BORN TO BE BLUE exclusively for thecontributingeditor.com PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID ROEMER FAHION EDITOR: MATTHEW EDELSTEIN
FASHION CREDITS:
SPREAD 1: Valentino peacoat and zip jacket. Acne jeans. Vintage boots throughout from What Comes Around Goes Around
SPREAD 2: LEFT: Burberry trench coat and sweater. Acne long-sleeve t-shirt and jeans. RIGHT: Yves Saint Laurent shirt. Z Zegna hat.
SPREAD 3: LEFT: Marc by Marc Jacobs cardigan, shirt and pants. Woolrich Woolen Mills hooded shirt. RIGHT: Penfield jacket. Converse by John Varvatos shawl collar sweater. Acne jeans.
SPREAD 4: LEFT: Polo by Ralph Lauren sweater, shirt and jeans. Acne coat. RIGHT: Shades of Greige sweater. Prada sweater. Acne jeans.
SPREAD 5: LEFT: Woolrich Woolen Mills shirt. Z Zegna hat RIGHT: Norsea Industries jacket. Z Zegna zip jacket, sweater and pants.
SPREAD 6: LEFT: Woolrich Woolen Mills shirt and pant. Z Zegna hat. RIGHT: Osklen shirt jacket and t-shirt. Acne jeans.
SPREAD 7: LEFT: Phillip Lim jacket, shirt and pants. Z Zegna hat. RIGHT: Maison Martin Margiela trench coat, Norsea Industries shirt. Osklen jeans.
SET DESIGN: Jim Gratson at Creative Exchange Agency. GROOMING: Samantha Trinh using NARS at Atelier Management. FASHION ASSISTANT: Victoria Cameron. MODEL: Noah Mills at Wilhelmina
Bushwick artist Nikita Shoshensky looks to John Wayne to save the contemporary art scene. Dash Snow need not apply.
“First off, the museum is a failing institution,” confides Nikita Shoshensky. “It’s been failing.” Shoshensky, an artist with a still new degree from Cooper Union, sounds almost happy to be hailing the end of an institution instrumental to his craft. “The Whitney Biennial was horrible,” he says cheerfully. “I don’t care about other people’s fantasies.”
At 24, Shoshensky, who has a lithe frame and an impressive mass of black curls, possesses the cynicism of a much older man, or if not cynicism – Shoshensky seems quite pleased with his life – the ability to recognize bullshit from a mile, at least, away. His take on the much-lauded New Museum, recently dropped smack in the middle of the Bowery?
“I have no issue with what’s in it, per se,” he begins diplomatically. “It’s what it says with what’s in it.” Diplomacy ends. “[It’s a] dogmatic, unemotional, and falsely rigorous assessment of the city and creative practice.” Or, in layman’s terms: “Bad ideas done badly.” Ouch. So who is Shoshensky – an art school grad with a few group shows under his belt – to talk about the establishment like this? In celebrity-driven art world terms, nobody. Which is just fine with him.
Born in Moscow, Shoshensky and his family left Russia and headed for the Bronx when the Soviet Union collapsed. Shoshensky was nine, and his English consisted of the basics: “cat, bat, hat,” he recalls. Partial credit is due to the New York Public School system for preparing him for the phrases and words like “archeology of violence,” “methodology,” and “numerati” that crop up in his speech now, but it’s clear Shoshenksy is a quick study. After graduating from Cooper last spring he moved to Bushwick where he lives and works in one of those great, big, carved-into loft spaces that make Manhattan real estate seem like such a joke. “It’s a funny place to grow up,” Shoshensky says of Russia, where trying Coca-Cola for the first time qualified as an event. “Places like that don’t exist anymore. You can go to maybe Cuba or North Korea to get a sense of that space.” Despite having been back to Russia several times, Shoshensky’s sense of national identity is as loose as his artistic opinions are fixed. “I don’t feel Russian because I spent most of my life here [in the US],” he says. “But I don’t feel American. I have no nationality.”
While Shoshensky may eschew his American identity, he is happy to embrace the country’s cultural artifacts. After completing a series of paintings based on Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow Gang, his latest project takes on Westerns in general. He has logged countless hours in front of his computer capturing stills from Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, and The Wild Bunch, watching upwards of four films a day. The result is a series of delicate and impressively done pen and ink sketches of heroes and sidekicks. John Wayne fills the page with his chaps and swagger; only his face is missing. “I decontextualized them by taking away their one recognizable feature, which is their portrait,” Shoshensky explains. “And I sized them down and put them into this isolated space.”
Villains get the star treatment in Shoshensky’s work. The medium changes from ink to acrylic and the canvasses increase in size. “I’m doing basically an encyclopedic cataloguing of all the tertiary villains from Westerns,” he says, less interested in the primary evildoers than those reckoned as disposable plot devices. “At the peak of their bravado or confidence they’re sacrificed for this construct of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood,” Shoshensky says of his subjects, drawing a parallel between their deaths and the deaths of Iraqis in the current war, offered up for the sake of American ideals. “I’m trying to engage the archeology of violence in our culture,” he explains. “This work is about cinema as a gateway to dissecting that history.”
While the war in Iraq was an obvious jumping off point for the project, Shoshensky would prefer not to classify himself as a political artist. “I despise political art,” Shoshensky says with his trademark conviction. “I think it’s preachy and oversimplifies issues.” His view of an artist’s job is slightly more nuanced. “I never want to smack someone over the head with ideas,” he says. “My job is to program the genetics. If somebody is interested in discovering them they can look at the work and find out more because I put it there.”
This might sound like a lot of big talk – bluster from a cocky gunslinger – but Shoshensky’s work is assured, technically sound, and intelligent. Chalk it up to his work ethic, which sees him painting or drawing until ten or eleven o’clock at night. “It’s a stoic workaholic life,” he acknowledges. “It’s not like I get a couple of prostitutes to come in here and…” He trails off, grinning.
The call girl lifestyle runs counter to Shoshensky’s idea of what an artist should be. “If you want good art you’re not going to get it out of Dash Snow or Dan Coleman, you’re going to get bullshit.” (Not that we’re saying these two particular artists pay to get laid, it’s just that they’ve been known to party.) “There’s a lot of thinking that has to happen,” Shoshensky says of his process. “It’s your job as a thinker to present a question.”
Luckily, Shoshensky’s girlfriend, Alexa Adams – who makes up half of the design team behind the Vogue-vetted label Ohne Titel – shares his proclivity for late nights. “She’s doing exactly what she was designed to do,” he says of Adams. As for himself, when it comes to making art he can’t imagine doing anything else with his life, either. “It’s like that or the gutter.”
Shoshensky expects to be finished with the Western series by this spring. He doesn’t know where it will be shown, but based on his projections for the project, it’s bound to be a success. Who knows, if he plays his cards right, maybe he’ll be invited to show at the next Whitney Biennial.
-ALISON BAENEN
To see Nikita’s work, visit his website: www.nikitashoshensky.com.
SPREAD 5: Public School vest. Surface To Air t-shirt. American Apparel thermal
SPREAD 6: TSE jacket. Supreme hat. Superpowerful sweatshirt. Norsea Industries shirt. Levis jeans.
SPREAD 7: LEFT: Staple jacket. Superpowerful cardigan. Theory scarf. Visvim hat. Acne chinos. RIGHT: Maison Martin Margiela jacket. Surface To Air shirt. Gucci cardigan. Levis jeans. Dries Van Noten sneakers.
SPREAD 8: DKNY Jeans blazer. Nike zip jacket. Oliver Spencer hat. Levis jeans.
SPREAD 9: LEFT: Band of Outsiders shirt. RIGHT: Patagonia vest. Corpus knit blazer. HERMÈS SCARF. VISVIM shirt and pants. Aprix shoes.
SPREAD 10: Adam Kimmel trench coat. Maison Martin Margiela sweater
SPREAD 11: LEFT: Patrick Ervell blazer. Shades of Greige shirt. Nike sweatshirt. Dita glasses. RIGHT: A.P.C. shirt. Levis jeans. Model’s own boots
SPREAD 12: Band of Outsiders blazer. Maison Martin Margiela sweater. Unis shirt. Alexander Olch tie. Acne chinos. Common Projects sneakers.
SPREAD 13: THIS SPREAD: Public School jacket. Maison Martin Margiela shirt. Supreme sweatshirt.
Fashion Assistants: Miyako Bellizzi and Arielle Himoff. Models: Parker Bose at Ford. Theo and Marcus Hedbrandh at VNY
MORE ABOUT CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: EUGENE TONG
As market editor of Details, Eugene Tong has honed | his eye and been on the frontline of menswear’s most important trends over the years.
His experience as a fashion assistant at FHM magazine and then as asociate market editor at Cargo magazine have helped him learn the industry and understand the men’s market like few others.
From Canal Street to Place Vendome, Eugene is on a constant search for the best of men’s style.
Juan José Heredia takes on the New York art scene; countdown to model-filled gallery opening starts…now
It’s not always the case that especially good-looking people are jerks. Not always, but often. Often enough that meeting a really, genuinely nice especially good-looking person is noteworthy. And when that genuinely nice especially good-looking person is an unguarded romantic who keeps a vintage briefcase full of love letters in his apartment and says things like: “The idea of love to me is super tragic,” it’s hard not to reevaluate your opinions of especially good-looking people in general. Enter Juan José Heredia.
Born in Mendoza, Argentina, Juan grew up in Miami. A surfer who’s seen swells in Portugal, Mexico, and Morocco, Juan started body boarding when he was 11; now, after moving to New York in 2005, he makes the trek to Rockaway Beach about three times a week. His first surfboard was a gift from a drug dealer – a friend of his older sister’s, Juan explains nonchalantly – but he insists it was a clean exchange. “I didn’t have to do anything,” he reassures, and adds, straight-faced, “I was too young to do any gang-banging at the time.”
Broad-shouldered and tall, with a mouthful of charmingly mismatched teeth, and a forward-falling mop of brown hair that requires constant attention to be kept out of his eyes (They’re hazel. Sigh.), Juan will be more familiar to readers of Vogue, Details, Arena Homme +, and V Magazine for his modeling gigs than for his skill on a short board. But Juan is a surfer first, and a model third. Second, he is an artist.
Juan wears his artistic leanings on his fingernails. They are paint covered, and his pants, ankle-baring ones he’s taken in himself, are specked with stray color. The traditional, embroidered work shirt he wears is from Guatemala and belonged to his mother; worn inside out, only glimpses of thick, hand-sewn red and yellow flowers are visible. Underneath that a girl’s black tank top, run through with silver threads, had also been flipped, creating a subtle impression of shimmer when the shirt hits the light.
Juan’s sartorial miscellany is reflected in his artwork, which is collage-heavy, delicately detailed, abstract, and otherworldly.
“I don’t like to keep things precious,” Juan says of his work. To wit, he’s been known to transport finished canvasses to and from his apartment by bike, folding them up and stuffing them in his backpack. Found objects receive the same anti-reverential treatment (Nylon covers take a particular lashing). His sketchbooks are works of art on their own, swollen with clippings and mementos torn and pasted to the pages, microcosms of a dark interior world.
Juan recently created that world in outsize form. The glass-roofed lounge on the bottom level of Delicatessen, SoHo’s latest see-and-be-seen brunch spot, features a wraparound mural he completed this spring. His eerily charming, distorted figures watch over the banquettes below, sharing billing with menu covers courtesy of Terry Richardson and staff uniforms designed by Charlotte Ronson. “Everything I feel is in there,” Juan says of the space.
Until recently, Juan’s artist-self was unrepresented. His designs could be found on hats and surfboards (he’s one of Volcom’s featured artists, a brand favored by boarders of all terrain), and his canvasses had made a few appearances around Manhattan. Not one to self-promote, Juan was content to work on his own in his Williamsburg apartment, reluctant, he says, to ever seriously consider his art worthy of more attention.
His sister (Maria, of the surfboard deal) thought differently, and it was through her that Juan met his agent, Kate Robinson. Kate, a freelance art advisor who trained her eye at Christie’s, had developed a friendship with Maria, her esthetician at an East Village salon. After several months of knowing each other, Maria broached the topic of her youngest brother’s artistic endeavors to Kate, who, at the time, had no interest in taking on any artists. Juan’s business plan, meanwhile, consisted of giving away his art to friends for free. Cue change of heart: Kate agreed to look at Juan’s work, and was surprised by the potential she saw. “There is something so sincere in what he does,” Kate says of her decision to take on Juan as her sole artist. “It would have been insincere on my part to pass it up.”
Juan’s business-savvy sea change is still in the works. “The potential of someone else seeing the work could fuck with you a little,” he says, admitting that he’s had to learn to “blank out” tributes from Kate. “I don’t believe in compliments,” he says matter-of-factly.
As for the future, well, that’s up to fate. “You know what the path is?” Juan asks when pressed about his artistic ambitions. “Honestly, in a sense, the word ‘path’ I don’t believe in. In life, you constantly experience that when you make plans for things, it has nothing to do with those plans, and dates, and times that you choose. It has so much more to do with fate, energy, life.” Coming from him, this laissez-faire philosophy manages to sound sincere, and not like some kind of hackneyed spiritualism; practicality aside, Juan’s willful naiveté is pretty sweet. “You always have fantasies about doing things,” Juan says, owning up to a few ambitions after all. “If you keep that alive, that’s how you progress.
How did someone so attention-shy end up booking a Ralph Lauren campaign? With reservations. From the beginning, Juan’s been ambivalent about his line of work, legitimate surfboard money aside. For one thing, there were the compliments.
“I didn’t understand that at all,” Juan says of the positive response to his teenage self. “I just didn’t want to hear anything remotely close to that.” At 16, Juan was walking in shows in New York and Milan, but his parent’s recent divorce – an adolescent rite of passage made no less easy by his father’s unexplained, long-term retreat to Argentina – made it hard for him to trust people.
“I’d go to castings and people would say, “You’ve pretty much got the job; all you’ve got to do is this….’ And I just couldn’t do it.” So he quit.
After a three-plus-year break in Miami managing a surf shop, Juan returned to New York and looked up the same agent he’d worked with before. After a shave and a haircut, he was back. “I’m a completely different person now,” he says of his decision to model again. “I like bringing a certain aspect of who I am into anything I do.” While Juan still has an uneasy relationship with his career – “I don’t really like talking about that stuff,” he says of the campaigns he’s booked and publications he’s appeared in. “It’s not an accomplishment in any way.” – the artist in him can’t resist a good collaboration. Take Bruce Weber. The two met through a friend – an assistant who had told the photographer about Juan’s artwork – and Bruce was taken. A Polaroid shoot ensued, and Juan incorporated his drawings into the frames, turning the photos into multimedia artworks. “I don’t often get to communicate with someone like that,” Juan says of working with Bruce. “He’s an artist.”
Which brings us back to the Juan with the paint-covered fingernails. Despite his youthful unhappiness as a first-time model, the proof of Juan’s first few trips to New York is more than a collection of despondent headshots. Cold, away from the ocean in a place he didn’t want to be, the nascent artist in him found something to be inspired by.
“In all that badness, I couldn’t help but look around and see how old things were,” he recalls. “In Miami everything is so polished. If something’s old, they destroy it. I was so blown away by that.” Sketching and drawing – things Juan had done before with a throwaway attitude – acquired new value. “The only way I could convey my feelings without writing them was through figurative images. Expressing the way I felt internally – the way I looked at myself – was what I was drawing.”
Chief likes to think of themselves as a happy dysfunctional family. “Our music is very passionate,” explains Mike Moonves, the youngest member of New York City-based, Los Angeles-raised band. “There is a lot of emotion flying around.” Bandmates Michael Fujikawa, 25, his younger brother Danny, 22, Evan Koga, 25, and Moonves, 20, credit their familial closeness to making their folk/rock and roll/country harmonies sound so unique. “The foundation of playing has always been our friendship,” says the elder Fujikawa. Unlike most rock groups before them, there is no leader in this band. “We are a four headed snake,” says Michael proudly. “Everyone puts in their two cents,” continues Moonves. “…And there are a lot of cents,” adds Koga. Chief credits everyone from The Band to Crosby, Stills and Nash to classical ballads to TV on the Radio as their “conscious influences.” Although as Koga put it, the group is “somewhat afraid of influences.” Michael agrees: “We do not deny the past, but try to look to the future.” In terms of their own history, however, they can’t help but look back. Both Fujikawa’s and Moonves went to the same Los Angeles elementary and high schools. Koga, had known ‘the legend of Michael Fujikawa’ growing up in Los Angeles and they later became friends at New York University.“We bonded over being hooligans,” recalls Koga. “Walking the streets late at night.”
Evan, Danny and Michael have been playing music informally since 2006. Chief got underway when Koga wrote the still crowd-pleasing “Mighty Proud” and “Far Away.” Moonves came to NYU in September of that same year, just as Chief was becoming a true performance band. He “was instantly impressed and amped.” He was asked to play bass at a January 2007 show and came to the first rehearsal knowing all the songs and “he played perfectly,” says Danny, who has known Moonves since he was in kindergarten. As Chief started to gain popularity in early 2008, there was “an unspoken need to get serious,” says Moonves. What began as loft shows in Bushwick, Brooklyn turned into downtown performances in such venues as Fontana’s, Piano’s and The Bowery Ballroom in New York City. This past summer, the band, who are recording their second EP, did a six gig United Kingdom tour including a stop at Hyde Park’s 02 Festival, their biggest show to date. Dysfunction never sounded so good.
SPREAD FOUR: LEFT: MARNI SHIRT TIM HAMILTON SHORTS. MARC JACOBS SHOES. RIGHT: MARC JACOBS SHIRT. SUBVERSIVE BROOCH.
SPREAD FIVE: Left: Yoko Devereaux t-shirt. Polo by Ralph Lauren jeans Right: 3.1 Phillip Lim t-shirt and pants. CLAE shoes
SPREAD SIX: Left: Marc Jacobs vest. 3.1 Phillip Lim shorts. Kris Van Assche shoes Right: Costume National jacket. Kenzo Minami t-shirt
SPREAD SEVEN: Left: Marc Jacobs t-shirt and jeans. Right: Tim Hamilton shirt and shorts. Dior shoes
SPREAD EIGHT: Left: House of Holland t-shirt. Right: Claw Money Honey hooded jacket (worn inside-out). Kris Van Assche pants. Marc Jacobs shoes.
Hair: Ryan Taniguchi using Ted Gibson Make-up: Ralph Siciliano at LBB Artist Management using Temptu Fashion Assistant: George Mccracken Models: Casey Lindberg at Fusion and Adam Trodd at Ford
