Kunle Martins on the End of Cool, the Rise of Corny, and Why That’s the Point
As part of Highsnobiety’s “Everything Is Streetwear” story and video series, we’re sharing a select number of our conversations with style insiders in full.
Kunle Martins is an exemplary New Yorker. A fast-talking graffiti writer, skateboarder, fine artist, “prolific” shoplifter, and more, he is the kind of unforgettable figure who should at least have one cast-iron plaque marking his existence here, the way Paris is so good at honoring its legendary denizens. Martins came of age in the 1990s and watched the downtown scene evolve in the 2000s, founding the crew (and brand) IRAK. He worked in retail. He hangs with Chloe Sevigny over seafood platters. He’s collaborated with Converse and showcased his nude portraits at Manhattan galleries. Below, he recalled customers at Alife Rivington Club, breaking his leg sketching, and other indelible scenes of a city that we can only access in memory.
New York in 2005: What’s the first thing that comes to mind?
I was watching the news this morning and that band The Fray performed “How to Save a Life.” [The song came out] 20 years ago. It made me think about people that have died that I could have stayed up with. I heard that song and I was transported back to the emotions and frustrations of my younger self. It was the beginning of the digital era. My name is Kunle Martins in Nigeria there are a million Kunle Martins. It’s as popular as Mark Williams or something. But back then, on Google, I was the only Kunle Martins on the internet. We were doing all the worst things that you could do on the internet because it didn’t matter. It didn’t count, it wasn’t real. We were young and all the stuff that we wanted to express was complete shit. It was awesome. It was free and there was no rules and it was just really cool to get that out of our system before the hammer came down—like, this is going to be up for the rest of your life and there are consequences. There were no consequences [then].
Were you on forums? What were you engaging with online?
There were a couple of forums that homies did. [The internet] was a new thing that we could play with while we still lived our analog, Polaroid, rotary-phone-in-the-kitchen selves. It was still the old world, but we knew, because of movies like Office Space and The Matrix, that that was a wrap. And lo and behold, there are now all these new ways of making money that didn’t exist back then. These skills — these clothing skills, knowing about specific brands and designers and sneakers and me having 90 different kinds of raincoats—that didn’t pay bills back then. It was like skateboarding: “why are you wasting your time?” Flash forward, a lot of my friends are in these prominent positions [because of that knowledge] — it’s like, can you believe that we’re getting paid to do the thing that we just sat around Wendy’s and talked about? This is insane. We’re very lucky.
Your analog life then, you were working at Alife Rivington Club.
Yes, I was. I was Rivington Clubbed out. I had broken my leg in 2003. The day before my birthday, I got ran over by a truck on Delancey Street coming back from Canal Street. I had picked up some fronts and I was skitching on a car; a big truck going for the bridge ran over me. And then I had DTs run up in Rivington Club: “We have stills from this documentary of you writing graffiti, so you’re coming with us.” And I was like, “Let me just lace up this guy’s shoe.” I was on probation for five years. Things had kind of slowed down for me in terms of needing to be the angriest guy all the time. I thought, Maybe this is a good thing to help me slow down from shoplifting all the time. And I only worked at Alife because it made me look legit and sane, because I still thought that I could make way more money shoplifting. Which I could, but I knew that it wasn’t sustainable. So I was like, let me try and be an adult. If that dork over there can make a lot of money doing legal stuff, I can certainly do something legally and make money and be successful.
How did the retail scene in downtown New York in the 2000s feel different from the ’90s? Was it less insular? More welcoming?
The ’90s were harsh; I compare it to the month of January. People were cold; they were more hurtful. It was not a great time in the city when I look back on it. It was a fight all the time. And then things loosened up [in the 2000s]. Bloomberg had a lot to do with it. Money was a little easier to get. It felt like there were more opportunities and people were ready to have their minds expanded. Alife and Supreme played a big part of that, offering who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in contemporary art options and information to go along with what they already like, which is skateboarding, graffiti, and music. Nowadays, it’s all the same guy: I’m a DJ, I’m an art historian, I do fine art, I’m a designer, I do all the things. But back then those were different people who were brought together by [places like] Alife and Supreme. Instead of it being these different siloed communities that had static, they were all now seeing what they had in common.
It felt corny, don’t get me wrong. You didn’t have to fight to get props anymore. You could just get props from wearing sneakers. [In the ’90s] I had to pay horrible, horrible dues. And now they didn’t have to pay those dues, and they’re excelling at a rapid pace—that felt unfair. And I realized that those things don’t really matter. It became more about what kind of person someone is and what kind of skills they’re bringing to the table, and that’s really it.
Nowadays, it's all the same guy: I'm a DJ, I'm an art historian, I do fine art, I'm a designer, I do all the things. But back then those were different people.
I don’t mean to jump too far into the future here, but I do wonder if there is some kernel of truth in being wary of the corniness, being wary of the new togetherness. If you flash forward, there’s so much corporate money involved in what was previously an independent, authentic subculture.
Well, yeah. You can look at it like the gay pride thing too. It’s capitalism and if one one company does it and it works, they’re all going to do it because: money and more. I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic in recovery and what you realize is that a lot of people have a disease of more. With big companies wanting a piece of something cool, yes, it’s going to become “too cool.” And then people who are really trendsetters are gonna say, “That’s not really speaking to me.” But that’s fine. Some fashion thing that became corny — pick one in your head, something that used to be cool that’s big now. That thing was cool for a reason. It stood on its own legs to people who really knew what was up for a reason. So it’ll come back. Don’t worry that every kid and their mother has one; it’ll come back because it’s dope. These people who are like, “Oh, New York is dead after the pandemic.” Give things time. Hopefully I can live to be old and corny one day. The older you get, the more you realize it is not about being the biggest, best thing forever. And then you start to embrace the cycle. Things will be fine.
Who was the stereotypical Alife customer?
In the beginning, there wasn’t one. Because no one knew about the store. You’d see them walk by for two days, missing the store, and then you’d see them come up to the window and I’d buzz the door to get them to get their fingers off the glass. It was a whole thing. In the beginning, maybe it was high-end sneaker company people, or people from Europe or Japan. And then it started to become neighborhood kids, and then it was sneaker resellers. Peppered into that were regular people who were like, “Oh, this is a really nice store. You guys are cool. I’ll come back here every month to get a pair of sneakers.”
But we definitely had our neighborhood kids like, “Yo, you got the uptowns? Those uptowns!” “Do you mean Air Force Ones or dunks? Because I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Yo, the Uptowns!” With the Cheetos fingers, tapping on the glass. Sneakers were a new thing for a lot of young people, and that’s who Nike, Adidas, Puma and all these companies were catering to.
Who I appreciated most were the older heads. People who were five or 10 years older than me who clearly had been into fashion for a long time. Old Commes des Garcon people. Seeing the people who had ill style who I would see on the street when I was just a little dirty skate kid, racking all the time. They had figured [their style] out by himself or herself. These people were maybe one out of a hundred downtown. You’d be like, “Yo, you can do that with clothes?” They would come to Alife and I would be psyched. They had their salt and pepper steez now; you could tell they’ve been doing this for a couple of decades. Those people were dope.
How did you end up working with Chloe Sevigny for that Converse short?
I had this really good opportunity to do something with Converse. I’m always really surprised that anybody wants anything to do with me. At the time, I was in Truro, Cape Cod, which is next to Ptown, and Chloe spends time there in the summer. When you see people from your hometown somewhere else, you hang out.
The original idea was to have Chloe wearing a trench coat and walking around flashing people in the Lower East Side. We couldn’t do that because of the SA-angle, but that was the original idea. It was the idea from the Marc Johnson “Yeah Right” skate video. He’s standing on Hollywood Boulevard, flashing people, and you think he’s naked, but when he turns around, he’s wearing a chocolate T-shirt and shorts. We wanted to steal that—because everything in my mind breaks down into a skate video I saw when I was young, or an episode of The Simpsons. I have a very limited pool of things that have inspired me and stuck with me.
Chloe is just the bomb, so down to earth and sweet and smart and beautiful and has a great sense of style. When somebody’s good at what they do, I fucks with that—hard. Still, I didn’t think she would do it. I thought she would be like, “Dude, I’ve got nine different shows I’m doing right now, so let’s just eat seafood and chill. Stop asking me to do the Converse thing.” But she was like, “No, I’m down.” The biggest hurdle was getting up the nerve to ask her.
I imagine the quality you see in her, she sees in you.
You’re very sweet. Thank you. I wish I could see myself the way other people see me. I’m a fan of my friends and grateful to be around them, and I think that’s why we’re still friends. Because there’s a lot of gratitude for being around each other. It’s not lost on me how lucky I am.
Coming back to an earlier thread of our conversation, is there a parallel between the fine art world’s relationship to graffiti and high fashion’s relationship to streetwear?
Yes, yes, there is. There’s a parallel between the two. For me, graffiti and streetwear are one and the same because streetwear comes from skateboarding, and graffiti writers and skateboarders are the same type of person. Those underground worlds were juicy for the picking. What a gift for the fashion world to have streetwear to explore.
What did it mean to you that Virgil, after he had really ascended into the world of mainstream fashion, was still repping IRAK?
He had so much enthusiasm. I saw myself in him in that way. He was such a nerd in a good way, and he could translate what he saw for a different audience. It is really easy for somebody to be like, “I’m being put on by Louis Vuitton. Let me forget about as many things that aren’t high level as possible.” Virgil appreciated the things that got him to where he was. Those things were still valid. I like that honesty.
