A Look Inside a Normal Day for Union Los Angeles' Chris Gibbs

See what life is like for one of the most powerful people in streetwear.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

What's a day in the life like for today's most powerful people in streetwear? Are they traveling all the time? Where do they go? Do they always attend cool parties? In a recent interview done by Freunden von Freunden, we peek at the life of well-known streetwear personality, Chris Gibbs of Union L.A., and his life seems quite normal. The German-based interview magazine spent a day with the boutique’s head honcho to discuss everything from family, the office, to the impact of the Japanese on the streetwear scene. Below are a couple excerpts from the interview. Visit the Freunden von Freunden website to read the rest. 

FvF: In addition to basketball, and hanging out in your yard, where do you, your wife, and the kids like to go on weekends?
CB: Our weekends are like another job for us. At any given point in time we will wake up early and rush the kids to basketball, football, soccer, art classes or acting classes. If we are lucky there is only one play date or birthday party to go to after that. On occasion, we will drive up to Mammoth for a weekend and go skiing with our close family friends. Good times had by all! Otherwise, what’s really great about LA is the weather. We go to the beach or this secret park we meet our friends at, all year round. We are still kinda of young parents so we will force the kids to go to art openings with us quite a bit too. But really we spend most of our time at the house, just chilling. 

Can you tell me more about the impact of the Japanese market in streetwear fashion?
As a natural progression from doing trade with the Japanese, and as the genre of streetwear blew up and became very commercial, Union had to figure out where it fitted into the game. As a very small boutique, we couldn’t compete with the major stores, so we started buying the Japanese iteration of the streetwear. They would buy it from us, take it, make it something different, and then do their own thing with it. We started buying back the Japanese brands, and what they did in particular, is they took the clothes and made them of a higher quality.

[Freunden von Freundenvia Hypebeast]

Latest in Style