looking post

Tight fashion by the Oakland-based design duo, 5733.   A combo of sweatshop-free materials, solvent-free inks, fresh designs and a model who really knows how to stare down her camera guy…. it appeals to both one’s vanity and uh, conscience.

Plus this interview kinda just makes me wanna hang out with the designers.  The highlights:

Hyphen: Tell me briefly what your line is all about, how you got started, and what you think makes you stand out from the rest of the streetwear scene.

5733: We’re just a little company doin what we feel like. That’s the main ingredient. If we don’t feel like doin something we don’t. If we have some goofy idea we like, we do it. This is supposed to be fun. I assure you there are no demographic charts at the studio. That’s what keeps it all genuine. Occasionally we do something that sucks, but we take great pride in the fact that it “genuinely” sucks. This all happened by accident. We were just playin around screen printing stuff for our friends. We knew some of the guys at Hieroglyphics in Oakland and they had a screen printing set up in their warehouse, from there, everything just escalated.

Actually there is no “streetwear” scene, this is a common misconception. See a long time ago there were people doin things, being creative, having fun, wearing clothes, expressing themselves, you know, living. Then another group of people with smart phones and BMW’s needed a word to describe what the first group of people were doin to marketing execs and investors. So they came up with the term “Streetwear” to describe a plethora of creative and often incongruous styles that they didn’t know anything about.

Your designs are part political statement, part street art. What inspires your designs?

Life, NPR, Cinema, all the information that floats around out there. Ideas about achievement, society, perception and such. Some things just stick, they stay with us. We carry them around. The things that stick are what make us who we are. We’re just expressing who we are. We all write our own histories. Through emphasis and omission we create our identities. This is just us, being us. That said I think we also have a definite agenda, but that would be a long and tedious explanation.

What about the various Asian allusions? What’s up with that? May I ask also about the seemingly LGBT thread also hinted at in your work?

I can answer both really simply. We live in the Bay Area. Lots of Asians, lots of LGBT, lots of LGBT ASIANS. To that end I think we reflect what’s around us.

Why did you decide to sponsor Mr. Hyphen this year? In your opinion, who makes a good Mr. Hyphen?

Mr. Hyphen should have an air of confidence and a certain understated sophistication. He should be a man who can hold his own, intellectually, in any forum and at the same time know how to throw back a few at the neighborhood dive. Mostly though, the decision should be contingent on the size of his penis.

You can check out the rest of the interview at the Hyphen blog.