Oakmont bakery and Dries Van Noten
Route 28 at 6pm on a Friday is maybe the least glamorous place to realize you care about Dries Van Noten. Sitting in dead stop traffic past the Millvale exit, scrolling Grailed on your phone, trying to win an auction on a jacket that nobody in your zip code has ever heard of
Pittsburgh's not a fashion city. Nobody on Butler Street is discussing the Hedi Slimane era at Celine. You just kind of find this stuff alone and it becomes yours differently — there's no scene reinforcing it
I don't even remember what the first thing was. Might have been a fragrance honestly. Some Maison Margiela Replica thing I found at a Nordstrom Rack that had no business being there. And then you pull one thread and suddenly you're deep in forums at 1am learning about fabric weights
The clothes come from Timbuktu
I wrote this line a while back — "the clothes come from Timbuktu but shit aint Egyptian / the whole closet's a rare European collection"
You're in Pittsburgh, you're making money young, and you're spending it on pieces and fragrances that your homies back home have never even googled. Same kid eating at Pamela's on a Sunday morning, just the closet looks different now and I have a Macallan preference. The Pamela's part didn't go away
Finding your people
Cam, Adam and I have known each other since first grade. We didn't find each other through some shared interest thing — we just grew up together and then at some point realized we were all independently getting into the same stuff. Making beats, collecting things, caring about quality in a way that just wasn't around here. Other people joined up over the years and that became AG — Attirer Grandeur
Hocs is chopping samples at like 3 in the morning and naming tracks after French fashion houses. Cam and I spent a whole weekend building out a concept about stealing a sailboat — fully produced the thing off one random conversation that started at like 11pm and by 4am we had the hook and most of the second verse and the whole plot mapped on a whiteboard. Adam's mixing everything we throw at him and somehow making it all sound cohesive
Camp
We're heading to camp soon — recording sessions, bonfires, the whole thing. Probably gonna come back with something new or at least a bunch of voice memos that sound good for two days before we realize the levels are all wrong
I think the sailboat track says whatever I was gonna say here better than I would