HBA’s Shayne Oliver on the pornography of fashion

Hood By Air makes fashion: XXX, deep-throated, hardcore, penetrative fashion. It’s a genre-specific, boundary-pushing fetish that gets people off. It’s possibly the one show of New York Fashion Week that editors flock to for satisfaction, shock value, and trauma. Being an industry of insecure, needy bottoms, we require that sort of attention. Shayne Oliver knows this, and he’s simultaneously amused and bored by the dynamic. The fetishisation of Hood By Air is something that weighed heavily on the designer’s mind when erecting his SS17 ‘Handkerchief’ collection. 

“When I came back to New York from Europe, I realised that people view Hood By Air the same way porn is being viewed,” Oliver tells me, 24 hours after his new collection slid down the runway, mercilessly, in two-faced witch boots. “It’s this thing that happens in fashion where, ooh! We watch it, but we don’t want to acknowledge that in public. HBA has become a fetish in more ways than one. It’s become a fashion fetish. You see it, you view it, and we’ve become one of the top-reviewed fashion shows to watch, which is what everyone does with porn. It’s similar to the way that someone like Robert Mapplethorpe placed his inspiration within sex... it’s a form of sex work. I relate to Mapplethorpe when he first began. Everyone was like, ooh, this is cool, and he was selling a lot of his work, but it wasn’t considered art for a long time. It was viewed as an amateur idea. It took years for Raf Simons, with an all-white cast, to put a black penis on a shirt. Think of the way S&M is used by designers. I love what Europeans have created for themselves in fashion, but when it comes to them referencing us, they backhandedly slap us.” 

“(HBA) has become a fashion fetish. You see it, you view it, and we’ve become one of the top-reviewed fashion shows to watch, which is what everyone does with porn” – Shayne Oliver

2017 marks the tenth anniversary of Hood By Air, and it feels like a premium opportunity to look back at what Oliver and his team have achieved in terms of bringing a truly conceptual bent to a deadeningly commercial American fashion industry. Long misunderstood before he was praised, Oliver is now reacting to his acclaim with a degree of sexual humiliation. It turns out fashion might have been a club Oliver never wanted or needed to join. In turn, Hood By Air’s relationship to the press has become sado-masochistic. 

“American fashion isn’t allowed to become historically fashion,” Oliver says. “Fashion history exists in Europe... it doesn’t exist here. Everything in America is considered pop culture. HBA is becoming a company like Hustler or PornHub.” (HBA collaborated with both brands this season, licensing Hustler’s logo and curating a new channel with PornHub which debuts today.) “People are getting their kicks because of how lustful it feels, and how important sex is to everyone, but no-one wants to talk about it. The language used on porn sites is very interesting, and the way people sell stuff is beginning to feel like that. You’re using your instincts and selling people their own instincts back to them. Human nature is very sexual, and the way you view fashion is how you want to view porn. Click click, you’re done. You’re moving on with your day.”

In the moments leading up to the HBA show, the sound of blowjobs filled Moynihan Station at a rate and volume so dogged that the noises became abstract. Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Whoopi Goldberg, who starred in Ghost, laughed hysterically, even before an army of lubricated models confronted her with bodybags, leather duffels on leashes, tethered piss boots, and exposed breasts. Continuing its lineage of exalting artists who’ve violated sexual limits in their work, like last season’s runway star Slava Mogutin, the brand sent Susanne Oberbreck (No Bra) and Wolfgang Tillmans down the catwalk in states of undress. With looks that featured HBA’s signature zippers, violent slashes, and variations on packaging, the looks were aggressive, fraternal, possessive, and fetishised – straddling the line of business and pleasure, as Oliver and his friends have always done. It was masturbatory. It was practical. It felt economic. Working with PornHub and Hustler – HBA took the sexual provocation everyone came for, bundled it, and force-fed it to them raw. 

To parse and interpret Hood By Air’s radical silhouettes and forms feels akin to decoding sexual signals in real life: primal, simple, but confounding at the same time. It’s something Oliver feels has been overlooked in decade one of HBA. “Coming off introducing Rihanna at the VMAs in that look, that makes sense with the brand, as opposed to constantly making new shapes and silhouettes and not being appreciated for that. People only talk about the t-shirts, or that the men are in heels, and that’s not actually the point. I don’t know if I’m being bratty right now, but I don’t feel the need for HBA to push things that I genuinely care about in a fashion history context. I’m sort of embracing the pop cultural side of the brand and being okay with that. I’m more comfortable with playing around now, whereas before, I was trying to push. I need to let HBA thrive and do what it does best. To be honest, I really want to start to move away from expressing myself as a designer. With HBA, I want to make more cultural statements. When it comes to fashion, I want to think of ways that I can explore that outside of the brand.”

“I relate to Mapplethorpe when he first began. Everyone was like, ooh, this is cool, and he was selling a lot of his work, but it wasn’t considered art for a long time. It was viewed as an amateur idea” – Shayne Oliver

If Hood By Air is too commercial an outlet for Oliver, one can only fantasise about what form his truly conceptual fashion might take flight in down the line. This is, after all, a brand that began with mutant t-shirts, which in turn spawned a thousand two-headed children, including the much-instagrammed double-toed boot that debuted this season. (“It had to do with reflection,” Oliver said. “Reflecting where I’m at, where I’ve been and it also looked really good. It looked as evil as we needed it to look. It was obviously a demonic shoe and we needed to show this.”)

The designer’s nostalgia for his naive 2007 beginnings manifested itself likewise in a Starter collaboration which revived the popular REALNESS vertical graphic from 2008, which can also be thought of as a message – along with WENCH, Oliver’s forthcoming music project with friend and collaborator Arca – that helps hanky-code the politics of one of New York’s most treasured artistic projects of this teenaged century. “If people only knew how insane the clothes were back in the day," Oliver says. “The collections have actually calmed down. Before, it was like, how do I even get into this thing? I’ve done a lot in HBA like that and it goes unseen and gets swept under the rug because I’m an American designer, or I’m young, or HBA is street-based, yadda yadda yadda. I don’t know how many more years I can teach people about what I’m doing.” 

If Oliver sounds fatigued, fear not: HBA has enough stimulation to power PornHub (or Vogue Runway) into another decade of fashion fetishisation, it’s just that the keywords will change. “This season was all about a concept and making that concept as clear as possible,” Oliver says. “That’s where the focus of the brand is going and what it’s about... these graphic statements. I’m using the brand in a fetishised way. I want to have HBA breathe a little bit, and not have people talk about its trajectory. HBA is a corporate interface for me and people I know to put mindframes and conversations on the runway. It’s very hard sometimes to decipher that. It’s about statements.”

Message received.