Rob Cristofaro on Puma’s ‘Who’s Who’ Book, Collaborating With Louis Vuitton, and Alife’s Future

Rob Cristofaro speaks on creating Puma’s ‘Who’s Who’ book with his new venture Newco Studios, collaborating with Louis Vuitton, the future of Alife, and more.

Whos Who Book by Rob Cristofaro
Puma

Image via Puma

Whos Who Book by Rob Cristofaro

On Zoom, Rob Cristofaro presents a shrink-wrapped white T-shirt bearing a logo that the late Virgil Abloh designed exclusively for him. In bold block letters, the word “ROB” is screenprinted in black and filled in with Louis Vuitton’s iconic monogram. “This is something that Virgil did for my 50th birthday,” says Cristofaro, who doesn’t dwell long on his intimate relationship with Abloh. But those who know, know. Just look carefully at Abloh’s Fall/Winter 2019 menswear presentation, where Cristofaro’s graffiti markings under the names “JEST” and “ROB 1970” appeared as tags on the Lower East Side-inspired catwalk. While Cristofaro is well-recognized as the creative visionary behind Alife, like any legendary graffiti writer, he prefers to stay low-key. 

“I always sat behind the brand name Alife without promoting myself personally. I very rarely would put my name out there at all,” says Cristofaro, shortly after showing Complex a rare work of art he’s planning to release that’s graced with the same JEST graffiti that once covered the highways of the Bronx in the ‘90s. “That’s why I am kind of like, let it [Alife] fizzle for a minute so I can put the focus on myself.”

Cristofaro has been staying busy ever since Alife closed its Rivington Street storefront in 2021. This winter, he collaborated with Louis Vuitton by curating art for a holiday window installation inside the windows of the old Barneys flagship on Madison Avenue in Midtown-Manhattan. His other company, RAB Arts, has consistently been releasing art made by Cristofaro with collaborators such as Blake Kunin and Virgil Abloh. Whether it was designing the pages of Mass Appeal magazine or hosting Alife Session concerts, Cristofaro has always used brands as a vehicle to platform rising creatives. Today, he continues to expand on this approach with the first volume of Who’s Who, a 270-page book published with Puma that serves as a guide to New York City’s creative scene today and will be followed by volumes covering cities like London, Paris, and Tokyo. 

“I didn’t want this to be like a cool guy book, where it’s like all of the usual suspects of people with 100,000 followers,” says Cristofaro. “While there’s elements of that, I wanted this to try to tap into something more unknown. The up-and-comers.”

Housed inside a collectable cardboard box and presented via detachable pages inside a yellow three-ring binder, Who’s Who spotlights 75 New Yorkers selected by Cristofaro’s newest venture Newco Studio Practice—a multidisciplinary design studio. The rapper Wiki, the Chinatown-based jeweler Tommy Jewels, and rising New York streetwear boutiques like Laams are just some of the New Yorkers highlighted within the book.

Complex got a chance to catch up with Cristofaro to learn more about his latest creative ventures. Here he speaks on designing print books with Puma, bringing artists like Clayton Patterson to Louis Vuitton’s stage, and the status of Alife today. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rob Cristofaro Whos Who Newco Studio Puma Interview

As someone who collects old issues of Mass Appeal, it’s cool to see you return to designing print publications within the past two years. This new Who’s Who book is definitely an intriguing way to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Puma and the 50th anniversary of Puma Clydes. Why did you recently launch RAB Arts and Newco Studio Practice to work with print again?

So basically, it’s a segue from Alife since we had to step away from that for a moment. At the beginning of COVID, my old graffiti partner and I created RAB Arts as a platform to create and fund my own artworks and projects.

We didn’t really know what it was going to do other than give me some freedom to start creating things. So we just started dropping products. The first being the box cutter, which goes back to Duchamp-ism because it was a ready-made that I tweaked a tiny bit and then repackaged. So as we were figuring out this RAB Arts stuff, I’d been in conversation with Virgil Abloh at the time and he was into all of these products and offered to be the retailer. So that was the beginning of using Canary Yellow as the original [exclusive] retailer for my stuff. So that was new. 

So I have all this product that I’m just kind of sitting on like the urinal sculpture we just released. So that’s RAB Arts, which is still taking form. But it’s essentially an [independent] platform for artists and producing products with them.

And Newco?

So like when we first started Alife, it was originally a store and then a design studio for clients like Mass Appeal. This is the same shit. It’s just like the separation of RAB Arts. Newco Studios is the design studio and agency where we get approached by brands to execute different things. Puma is our first client and it’s been a year since we started this conversation. Typically, in the corporate world, a company like that will come and say, ‘This is what we’re doing, we want you to create, this, this, and this.’ This was different because, although we listened to what they wanted to do for their anniversary, I made a commitment to myself since COVID that when working with these big brands the goal was to take make the work relevant to my ethos and at the same time giving the brand a product that is no bullshit. A product that speaks truthfully without forcing a brand message and incorporates the community that I am surrounded by.

Puma Whos Who Book Layout Detachable Binder

This book is literally a who’s who of the dopest creatives in New York. It’s not just the OGs. You highlighted rising underground crews like Corpus, designers like Estiee of Cliff, and photographers like Edwin De La Rosa in here. How did you go about curating this roster of talent for this book?

The curation was decided upon from numerous internal meetings within the studio, tapping into the community of people we had relationships with and some that we sought out. There was no real age restriction either; it could be an old-timer like Clayton Patterson or a young kid who hasn’t appeared on the scene yet. I mean, we’ve been doing this type of thing for so long that it comes pretty naturally. It’s all real life. It’s giving people an opportunity because we believe in what they’re outputting.

Knowing your history with Alife, I’m not surprised by how tapped in you are to local New York creatives. Whether it’s Blake Kunin today or Ryan McGinness in the past, you truly have this eye for spotting up-and-coming talents. How do you think you developed this sense or foresight to find great art? You never went to art school right?

I did, but my real training was the graffiti world. That really gave me my design sense, my DNA, my work ethic. You want to become something in the graff game? You better go out every night and fucking do it. A lot of the aesthetics of graffiti are incorporated into design and marketing. It’s all the same to me, branding, design, and communication. So that’s why I still get so excited by all of it because it’s the same rush that I got from graffiti. I know when I see something or someone that I like. Whether it’s from the 1960s or 2023, visually is where it usually begins. 

I’ve worked with a large amount of people, some working from the heart and some for the wrong reasons. The fakers don’t last long in this game. They’ll blow up for a couple of years, are at the top of the world, and then fizzle out. I keep using the word platform, it is about the introduction to my audience, which is a pretty great audience. They’re critical, they’re design-based, and they’re no nonsense. You can either get on the stage and kill it or you can fizzle. It’s just giving people an opportunity. 

Rob Cristofaro for Louis Vuitton LV 200 Window Display Steve Espo Powers

Speaking of curation, this winter you collaborated with Louis Vuitton to give a new twist to New York’s holiday window displays. It’s crazy to see artists like Clayton Patterson and Stephen “ESPO” Powers on Madison Avenue. How did that come together? I’m guessing it started with the LV200 trunk you made, but obviously your relationship with them goes further than that.

That relationship started with Virgil. Even before the LV [‘200 Trunks, 200 Visionaries’ show], Virgil and I would speak about all things creative. We worked together conceptualizing the opening of the [neon green] Louis Vuitton pop-up in the Lower East Side amongst other things. LV’s design studio that created the trunk exhibition at the old Barney’s store was the group we also worked with on that East Village concept. So they were interested to hear what I would bring to the LV200 because of my history working within the creative community in New York.

The people that I tap into are who people are continuously interested in. LV originally wanted me to take over the lower level [of the exhibition] that was dedicated to workshops and lectures within the space. There were a lot of unknowns because this was all happening on the fly. I used this opportunity to involve my studio Newco to problem solve, to put everyone to work under extreme deadlines with extreme deliverables. I treated it as a studio lesson. At the same time, I treated it as my own personal art piece. I came up with an idea from my background in retail. When I collaborated with Jeffrey Deitch and the Bronx Museum, I put up created works that were vitrine-like—placing and arranging product behind glass so you can’t really fuck with it. I took this recurring aesthetic and proposed to create it within the windows of Barney’s rather than the lower level.

Rob Cristofaro Clayton Patterson LV 200 Holiday Window Display

Timing was from Dec. 19–Dec. 31, Christmas, New Year’s. On one hand it was the worst possible time to do anything. But on the other hand, it’s also a great time because there are so many tourists and it’s the windows of Madison Avenue where people are shopping. The inspo was like old school New York, when you went out to see the store windows during Christmas. I haven’t done that since I was a kid and nobody in our community is looking at Christmas windows. 

So I wanted to have one window that was just a curation of people. A lot of them asked if they could just hang their artwork. No, they had to physically be there. They had to conceive something that they could do while they were in that window. For example, [the graffiti writer] King Baby, while researching what he was doing  I saw a piece that was created with garbage and said boom this is it. He’s going to collect garbage, pull up to the window with these garbage bags, dump them out in a pile within the window and start to create. It will be a performance piece. Using ESPO as an example of how he would whitewash these huge walls—looking like he was cleaning the graffiti off the wall but in reality he was building his piece—nobody is going to know what you’re doing until you drop that [spray painted] outline within the last two minutes you’re there. Then, you’re gone. I had King Baby gluing garbage to the wall for three hours and then finishing his piece with an outline that took one minute. Again, it’s about putting people on and making sure that what they do is actually what they enjoy doing. 

Rob Cristofaro Louis Vuitton Window Display

And what about your own window with those 3D printed LV sculptures?

The initial concept was a tweaked out New York souvenir shop that was to sell NYC memorabilia, but because of legal hurdles and such a small amount of time to create, we scrapped that and kept conceptualizing with LV’s creative studio. We came to the decision that it would be best to create my own artworks onsite within the space. I created a variety of objects depicting New York City. The mailbox, taxi cab, Washington Square arch, garbage pail and Lady Liberty, all 3D-printed with LV, an edition of five different pieces, 40 of each.

3D printing has always turned me off and I never fucked with it until I came upon this idea. But when you put Louis Vuitton’s branding on something, even though it’s a plastic 3D-printed object, the limited amount of them and the fact that they are branded makes it something completely different. The concept for all this stuff came from being “Made in New York” because the exhibition space had numerous 3D printers in their workshop space. These editions became what I would use to create my artwork titled “Rob & LV on Pedestal” ©2022. The artwork was the combination of the 3D printed objects placed upon ready-made push carts arranged on a fabricated pedestal to fit within the window, where the “Rob.1970” branding is the cherry on top of the install. This piece is tapping into my love of dioramas that was even present in the old Alife store, where the entrance incorporated this artwork I created of the piranha inside a tank. The creation of dioramas continues to appear within my work. I’m currently building more of these diorama works [of art] for 2023 and beyond.

Obviously, Alife is one of these labels folks reference when they think of streetwear pioneers and Virgil was in sync with the store’s ethos. What do you think of the position of streetwear within luxury in general?

The ability to create goods with Louis Vuitton, or comparable luxury brands, when you started your business from printing a T-shirt is pretty incredible. It is full circle.

But I’m honestly not impressed with much of it. Virgil brought something to the table that was very fresh and kept me interested with his thought process—the usage of their atelier and various production capabilities to bring his concepts to life. There’s so much following in this fashion game that most of it turns me off. It’s a trend bandwagon where one person does something that hits and then every brand follows suit. That goes for not only design but taps into everything. Even retail, there’s nothing to it now. There’s nothing exciting happening. I am going to re-inject myself into this retail conversation shortly. In a way that is not a way yet.

I’m not sour at the game, but I’m not really excited with what’s going on, and I want to be. I don’t think we’re going to experience what we experienced with Virgil. I don’t think anybody really can tap in like that. We experienced an era of pure unfiltered creativity and commerce working together. Thank you, Virgil.

It’s crazy that Louis Vuitton collaborated with KidSuper this season and Colm is also featured in this book you made. What did you think about his collaboration with LV?

I think Colm, what he did, was dope. I feel like most of that came from Louis Vuitton themselves in regards to design. But I think he added elements of his work and personality that are cool. I sat with Colm at the launch of that Louis Vuitton trunk exhibit. He asked me how I became involved with all this stuff at LV, I told him it was Virgil and him being a student and participant of what we did at Alife. Colm is from New York; he knows about what we did as well. But I asked how he got involved and he said he just made his own trunk and sent it to Louis. He acted like he’d been invited, created his own trunk, sent it in, and they accepted it. This was what was dope to me.

That whole train of thought, where somebody that’s not invited is crashing the party. That’s what I like. When he told me that, it leveled up my respect for him. This is somebody young that’s pushing their own agenda and making it happen. LV makes things look great and I thought what they did together was good.

And speaking of collabs, did you happen to pick these Puma collaborations with Laams, Public Housing Skate Team, Tommy Jewels, Russ & Daughters that came out alongside the book as well? Why those four exactly?

We brought Laams, Public Housing, and Tommy Jewels. Bernie from Extra Butter, who’s also in the book, reached out to have Russ & Daughters incorporated into his execution.

Laams because it’s like a retailer that was very similar to how Alife started. Retail first, before the brand. What they’re doing is very similar to what we did and it’s even on the same block in the Lower East Side where we originally started. It’s just so interesting. There’s a community there centered around creating, doing it yourself, and it’s very similar to Alife but with different aesthetics.

Public Housing Skate Team, they never had footwear produced with a manufacturer to that degree. We’d been in touch numerous times in the past and I like how their thinking goes beyond just printing logos on T-shirts. [Their co-founder] Vlad [Gomez] also does photography and makes films on social issues that speak to his Bronx upbringing—Gunhill Road, which was where I used to go and cop weed when I was 15. They’re serious about what they do, and those are the kind of people that I wanna give an opportunity to.

Tommy Jewels, came from Treis Hill, my partner at Newco. He was a part of the list of people that he personally likes. And while there’s tons of jewelers out here (I’ve worked with Greg Yüna for years and he’s still my top man), Tommy represents a younger generation of locals just hustling and doing their thing.

Puma Whos Who Clyde Collaborations Laams Public Housing Skate Team Russ and Daughters

This also happens to be the second book you’ve printed in recent times. Your first one under RAB Arts was Bark At The Moon. Aside from REVS’ Life’s A Mission… Then You’re Dead, Bark At The Moon was honestly one of my favorite graffiti books to come out in years. How did you first connect with Blake Kunin and why did his graffiti photography resonate with you so much?

So my relationship with Blake started from Alife. One of the last projects that I did with Alife was for Timberland. I met Blake through the ‘gram and he was working with writers like REMO plus others I’ve known for a very long time. I saw how serious he was with his photography and that was his craft. But outside of shooting graffiti, he had never worked a professional gig where he made anything off his photos. So I said, here’s the gig. I got Timberland. I need to create marketing. I want to give you my marketing budget, take the boots that I created, put them in the public, and go just document what we do. He went out and gave pairs to graffiti writers like LES and CH. People who are really out in the wild and doing their thing. He just followed them around and documented them. We created a bunch of still photography from that and video. At the time, he was making these graffiti zines on his own.

I saw how he managed this job and he did great. That’s when I see if I could really work with somebody or not. So Timberland was the initial project that put money in his pocket. That was our first experience working together and from there I started looking at his body of work. While I’m 100 percent about the graffiti scene, I I like to be about it in not so “graffiti” ways. Blake’s documenting a time, which is right now, with his photography. It’s a snapshot of the graffiti world that most people, unless you’re involved in the graffiti world, will never see. So that’s important to me as usual. It’s almost like he’s being more of a documentarian, taking pictures like Clayton Patterson, of a specific time happening in New York. 

I knew it wasn’t going to be a money maker and I didn’t realize how big of a project it was going to be because publishing a book has a lot of variables. Printing costs were going up because of COVID, and there were shipping delays. It was a big learning experience but it also allowed me to build the RAB Arts site because it was the first product that we dropped, created marketing around, and my first real project under my own thing.

Lastly, I kind of feel like I need to address the elephant in the room: Alife hasn’t posted on its socials in over a year now. Is the brand officially done now or has it just been on hiatus?

Alife was 20 years of my work. There is a time that you have to entertain partnerships, to grow. Moneywise, we have partnered up with people who didn’t have the same visions for what the brand stood for, so we ended up walking away from the current structure. A larger brand has the Alife IP; we are sitting on the sidelines to see what or where this will go. 

We’re not promoting it, we’re not doing anything. It’s quiet. When things start to pick up with it, the conversation will somehow come back to me and we’ll see where it goes. But yes, that is the apparel arm to anything that I would do. It’s on hiatus currently and I think that’s good because the state of fashion needs revitalization. So until I figure out how to get back into it in a different way, I’m not really putting my energies into that. I have a million other things to figure out.

But that’s a big part of my life’s work. A lot of people were eating off my creativity. I put the brand name first priority and sat without promoting myself personally. This is why I am kind of like, letting it fizzle for a minute so I can put the focus on myself and the creation of new. 

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