Style icon Glenn O'Brien is an old-school New Yorker who hung out with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Lee Quinones and Fab Five Freddy. Needless to say, he's got racks on racks of street cred. So what does a perennial cool guy like O'Brien have in common with a young, popular rapper like Tyler, The Creator?
Well, as this GQ interview shows, it's a love of Supreme. The magazine sat down with the two of them and discussed the brand's cross-cultural, cross-generational appeal. Here are some of our favorite excerpts:
How Glenn O'Brien discovered Supreme:
"Supreme is in my neighborhood in New York, so I'd walk by it all the time. I'd see 150 guys standing in line and figured out that's when they'd have some kind of new sneaker or something in there. I didn't want to be the old guy walking into Supreme, but then I was walking by one day and they were showing Glenn O'Brien's TV Party from the '80s on this big bank of TVs and I thought, 'Jeez, I guess I can go in there now.'"
What Tyler, The Creator likes about the brand:
"Visual aesthetic is important to me. I take video directing and designing album art and shit like that very serious, and they do, too. So that's one thing I like from them, the way they design certain things — not too much, not too little."
Glenn O'Brien on Supreme's cross-cultural appeal:
"I don't pay any attention to skateboard fashion or anything like that, but they work with artists who I respect and a lot of my friends have done stuff with them, and I think that's great. They have interests that I can relate to."
Tyler, The Creator's favorite Supreme collaboration:
"There's a lot of artists I didn't know about that I learned about from them. My favorite collaboration they did was with Sean Cliver. He has decks with black dudes in KKK suits, a white kid with a Hitler mustache dressed as a pimp, stuff with John Wayne Gacy—just cool decks. I like his art a lot, and I didn't know about him until I seen that shit. That was back in '07, I believe."Read the full interview at GQ. [GQ]
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