This surrealist fashion brand dreams up freakish meme-iverses

Peep the latest Steve Lacy music movies. Entrance and middle is the person himself, goofily bopping round to his slinky guitar riffs as he’s chased by a canine or lifted by a crane into the blue sky. Entrance and middle on the person himself is a barely outsized button-down shirt that appears prefer it was ripped straight off the discount rack at Nordstrom, emblazoned with a giant black “S” on the entrance.

The “S” may stand for the 24-year-old artist’s first title or the greenback signal it makes when worn with a black tie — but it surely may additionally stand for Stylo au Plafond, the upstart Philadelphia-based trend model that styled the shirts for 3 movies selling Lacy’s new report, Gemini Rights. The intense crimson goal on the again of the button-down is unintentionally symbolic. The pair of designers behind Stylo, Matthew Michaud and Kieran Sutton, took their shot when introduced the chance and hit a bullseye.

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“He was our third buyer,” Sutton says. A few weeks later, Lacy and his crew requested them to design shirts for the upcoming music movies, utilizing Useless Kennedys as a reference. Stylo obliged, with Sutton flying out to Los Angeles to personally ship their work.

[Photo via Stylo au Plafond]

It was a fast bounce in publicity for a model based in April. Michaud and Sutton first made shirts for a going away occasion for Philadelphia band Pleasure Once more, finest recognized for the music “Trying Out For You,” who had been embarking on a spring tour. The preliminary T-shirt poked enjoyable at Marc Jacobs’ HEAVEN clothes line by changing the brand with a two-headed hydra of cartoon dads Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson.

Michaud and Sutton now scour native thrift shops for high-quality button-ups, clear and sanitize them and use waterproof material markers to etch their designs. The pair dove headfirst into outsider humor, sketching eco-terrorist Sonic the Hedgehog, attractive Black Rock summer time internship and the Utah Jazz/Raytheon Applied sciences hybrid that caught the attention of Lacy. Every new shirt felt extra entrenched within the dizzying expertise of scrolling by way of social media, the place the road between real posts, memes and promoting blur. 

Even the title Stylo au Plafond is dipped in irony. “I wished it to sound like excessive trend, one thing French or Italian. I assumed it might be a humorous distinction, what the content material was versus what the title was,” Michaud says.

Sutton additionally had a reminiscence from seventh grade when a fellow classmate confirmed him learn how to toss a pen so the purpose caught completely into the ceiling. He typed “pen within the ceiling” into Google Translate and voila.

[Photo by Nick Pedro]

The style items embody that distinction of high and low trend by way of ridiculous meme-like content material splattered on a basic piece of menswear. However in relation to the designs, Michaud and Sutton go off intuition, and that usually takes them to profound locations. “We’ll consider the funniest factor to reference and join it to one thing irrelevant, that’s additionally type of related,” Michaud says. 

Take Stylo’s Hyper Pop Cafe for instance. You initially double-take — the brand you acknowledge from one context is ripped from its typical techy white backdrop and recolored in snotty inexperienced, break up by the eponymous textual content. Peel it again one other layer, and also you notice that, effectively, hyperpop music is created and carried out with the assistance of a laptop computer, so the reference is sensible. Irrelevant however related. However then Sutton takes it one step additional, hinting that the shirt references the Laborious Rock Cafe restaurant chain, ditching its guitar iconography for an Apple brand. Suppose “Shedding My Edge” in 2022.

Such meme-ing encapsulates one thing romantically center faculty about Stylo’s designs. Not solely does the title harken again to seventh grade, however the illustrations exist within the emotional center floor between childhood and maturity. There’s that preteen longing to develop up that manifests itself in crude South-Parkian humor, alongside wistful homages to issues and locations that slowly fade from sentimental significance to getting older irrelevancy. Working example: Stylo’s reimagining of beloved characters like Sonic and Kirby as eco-terrorists and warlords and the oddly shifting portrait of nowhere America fuel stations and fast-food joints that line stop-start suburban highways.

[Photo by Nick Pedro]

It’s no shock that others connect nostalgia to Stylo designs, then. After Lacy’s music movies got here out in late June and early July, the stylist for Glass Animals commissioned a bit based mostly on the lyrics to the group’s new music “House Ghost Coast to Coast,” which describes singer-songwriter Dave Bayley’s childhood in Texas. Weeks later, Bayley carried out on the Brooklyn Mirage Aug. 8 clad in a Stylo authentic that referenced the cartoons AAAHH!!! Actual Monsters and Pokémon and the sugary snack Dunkaroos. 

The Stylo guys are stunned by how briskly it’s all occurred. Michaud calls it “failing upward.” Sutton credit “anticipating to be fortunate.” On high of designing a shirt for the duvet artwork of Christian Taylor’s single “Why Am I (In California) .cass,” they hope to capitalize on the momentum with the primary official Stylo au Plafond drop quickly to be introduced. 

Regardless, they’re simply joyful to make garments that folks need to put on. “We’re both making a shirt for Steve Lacy or we’re making a shirt for my silly buddies,” Michaud jokes. “​​We’re fairly fortunate to be buddies with actually superior artists who share our stuff and are supportive.”

[Photo by Nick Pedro]

[Photo by Nick Pedro]

[Photo by Nick Pedro]