The designer and hip-hop artist Tyler, the Creator performing during his fashion show Saturday at the L.A. Live complex, in Los Angeles.Photograph by Kevin Winter / Getty
“Growing up as an inner-city black kid, I wasn’t the most masculine,” a shirtless, deep-voiced Tyler, the Creator told a sellout crowd of two thousand at the L.A. Live complex, in downtown Los Angeles, on Saturday. “I wasn’t into sports,” he continued. “I liked pink and sh*t.”
The speech was the twenty-five-year-old rapper’s third of the night. After débuting a blinding line of apparel, footwear, and accessories from his Golf Wang clothing label, Tyler had screened a product clip with a pre-recorded voice-over, and then emerged to perform a scathing new diatribe called “Ego” in a silver, glittering polo top. Now, fearing that he sounded like a “broken record,” Tyler hammered points home about identity, individuality, and ownership with his mix of sincerity and trademark vulgarity. He recounted a scene from his teen years, before 2010, when his self-directed music videos catapulted his Odd Future collective into the limelight. At a local shop after school, he recounted, Tyler was “made an example of” by a store worker for wearing a pink hoodie. “That’s not a real man,” the shopkeeper had taunted in front of others. “That’s not what real men wear.”
Barely an hour after the runway show had ended, Omar Mateen opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. The heinous act cast an especially dark cloud over an already drizzly weekend in the city, where L.A. Pride Week had brought thousands of revelers out to L.G.B.T.-themed events in the days before. By Sunday morning, the worst fears were confirmed: news outlets reported that a man armed with assault rifles and explosive chemicals had planned to target the parade before being arrested by local police. The parade proceeded that day as planned.
Tyler’s had a complex relationship to the L.G.B.T. community, rife with contradictions. He’s been criticized for his use of slurs in his lyrics, resulting in a ban from the U.K. and New Zealand for perceived hate speech, while simultaneously claiming two outwardly gay members in his flock—progressive for any hip-hop group—and openly (if sardonically) professing his attraction to several men, including Leonardo DiCaprio. Throughout the show, his repeated nods toward these controversies seemed to weigh down what should’ve been a proud moment for the young artist. He emphasized clothing as a tool of communication, and even dissent—a message that was ultimately inseparable from the horrifying attacks on identity and individuality that would unfold soon after.
Tyler’s clothing line combines the loose fits of hip-hop and skate styles alongside prim collegiate silhouettes, all in bursting primary shades and soaked with repeating patterns bearing Golf Wang insignia. The flat-brimmed caps, striped polos, and high-water cuffs, childlike in their slants and sags, insist upon their early-nineties influence, the formative years when street wear first began to take shape, and when many of the models in the show were young enough to still be dressed like miniature versions of their parents. The clothes bear a strong hand, and seem intent to stand out against even the most closely comparable lines. “The difference between me and these nigg*s is that I make what I like,” Tyler explained, of his design choices, in subtle criticism of predictable looks that bow to seasonal trends or the Web-driven menswear community. If producing what you “like” in spite of a market demand is an act of insubordination, then shifting tastes can be considered a marker of progress, and a fashion presentation a vehicle for protest. The Golf Wang runway, flanked by a clear blue sky, pillow-sized sunflowers, and patches of fake grass, was just short of a rainbow—models of various ages, races, and body types cruised around a summer vacation on mini bikes and skateboards. Fans swarmed the stage at the show’s end, tearing off keepsakes and trying out the six-foot-tall chairs fashioned after co*ke cans. The Golf Wang pieces do not aspire to practicality: they are meant to be the loudest items in your closet, statement pieces delivered with a shriek—barely palatable, but impossible to ignore.
Most notable was Tyler’s announcement of a new sneaker line, Golf Le Fleur, a move he described as “taking a leap” after releasing several designs with the shoe company Vans. The tested concept of brand collaboration between small shops and large corporations caught on when James Jebbia, the founder of the iconic New York shop Supreme, wanted to release a sneaker in the early nineties. “The first thing James had me working on was just Vans,” the Supreme creative director Brendon Babenzien recalls in a 2014 interview. “He said, ‘I want Supreme sneakers, but I’m not going to go make my own sneakers, because I’m not gonna make a better sneaker than Vans or Nike.’ So he started working with Vans to make unique colorways for the store.” Decades later, Tyler, visibly emboldened by the oft-mocked rhetoric of Kanye West (who attended the show, and must’ve been pleased with how much “Ego” sounded like “New Slaves”), boasted of forfeiting the infrastructure Jebbia sought in exchange for a distinctly capitalist affirmation of identity. “Y’all know I did collabs with Vans and sh*t and all this stuff,” he explained from the stage. “But I just realized, black people don’t really own sh*t. So I said, f*ck royalty checks, I’ma start my own sh*t, and if it fails, it fails. I decided to start my own shoe company and sh*t,” he continued. “It’s Golf Le Fleur in f*cking French, and it means ‘flower boy.’ I like flowers.”
Displays like these from known provocateurs like Tyler and West are confounding to many: Why hang such ambitious social critiques on T-shirts and sneakers? As Tyler described his conception, production, and design choices, it was clear they were meant to poke holes in ideas of ownership and identity, and question how our style choices articulate stances in these arenas. Tyler is hardly the first rapper to claim an affinity for pink, for example: his longtime idol Pharrell Williams, the cult hero Cam’ron, and the seditious auteur Lil B have all bet entire campaigns on the hue, and have all fielded murmured suspicions about sexual orientation as a result. Subversions like these—rappers recoloring masculinity across runways, and inviting the bewilderment it spurs—push against the ostensibly insurmountable human instinct to stratify and separate; the kind that presumes which color a “real man” should wear, or, worse, whether a life lived differently from one’s own is one worthy of living.
