Vice Style

There are approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States and yet hardly anyone is attending to the fashion needs of the prison-industrial complex! To remedy this injustice, we asked Bert Burykill, our recently-paroled penitentiary correspondent, to give us some inmate style tips. If you’re reading this in jail, take heed lest you become a human fifi towel.

The brilliant thing about internet art is that it’s democratized. I mean, how many people have ever had the chance to spin Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel until it became an interactive website? Thanks, Rafaël Rozendaal. Now Sterling Crispin‘s new curated t-shirt line, which launched this Monday, is taking the internet art out of the machine and into our closets. But unlike the free-for-all accessibility of net art, the collection features six original designs—from some of the internet’s most esteemed artists—capped at just 10 pieces each.

“I wanted to provide a common platform for contemporary artists to experiment with and make physical what would otherwise be a digital form,” said Crispin via Facebook this week. “It’s exciting to watch the ways digital art can be translated into physical forms and I think clothing is a fresh and fun take on limited edition prints. Designing clothes, or industrial objects, is something I think a lot of artists think about and I could see the need for this sort of platform for experimentation to exist.”

There’s technically no theme to this debut collection, though each shirt reflects a “post-internet sensibility”. Crispin says all the artists were given free range to create whatever they wanted. Rozendaal’s shirt, for example, was inspired by one of his websites, intotime.com.

Are they physically connected to the internet? Only by concept and style, says Crispin. “I think they act as hyperlinks in physical space to emerging concepts that artists are addressing on the internet.”

Here’s my critical take on this fascinating debut line...

Andy Capper, VICE's global editor in chief, recently co-directed A$AP Rocky's new music video for "Wassup"—an ode to Harlem, 40s, OG Kush, and gold teeth—which is premiering on VICE today. To celebrate that, and partly to revel in how fucking amazing the Harlem rapper and his A$AP Mob are, here are some choice things that nearly made us give up following established fashion magazines and blogs, in lieu of just taking all our style inspiration solely from a 23-year-old perma-stoned MC.     

OK, so most of the time when someone's social status rests solely on the vaguely pleasing pictures on the internet, it tends to make me want to eviscerate them. I definitely don't buy into their lifestyle or some other dumb shit marketing people pretend to think we want. Really we just have to suffer pointless It-Girls and bloggers DJing at parties because, thanks to the their spurious media profile, the marketing guy is now able to convince his boss that the only sexually attractive young person he can afford to have endorse their brand has a following.

Thing is, Japanese model and meme Eriko Nakao is different. For a start, she's so hot she causes me to ask myself if my desire to lick her all over makes me a breeder. She's a big deal in Japan and has legions of fans. She does this amazing make-up trick of painting red around her eyes that sort of makes her look upset and vulnerable and makes you empathize with her soul.

Collage by Monika Mogi.

Being 19, Vice Style contributor Anna Ryon gets to spend a substantial amount of her time on various bits of the internet, where other teens girls and female students spend a lot of time, which is useful when you're a guy who doesn't. Anna recently mailed in her observation that the internet zines and blogs that girls are looking to for style pointers right now, seem to be focused on a mix of ultra-girly aesthetics and a sort of vague feminist consciousness. It's less angry and hairy than it is determined to enjoy being a girl in a way that revolves around something other than 'getting the red carpet/catwalk look'. Though the hairy armpits are back. Listed below are some of the girls and sites she's talking about.

I’ve been surrounded by enough athletic people—i.e., my entire family—to know that Under Armour is “the brand” of choice for professional sports teams, jocks, and anyone remotely into jogging, but the proposition that Under Armour may be the go-to fashion brand for the crusaders of the internet? Now, that just doesn’t make sense.

For some reason back in the mid-90s, looking like you might be about to climb up a mountain at any second became a nightclubbing look. It became so super-fashion, and I mean the sort of fashion so many people take up it invades the entire culture and the whole of society eventually ends up wearing coats designed to keep you warm at 10,000ft along with fleeces, technical backpacks, over-specified walking boots... you probably remember this. Indeed, some people are still under the delusion that this constitutes a passable look, well it is again but not for them. After everyone went walking boot mad, the return of Berghaus jackets to the height of fashion always looked as inevitable as dying or something.

G-star RAW recently teamed up with Vice Style for their fourth collaborative film to celebrate G-Star's ongoing relationship with Gemma Arterton, as she fronts the brand's womenswear for a second season. In this installment, Kim Taylor-Bennett flies out to Berlin to meet the actress at G-star's Bread & Butter show and chats to her on G-Star's RAW Ferry 01—a tricked-out boat that looks more plush than anywhere any of the Vice Style staff live.

In this new series we get different contributors to name the movies which have most influenced their wardrobe choices. Rockwell is Vice UK's underground metal fiend, Vice Style production guy, serious collector of Nike footwear, Speedo fan, and viking lookalike.

In the 80s, Nick Knight made his name with a book called Skinheads and shot era-defining fashion editorials for i-D. In the 90s he did the same thing for Dazed & Confused, shooting amputee Aimee Mullins in high fashion for an issue edited by Alexander McQueen.