"You Can't Cancel Culture": No Vacancy Inn's Provocative Rebirth
When you drop a clothing collection called "Born Cancelled," it's pretty obvious that you aren't aiming for subtlety. In fact, No Vacancy Inn wants nothing less than to be understated; co-founders Tremaine Emory, Ade "Acyde" Odunlami, and Brock Korsan are here to make an impact.
No Vacancy Inn is the ultimate IYKYK project, a finger-in-the-pie creative experiment with no finite beginning or end.
"The beautiful part about No Vacancy Inn is that we genuinely just do what feels right when the time is right, for us," the founders told Highsnobiety. "Our agenda isn’t tied to any one medium."
One week, NVI is spinning records at Art Basel and the next, it's hosting a pop-up for its fans in London, everyone welcome.
For a while, No Vacancy Inn lay dormant as its co-founders dove deep into the many, many other plates they're spinning across the globe. But that was then and this is now. NVI is back in a major way.
"Born Cancelled is a rebel yell for every kid who was ever cancelled for one mistake," the founders said of the clothing collection that's intended to be No Vacancy Inn's public reintroduction. "The foundations of what can now be defined as ‘cancel culture’ lies within the prerequisite of privilege.
"The implication of ‘being canceled’ seemingly means an individual has something of worth to take away... 'Born Cancelled' is the amplification of a voice for a generation of youth who’ve yet to hone their own voices of exasperation."
Don't think that No Vacancy Inn is simply lashing out at the "woke scolds," though. Born Cancelled is less of a politic sentiment and more of a call to arms for creatives wary of stepping on toes. Not everyone will agree with the sentiment and that's fine with the NVI founders.
"People get whatever message they are searching for [out of Born Cancelled]," they continued. "If we focused on that, we wouldn’t ever be able to put out anything.
"We live in a time where people are terrified to come to individual conclusions about anything that challenges or provokes them. 'Born Cancelled' is asking you to come up with your own answers or even more questions, discuss it, dissect it, figure it out, laugh about it, wear it, rinse and repeat."
Available October 14 on No Vacancy Inn's website, the Born Cancelled collection filters those motifs through — what else? — a musical lens, channeling what No Vacancy Inn describes as punk's "anti-establishment anarchy" into patched varsity jackets and scratchy printed T-shirts.
In a more literal homage, NVI mirrors the cover art of X's Los Angeles in a salute to one of the garage punk greats.
"You can't cancel culture... human beings are made to express themselves whether right or wrong," NVI's founders said. "Most of the energy behind 'cancellation' is media driven and, to a extent, it's become pure propaganda."
Cancel culture is, like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter, one of those subjects that gets inherently politicized and argued to death across the internet (and mostly the internet).
Does cancel culture quash creativity? Does it level the playing field to punish transgressors? No Vacancy Inn knows where it stands. In fact, its founders are really just tired of the entire argument.
"Honestly, we have no idea where culture goes from here," they sighed. "The whole idea of it kind of does [our] heads in."
