [74:35]
B
Yeah, that's. That is true.
- [74:37]
A
Yeah.
- [74:37]
B
You should actually ran into the. One of the editors. That Fantastic man is. That's.
- [74:42]
A
That Gert Yonkers.
- [74:44]
B
I don't know what his name was. It was a black guy. This is a black. Yeah, this was a black guy.
- [74:50]
A
Okay. Gert is a White guy.
- [74:53]
B
Yeah. He was like, I'm a fantastic man. I was like, oh, one of my great ambitions.
- [74:59]
A
And whose fashion do you like and wear?
- [75:02]
B
What do you mean by like?
- [75:04]
A
Like designers that I mean, like there.
- [75:07]
B
Are people I like, but I think it's incredible. But I would never wear it.
- [75:11]
A
Uh huh.
- [75:12]
B
It doesn't. That doesn't necessarily even necessarily seem to be the point, you know, whether you can wear it or not. I mean there's a lot of stuff that's just amazing to look at and think about. You know, I like. You know, I like a lot of people. I tend to like things more than I do. Somebody has to be really, really great for me to say I like what they do. I do like what Demna does at Balenciaga. I think I thought what he did at Vetermonts was a great, you know, and I do like quite a bit of. Quite a bit of what he did. And it's funny to think about it in hindsight now, but what he did at Balen Saga. But I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't ultimately like what he does at Gucci more because that silhouette is beautiful, like sculpturally and everything. But you know, you know, I'm not like a real thin model. It's like Heidi, you know, Ellie Slimond or something incredible. But I could never wear it, you know what I mean? My favorite design is like from a purely artistic vantage. Margiela.
- [76:23]
A
Yeah.
- [76:24]
B
Love Ralph SIMMONS, you know, Ms. Prada is incredible. There's no doubt about it. The movie, like I used to always say, I wish I could wear her womenswear.
- [76:36]
A
Yeah.
- [76:37]
B
I have this friend, incredible artist named Manson Morales. He works under the name of Blueprint online and he is a don like a king in this whole second Life, you know, it's an online. Oh really virtual like reality that people live in and wow. But he does. He started off doing like clothes like. So if Balenciaga came out with a new spring, summer, like within a week, everything that was available in that new collection would be available online for people's avatars to wear. That's how it started. But then eventually he does. He would it kind of be like the Balenciaga collection as it was. And then in addition would be like the Emperor's empty improvisation or the, the harmonic distortion like Jimi Hendrix feedback of that collection. So like go beyond what the collection was and then people, you know, there's the online economy of people wearing and you know, wearing, you know, high end fashion and stuff. But eventually what he got into was actually making the avatars the bodies. And so you can see who. Who people think are hot, like, so as opposed to this idea that black people just want to look white. You know what I mean? When you go online, you can see that's not the case because the avatars that people pick are based on, like, Teyana Taylor, LeBron James is by Iman Shoupert. You can kind of see Nicki Minaj. You can see who the templates are, you know, and everybody gets to look like what they want to look like. And it's really kind of incredible when you see it, you know, but that's where we're going. Like that thing that's just virtual now. It's not gonna be just virtual within 100 years. It's gonna be. I mean, if human beings are still around, you know what I mean? If we haven't been put in zoos by AIs and stuff, but people gonna be able to look like what they want to look like, you know?
- [78:51]
A
Well, thank you so much, Arthur, for coming on Fashion Neurosis. I'm a different person from listening to you. It's just been so interesting.
- [79:03]
B
But have I been sufficiently neurotic enough?
- [79:07]
A
I don't know if I'm the right person to judge, but you clearly got an amazing mind that never stops questioning and pulling things apart and forming them. And it's just totally a privilege to listen to you. Thank you.
- [79:25]
B
Well, I've enjoy my time on the couch. So.
- [79:47]
A
Today'S show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every conversation we have reveals something unexpected about fashion identity and culture. If today's discussion left you with questions you can't shake about someone's fashion influence, a cultural moment, or why certain pieces feel so charged with meaning, Claude can be that thinking partner who helps you follow those threads wherever they lead. Try Claude for free@claude aifashionneurosis.