The British lads behind cult label Long Clothing and the resurrection of street wear brand Boy London landed on our monsoon-ridden shores last week. We had the rare opportunity to catch up with Rhys Dawney and Gareth Emmett to talk style and music.
The gifted duo has recently collaborated with OWSLA – a US record label founded by Skrillex. As part of their visit, Rhys and Gareth also hit the decks at Canvas and served up their rendition of UK-flavoured house music.
Nookmag (N): 2014 is coming to an end. Where you see Boy London and Long Clothing heading towards in the coming year?
Rhys Dawney (R): I’d like Long to become more established as a proper fashion brand, to have a more extensive collection and up our game in terms of products.
Gareth Emmett (G): The first couple of years when we re-launched Boy, we put in so much effort into the brand and we placed less of our attention in Long.
R: We kinda neglected Long a little bit. So we need to push things forward in terms of products and establish both brands. We want to have everything – bags, accessories…
N: What is the ethos of Long Clothing?
G: We basically design stuff that we like.
R: I’d rather people attach their own message or meaning to our clothing, rather than us dictating what the message is about.
G: I think one of the reasons our brand crosses so many different movements and worn by so many different people is because there isn’t one message. We’re universal.
N: Who are you itching to collaborate with?
R: We’d like to collaborate with brands on hats, rucksack, watch… We’re just about to launch a Boy and Baby G collaboration. We wanted to do Playboy collab before Joyrich snuck in there – so that was kind of annoying.
I’d like to do a range with a major celebrity, like a Boy collab with Rihanna. It’ll be cool if she helps design the range.
G: For Long, I quite like the fact that the collaborations we did were with underground artists. I think that’s really cool.
R: I always think that whatever collaboration we want to do, we got to do it with the best brands or people in the field. But as a rule at the moment as Gareth said, we normally do collaborations with smaller or underground brands and artists. It’ll be nice to get big names under our belt.
N: Let’s talk about shoes. What are your favourite silhouettes and labels?
R: What I’m wearing now – Nike Air Max TN shoes. These are really big in the UK, I’m not sure about the rest of the world.
G: They are always quite hard to get though. Not the most popular but definitely cool.
R: Do you know what I like about these? It seems like H.R Giger designed a pair of trainers, especially the black one. They’ve got a weird kind of organic alien vibe to them, growing on the shoe or something.
N: You mentioned in other interviews that Boy London is a way of life. How do we live and breathe Boy?
R: It’s an attitude. It’s how you wear it and you got to wear it with confidence. You’ve got to be brave to wear it.
N: Tell us more about Long’s music collaboration with OWSLA.
R: We got randomly contacted via email by the OWSLA guys. They were like, “Sonny (“Skrillex” Moore) is a big fan of your brand. He’d really like to talk to you guys.” We were like…
G: Who the hell is Sonny? (laughs)
R: I was in Sri Lanka and I got a phone call from Gareth saying that we got an email and apparently Skrillex was a big fan of Long and he wanted to do something with us. I was like, “Cool.” The next time we heard from the OWSLA guys after I got back, they asked us if we wanted to Skype. We had just gotten back from a night out and we were really drunk.
The next thing – Skrillex was at our house. It was so weird. He invited us to his recording studio, which was right by where we live. He played his new album in the recording studio and we talked about doing a collab. And a month after that, we were hanging out in LA and flying to Tokyo with him. It all went by really fast – kinda out of nowhere.
We actually struck up a real friendship with the guys at OWSLA. They’re actually really nice guys and we had a lot in common.
N: Describe the sounds of your DJ set.
R: We got a real UK flavour to our sets. We play a lot house, UK garage, and we chuck in a bit of UK funky. Sometimes, we inject some old school dupstep, sometimes hip hop.
G: We also try to tailor the music to what the crowd wants to hear.
R: You don’t really know what the crowd wants until you get to somewhere, and find out what people are going to respond to. You’ve got to keep your integrity and stick to your sounds to a certain degree. At the time you can’t be too selfish.
N: The fashion scene is rather volatile now. What challenges do you face and how do you stay on top of your game?
R: One of the challenges that we’re facing is trying to elevate our brand, and drift away from the monochrome theme. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon of the style that we helped to pioneer. And now the challenge is to get away from that a little bit before it gets too overplayed. And it’s already massive challenge to create a brand that people like, and to keep the brand’s aesthetic while making changes without compromising too much identity. Also, keeping our sanity in general.
G: Staying focused. We’re doing too much.
N: Which current trends catch your fancy?
R: You know what, I feel like it’s in a transitional period at the moment like the next sort of big wave hasn’t come yet. We’re at this weird point where anything can happen. I hate the idea of trends. I like clothing and style but I’m not really into trends or fashion.
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