Los Angeles is so much more than Hollywood, so much more than beaches, and so much more than Beverly Hills (shout out Weezer though). Though the high-end fashion world has long obsessed over New York, the way that street style, skate culture, and subcultures like street basketball influence fashion in LA is undeniable. Converse — with a rich SoCal history — recognized this and decided to showcase the city in a new series of capsule collections.
In an effort to honor LA’s eclectic aesthetic mix, while also incorporating their own classic basketball heritage, the footwear brand tapped four emerging streetwear designers to put their spin on the blank white palette of Converse basics. They tapped Babylon LA, RSVP Gallery, CLOT and Rokit to make over silhouettes of shoes like Converse’s Chuck 70, Fastbreak, and One Star CC, and create custom apparel to go along with the shoe designs. The guidelines were simple: Use a base of black, white, along with a color of the designer’s choice. The rest was up to each collaborator.
This week, the results of this experiment were unveiled in a private media preview held in Chinatown for the four brands involved. Lee Spielman, one of the designers behind Babylon and a founding member of the hardcore punk band Trash Talk, cited the influence of skate culture and Hollywood High as an LA skate landmark in their designs.
“Our shop is on right near Sunset and Highland, and the Red Line lets you off at Hollywood and Highland,” Spielman explained. “And anytime a kid gets off at Hollywood and Highland they have to pass by Hollywood High to be able to come to the shop. It’s almost in some ways like a gateway, it’s like a marker in a sense. But a lot of the kids who come to our shop to skate — because we have a big bowl in the back, it’s almost like a community center type spot — know that Hollywood High is a super iconic skate spot. It’s a monumental stair set. It was tight to incorporate the neighborhood that the shop is from into our design.”
Taking things in a totally different direction, Lance Jackson of RSVP Gallery wanted to lean into the city’s basketball culture and created a collection in Lakers yellow and bandana paisley.
“If you look at the designs you’ll see that yellow is a big part of the designs, we took that inspiration from the Lakers, obviously,” Jackson said. “And then we thought about LA culture and street culture, and we thought that the bandana is a big part of the culture. So that’s what the paisley print on the jersey is, and the paisley arms of the shirt.”
Unlike Spielman and Babylon, who have collaborated with Converse before, this was a first-time partnership for Jackson and RSVP Gallery, but the designer said it was a no-brainer.
“Converse is just a classic brand, everybody knows Converse and they’ve been around for so long, they have such a good reputation,” he said. “And when they gave us the opportunity, of course, we wanted to take it.”
As is common for media previews, Converse gifted attending press with a set of sneakers from a designer’s collection. I went home with the CLOT take on the Converse’s Chuck 70 — featuring a knitted upper and thick, colorful laces. While their designers weren’t present for comment, the company’s ethos is uniting East and West designs, something that fits well into LA’s sometimes dichotomous city set-up.
Combing disparate cultures was also one of the goals for Bam Barcena from Rokit, who cited LA car club culture along with basketball and skateboarding.
“The brand itself exists conceptually within the marriage of street basketball and street skateboarding, which we thought was unique to our upbringing and living here in LA as well,” said Barcena, who grew up in San Diego, before later moving to LA. “We used things like on our tracksuit, a two-tone different fabrication, different print, to illustrate how there’s a ton of different subcultures, but only so many people — so there’s bound to be crossover. That millennial experience is hey man, I go to hardcore shows but I play basketball outdoors at Silver Lake Reservoir on Saturdays.”
The capsule collections are all one-offs, but will be available for sale at the respective designer’s stores as well as online.