In this episode our Style Editor John Zientek and Deputy Editor Jack Seemer join Nick to discuss streetwear, art, and how LA streetwear brand Brain Dead utilizes collaborations to give back to the wider community. John spoke with the founder of Braindead, Kyle Ng, for Issue Sixteen of Gear Patrol Magazine, and discusses streetwear culture in general, and why Brain Dead is so unique among its peers.
Kyle Ng of Brain Dead has a philosophy about collaborations: that they should be vehicles for positive change.
Links:
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Why Did the Best Female Rock Climber in the World Team up with a Streetwear Brand?
Introducing Gear Patrol Magazine: Issue Sixteen, The Summer Preview
Virgil Abloh-Designed Furniture and 7 More Home and Design Releases
You’ve Never Seen Carpenter Pants Like These
A Directory of Brands and Retailers That Have Spoken Out Against Racism
Episode Navigation:
Nick Caruso:
This is the Gear Patrol Podcast.
Nick Caruso:
In this episode, our style editor, John Zientek, and deputy editor, Jack Seemer, join me to discuss streetwear, art, and how LA streetwear brand Brain Dead utilizes collaborations to give back to the wider community. John spoke with the founder of Brain Dead, Kyle Ng, for Issue 16 of Gear Patrol Magazine, and discusses streetwear culture in general, but why Brain Dead is so unique among its peers. Also, you may notice a few short audio hiccups in this episode. Sorry about that. I'm Nick Caruso and I'm glad you're here. Let's get started.
Nick Caruso:
So our chat today needs just a shade of context to get started. I want to make sure that folks understand your relationships to the story we're going to be talking about, just to put everything into perspective. So Jack, you are our deputy editor at Gear Patrol, meaning you oversee the editorial direction on the website and in the print magazine. And John, you're an editor at Gear Patrol and you conducted an interview with a man named Kyle Ng and authored a story about it in the latest issue of Gear Patrol Magazine. So that's the crux of today's story. Jack. You've had a hand in it. John, you made it. So John, why don't you start us off? Can you tell us who is Kyle Ng and what is Brain Dead, just kind of generally?
John Zientek:
Yeah. So Kyle Ng is a designer, urban designer, who lives in Los Angeles and he co-founded a brand named Brain Dead with a guy named Ed Davis. And the two of them have really shaped what streetwear and collab culture and really modern men's wear for that reason is in the last half decade. Kyle's kind of a fascinating guy, and we can get into that a little later, but he's a West Coaster, born and bred, grew up actually in Berkeley and then moved to LA for school. So he's repping the better one of the coasts.
Nick Caruso:
If you insist. And then so Brain Dead is the brand they founded together and they do much more than just streetwear.
John Zientek:
Yeah. So if you're going to any online retailer, you're looking for things, this isn't a tailored clothing business where it would fall under the what's known as the streetwear category. But as you said, their collaborations range from clothing and shoes and sneakers, which are much hyped and quickly sold out to tables, pasta, coffee, homewares, grooming products. But they would be called a streetwear brand, yes.
Nick Caruso:
And they also run a cinema too. Right?
John Zientek:
This is so cool. So everything's shutting down during the pandemic, right?
Nick Caruso:
Yes.
John Zientek:
Brain dead opens up an independent cinema over on Fairfax in Los Angeles. A goal of this is to kind of show Indian art house films, create weird merch around it, a one of a kind stuff, sell it, that stuff. As everything else was closing, Kyle and his team were opening basically what is the first of hopefully numerous concepts around this indie theater clothing hybrid shop. They sell food as well there and the food is just as cool and sought after as the clothing.
Nick Caruso:
What you pursued with this interview and the story is the philosophy, specifically Kyle's philosophy behind collaborations. That's what we're talking about everybody when we say collabs. We're talking about collaborations between Brain Dead and generally other brands. John, how do we define streetwear? It's sort of a nebulous entity, I think, for a lot of people who aren't steeped in the culture already.
John Zientek:
Yeah. So streetwear is a term that's very, as you said, it's a loose term to describe a type of casual clothing, but it's a little more complicated than that. The term streetwear pulls off of, it's the opposite, the antithesis of office wear or business wear, right? So it's what you would not wear to an office when there were dress codes, back when that was the thing.
Nick Caruso:
And offices.
John Zientek:
And offices. When there were dress codes, what were the things that would be against that? Sneakers, jeans, sweatshirts, hoodies, T-shirts, things in that category. But a lot of that was then also associated with coming from the street, which then started to draw upon black culture a lot. So the root is streetwear really does come out of black culture and what was happening in cities in the eighties, nineties. But the term streetwear is also a little controversial. The designer, Virgil Abloh has called it out essentially as just being a loose term to define black culture or clothing around that, just as Tyler, the Creator did with the Grammy's urban category for rap, hip hop, R&B music.
John Zientek:
It is a wide ranging category, which now defines casual clothing, graphic inspired. One of the big things about streetwear is there's a large following from young people. There are limited edition drops, there are new releases. These things sell out very quickly. There's a lot of excitement around it. It plays into pop culture a lot as well, just as there's the hype of the celebrity and things like that, these products are elevated to almost that same level.
Nick Caruso:
Thanks, John. Yeah, that's a nice deep dive, brief deep dive. Jack, how do you deem John's description there?
Jack Seemer:
Yeah. I don't follow the streetwear nearly as much as John. I think that in our Slack channels, we get a bird's eye view of things that are happening out there. One of the things that just always takes me with streetwear is just the pace of it. It just feels very, very quick. I think compared to other traditional seasonal fashion drops, I don't know how you feel about it, John. It just seems like with Instagram culture, with just the internet, things are just happening all the time, right? Every day there's a new moment.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. There's a ton of energy. Right? And it does play off that zeitgeisty outside the mainstream, but just never stops. It's a current there. John?
John Zientek:
Yeah. Streetwear, it's the antithesis of traditional fashion models, right? So traditional fashion, you had releases for fall, winter, spring, summer there'd be runway shows if it were bigger brands. That's expanded into holiday and resort collections as well. But there are very codified seasons for new collections and whatnot. But streetwear, it's young, it's punk, it's not trying to conform to those things. So instead of dropping whole collections, it's single releases. Instead of doing it and planned drops for calendars, it's whenever they would like to do it. Sometimes you hear about these things overnight, and this is how brands like Supreme became so popular.
John Zientek:
How would they get lines through Soho to buy their products out is because there became a culture of waiting for the next release. It was like this big dopamine hit when a new single product would come out or group of products and people would snap them up and they'd be gone, and that would be it.
Nick Caruso:
Right.
John Zientek:
You'd have to wait for the next one.
Nick Caruso:
It sort of makes this doubles back on itself and makes its own culture, even as it's responding to culture. Because if you're waiting for that next drop, you are part of a community who's also doing that. And I've always thought that that kind of liveliness and attention is really impressive and unique to this category.
John Zientek:
Yeah. People familiar with the category will talk about drop culture, which speaks to that engagement. And people who are a part of this community who relate to the brand who are, wouldn't say fanatical, but the brand is part of who they associate themselves with, it's part of their identity, which is something that these big fashion brands have lost in recent years is the means to connect with people on that much deeper level.
Nick Caruso:
Right. When you were saying that they drop stuff whenever they want, I was thinking, there's no way they could have a catalog, like the catalogs that brands still insist on sending to my house that are in my entryway. And it's like, there could almost not be a more removed way to communicate your brand than some crappy, throw away pamphlet that they just toss on the floor inside our mail room.
John Zientek:
It's archaic and some people now have a nostalgia for that, but that's what it is, it's a thing of the past. So now it's Instagram, it's TikTok, it's all done on your phone and it's all done really fast.
Nick Caruso:
What you focused on, John, with this interview with Kyle is his relationship with, and his philosophy about collaborations within that category.
John Zientek:
Correct.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. And so we cover collaborations all the time, watches, cars, tech. Can you both check me on this definition? Generally in the fashion world, at least, collaborations are when a brand or a design house or someone notable for their aesthetic, works with another brand, one who is often very established, to design and produce special edition clothing, so to speak. Is that fair?
John Zientek:
Yes and no. The term collaboration is two entities coming together, right? So in the fashion world, that's two brands, that's a designer, two designers, that could be a brand and a celebrity. And then the range of products that fit within this collaboration mold has really taken on new meaning in recent years or new depths of range, I guess. On the deepest dive that you just alluded to, that's a whole new product where teams come together and they find the best of both brands and solve a new problem and create a new product that is additive to the market.
John Zientek:
On the very surface level of a collaboration, it's slapping a logo on a product or changing a color scheme to something, which you'll see in many other areas of the product world. And this is something where you'll see retailers and fashion doing it a lot more. The thing that's so hyped right now in retail are exclusives, and these are their special term for a collab, it's essentially just a different color way.
Nick Caruso:
Right.
John Zientek:
So you can go to the Mr. Porter's, Essence and Huckleberry, et cetera, and you'll see these things that are deemed collaborations. And they're not new products, it's just a color way that you can only shop at that retailer. Is it solving a new problem? No. Is it a little different than what other people have? Yeah, sure.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. So that raises a really interesting question that I have for you Jack. From an editorial curation standpoint, when would a collaboration be newsworthy? Is there a threshold? Is there something that signifies that this is finally worth covering?
Jack Seemer:
Yeah. I don't think that there's a standard. I think every collaboration tries to be unique. Right? I think as much as we want to bucket collaborations, we should really evaluate them relative to what they're trying to achieve and what they're doing. One of the things that's always just really difficult, I think, not just as an editor, but just a consumer, is just the transparency into what went into that collaboration, right? Like we were just talking about, some collaborations that maybe were more shallow than others. Others feel very hands-on where you have a designer coming into a fashion brand. Even something like Uniqlo, that does a lot of collaborations.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Jack Seemer:
And you can tell that there was a heavy hand there, from the guest, I guess that came in. I think there's a lot of variables that go into making something newsworthy or notable. I think, as an editor, you're your first responsibility is to ask is this going to be of interest to the reader or to our reader. And the brands involved probably will do most of the answering. But obviously, if the collaboration itself has goals around beyond just making profit, which I think is something that is relevant to this story here and Brain Dead, is that a lot of the collaborations aren't primarily motivated by pure profit.
Nick Caruso:
So Jack, you alluded to this, like a deeper meaning behind some collabs. Like we've said, a lot of streetwear is hypebeasts hunting for the latest drop. But a lot of it does seem to be universally connected to a deeper philosophy and maybe a deeper awareness. So John, the subhead for your story is how Brain Dead's Kyle Ng has embraced the collaboration as a means to build community. And inside the piece, you talk about him using collaborations for positive change. Can you explain Kyle's collab philosophy?
John Zientek:
Yeah. I think that to understand the way Kyle started to approach what he's done with Brain Dead, just have to look at what he did before Brain Dead. He went from Berkeley where he grew up, went to high school, attended punk shows, his dad liked mountain climbing, stuff like that, rock climbing. But when he went to school, he went to LA for film school and he realized that film and much of art is a collaboration. This myth of the artist or the designer as getting the word of God spoken to them and they create a beautiful design or a film or a piece of music or something like that is such a, I don't know, a myth that we've created in society where we like to place these people on pedestals. And that really these creative works that are out there are really the work of many people coming together.
John Zientek:
So when he started Brain Dead, it really started as this collaboration, not just with him and Ed, co-founders of this company, but he was working at Urban Outfitters before he started Brain Dead working, pulling together collaborations for Urban Outfitters, bringing people in that could do different things. And as he started Brain Dead, he reached out to those people again and had them create designs for him, for some of Brain Dead's first shirts. His first experience launching the brand was at Nepenthes in New York, in the garment district. He created a range of custom skateboards for this cool Japanese, New York based brand.
John Zientek:
Within the first few months, this company, and so the company itself Brain Dead, is built on this foundation of collaboration. And so as the company has grown through the years, Kyle's really started to hone in on what these products can do and what they should do. And he's gotten to a point where he believes that these collabs can give back, and giving back being a very wide term. They can give back in terms of profits that they generate, they can give back in terms of supporting culture, and they can also then support other artists, designers, brands, communities, those types of things, raising awareness, and just bringing them into the greater Brain Dead community and space that has been generated from this hype around the brand.
Nick Caruso:
It's such an impressive, admirable business model. So this is a good opportunity to take a quick ad break, but when we come back, let's really drill down into Kyle's specific philosophy about how he conducts Brain Dead and his approach to collaborations.
Nick Caruso:
There's a quote in here that I love, says "Collaboration and commerce and ethics all work hand in hand, because it's all about community and about creating relationships and putting this mycelium network together of knowledge and ideas and people." That to me, is just a really beautiful way to describe what you were just describing as art, right? He's making art with these collaborations. Jack, when John pitched this to you, what did you think? What made you say yes to this story?
Jack Seemer:
There are a couple of things that just stood out immediately. I think one of the things that we really try to do in print as much as possible is bridge the various beats and verticals that we cover at Gear Patrol, right? We cover a lot of things. We cover watches, we cover door products, we cover cars, bourbon, et cetera. And I think that if you can find stories that bridge those things, you're going to create a memorable moment for the reader. And I think that the Gear Patrol Magazine reader is unique compared to a lot of the readers that we have online, because they're discovering the content in a completely different way. I think that that was one thing that really stuck out, as John has alluded to, Brain Dead, isn't really a style brand, right? They maybe come from that background and it can be categorized as a streetwear or style brand, but they're doing rock climbing collections, they're making home products, they're putting unique decals on Nalgene bottles. I've been trying to buy a Brain Dead Nalgene bottle for a year and I always miss out on them.
Nick Caruso:
John, you should've hooked him up when you were talking to Kyle.
John Zientek:
I don't have the hookup, dude. I've been trying to get it for years too.
Jack Seemer:
I think that was the thing that was really immediately attractive about the story is that it touched on a lot of what we do holistically as a editorial company. And I think it bridged that gap a lot. We've talked about some things already that I think also made the story pretty attractive. And I think it's that I don't think Brain Dead an abrasive brand, but I think streetwear can be antithetical to sort of mainstream status quo. And I think that as a brand that prioritizes collaborations, they're adding to the culture, right? They're very additive and creating this venue for a consumer to buy things that isn't just transactional, right? There's a sense of discovery there where you're buying a product and you're learning about something. And I think that was something that really stood out about the story as well.
Nick Caruso:
The other element, I think, that's also, I know something Gear Patrol has been exploring more and more is the effect of brands on society and how they fit in, whether that's economically or culturally, who they're supporting, why they're supporting, how. And I wanted to refer to a few of specific collaborations that John, you highlighted in the story, that really outline what Brain Dead can do. The first is a T-shirt from last year, June, 2020. It was a collaboration with a musician Dev Hynes and raised about a half million dollars for the movement for black lives and the LGBTQ Freedom Fund. He worked with climber, Ashima Shiraishi, on a shoe and supported organizations working to get marginalized people climbing. And then also, like you alluded to earlier, you said pasta, but also made vegan burgers with LA Burgerlords and proceeds went to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Stop AAPI Hate.
Nick Caruso:
So the activism aspect has to be just one of the biggest drivers behind how these collaborations come together for Brain Dead. But is that true? Is that how he seeks out partners?
John Zientek:
So I think that what you're getting at really touches on this really interesting philosophy that Kyle's approaching. Here in the US, people consume. We're in a capitalist society, the world, Western world, whole world, we're all about consuming. Whether it's Netflix, whether it's food, whether it's clothing, whether it's the media on our phones, this podcast, we are always consuming and people get very cynical about that consumption. When you start to think about it and resources it uses and how it's this constant cycle of buying and something new and something new and something new. But instead of getting too cynical about that late stage capitalism, Kyle has found a way to use the necessity people have for consuming to give back, to build, to do new things.
John Zientek:
So if people do have that hype around new drops, then why can't that hype be used to raise a lot of money for an organization that needs it? Why can't it be used to support underprivileged communities? Why can't it be used to support diets or ways of life that are better for the planet? He's really used this drop culture and hypebeast culture to just flip the system, the capitalist system, on its head and not make huge profits from some of these collabs, but instead really, really give back.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Sort of make it work for us. It's not totally a Robin Hood situation, but it's just using the machine in a different, more effective way, I guess.
John Zientek:
Yeah. You rage against the machine or you can just figure out how to make the machine work for you.
Nick Caruso:
Replace some parts. He alluded to a hypothetical situation where if he's selling a T-shirt, a special T-shirt, he can pop a cassette tape in there. And I think he was basically saying if there's some up and coming artist, something really special happening, we can introduce our customers to those new aspects of culture. So it's like a cultural exploration too, not just give back to the community. It's also just broaden the community, which I find really interesting.
John Zientek:
Yeah. So the big thing is about growing a deeper community and building a richer culture. So one of the things that many up and coming streetwear brands seem to miss out on is the cultural context where a lot of these things are so popular or so interesting. How brands like Supreme, in its early days, got so hyped, how Brain Dead has continued to see success. And they're more interested in slapping logos on T-shirts. But Kyle's found a way to realize that the success of a brand, a streetwear brand, is really built on the success of a community and a culture and all those things that play into this greater lifestyle. So if you support the culture that nurtured you, the community will continue to thrive.
Nick Caruso:
Jack, I want to pick your brain about that angle in terms of general products. And of course, John, I don't mean to shut you out. This is a question we ask all the time and many people ask all the time. How much responsibility does a brand have to convey a message or to give back or enrich a community versus just churning out products?
Jack Seemer:
Yeah. I think it's a hard question to answer universally. I think that the responsibility is growing quite a bit though. I think that the responsibility ties into to their consumers, right? And I think consumers are getting more demanding than ever with the values and ethics of the brand. I do think every brand has a unique responsibility.
Nick Caruso:
John, do you have any favorite moments from the conversation you had with Kyle that maybe he didn't make it into the final edit?
John Zientek:
Oh yeah. Kyle is such a fun guy to talk to because he's thinking about these things. He's like playing 4D chess or something like that, where he's thinking at it from so many angles, but he's not being preachy about these things. He's not necessarily being too serious about them either. He's doing what he believes in and the product collabs he's creating are things he's all interested in, the things that he and other people in the brand are interested in. And so he was talking about this T-shirt he did with, with Dev Hynes, Blood Orange, the BLM protests were happening last summer. And he was seeing all of this start to go on and in Los Angeles where he lived and he really felt this need to be able to take a stand and to support this, some other people.
John Zientek:
And he reached out to bigger companies and they said, "Hey, we've got a ship to sail, man. We can't just turn around and do this." So he texted Dev and said, "Hey man, you want to do this?" The next day they had a shirt, put it up on Instagram and I think they did a presale or something like that. And within a week, it raised and a half million dollars. And that's more than all of these other brands with huge budgets and huge reaches, Brain Dead's still a small brand. And so it just speaks to the fact that it's like, here he is, a small brand, able to raise much more to help support something that needed that support in that moment.
Nick Caruso:
It's like an authentic altruism. He's just doing it because he thinks that's how it should work.
John Zientek:
Yeah. People talk about virtue signaling, people talk about all that. Those are buzzy words about how brands were behaving last year, and this year as well. This is an example of just acting how you believe you should act. There wasn't any marketing around it. It wasn't, I didn't get any press releases about this. If you do the right thing, you can still have a profitable brand. And here's the thing, he did all that, he didn't go out of his way to push it in the press to do anything else, he's doing these other great collabs. And because that happened, support for his brand has gone through the roof. And it's not because of that, it's because, as Jack said, the consumer right now, people who are buying products, are voting with their money. And when they see a brand that is also aligning with what they're doing, that's making a cool product, they see another brand that's making a cool product and isn't aligning with what they're doing, then I think the choice is pretty clear.
Nick Caruso:
I know there's a lot more that we could just keep pulling the thread on. I've taken up a lot of your time already. Thank you both. Listeners, anything we did talk about, links to the magazine, if you've made it this far, probably heard an ad for the mag as well, but we're really proud of it. It's full of stories that are as rich and timely as John's and a lot of stuff that's really serviceable and fun. But thank you all for listening today.
Nick Caruso:
If you are listening still and you listen to episodes a lot, we'd really appreciate you giving us a little five star review. Just check those five stars, one, two, three, four, five. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That helps more people get in on the conversation and hear more epps of the pod, pod epps. And if you have any questions or comments, you can just email me at podcast@gearpatrol.com. So John and Jack, thanks for taking the time today.
Jack Seemer:
Thank you.
John Zientek:
Thank you, Nick. A real pleasure.
Nick Caruso:
Thanks everybody for listening. And until next time, take care.