2015 was a busy year for Hood By Air. The brand presented four runway collections, in Florence, Paris and New York (twice). They won the Council Of Fashion Designers Of America Swarovski award for Menswear, launched a line with Fox’s hip-hop dynasty TV show Empire, threw a party at MoMA, made music with acclaimed artist Arca, had a Barbie made in their honour, and moved into a new studio in New York’s Lower East Side. They headlined international fashion press and were worn by Rihanna, but my favourite piece of 2015 x HBA media was this little thing – an off-focus iPhone pic posted to Tumblr by fashion photographer Renata Raksha.

In it, a plain white t-shirt is hand-branded “Hood By Air,” evidently by black Sharpie markers, which lay beside it. The caption reads, “just got my new hood by air shirt excited”. As a one-liner, it’s right on, aligning in reverent jest with the brand’s ethics of accessibility, freedom and power to people via performance, appropriation and logo-maniacal streetwear. Raksha’s tee captures something of the essence of HBA, its DIY spirit, while simultaneously winking at a material fact – how often the brand is knocked-off (it is). It’s a conceptual shout-out to a conceptual brand, a brand that works, as great pop does, on many levels.

Levels such as – in one of HBA’s signature designs – stacking a Timberland-tan upper on creeper platform heels. Glam, goth and hip- hop in one shoe.

Or – for their S/S 2016 Pitti Uomo show – stuffing male models’ mouths with pearled, studded and padlocked pacifiers, guards and gags, a comment on voice, bashfulness and childhood curiosity. And also an earnest celebration of kink.

Hood By Air layers like this. Shorts are tailored, atop of trousers. Cat Power is remixed into Lauryn Hill and reggae a cappella on their catwalk soundtrack. Even HBA’s business is multi-leveled, producing four-figure luxury leathers and three-figure t-shirts down to twenty-buck hair barrettes. The New York-centric brand is lead by creative director Shayne Oliver and CEO Leilah Weinraub. Collaboration and community are core to the enterprise; their roster of fellow creatives includes stylist Akeem Smith, DJ Venus X and model Boychild. Conversation is core, too, as Oliver and Weinraub made clear when we met at the end of last year. We discussed fetish, friendship and how they work concepts into clothes. Below is an excerpt from that chat.

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Could you describe your roles at Hood By Air?

Shayne Oliver I go by the title of creative director. I conceptualise the fashion direction of Hood By Air. That involves corresponding ideas with the design team, as well as corresponding with Leilah, my business partner. Leilah came in around 2012 to build out the business structure of the brand. We’re understaffed, so the roles we play, it’s really like…

Leilah Weinraub Everything. But the creative process is based on fun. Before I was spending the majority of my time on HBA, I was focused on being a film director, and the work is very similar to me. There’s money, actors, dialogue and story; it’s performance and how you roll out that performance. The object is different – it’s a fashion collection, not a film – but the work is the same. It’s about having ideas and producing them to make an impact.

Shayne And about making ideas physical. Like design theory. How to put ideas into clothes, or the idea of showing how people interact with clothing, which is the runway show, which didn’t exist in the brand before Leilah came in.

Leilah Before I got involved, it was more about attitude. You’d hear the name Hood By Air, and be like, “What the fuck is that attitude?” You were struck by the sound of it.

2006 is often listed as a start date for HBA. Is that accurate?

Shayne 2006 was me buying the copyright, that’s how I see it. It was me being like, “I know what I want to do when I grow up.” It was claiming that name, claiming that energy and developing ideas in an underground, but HBA only became an actual collection, a business, in 2012.

Underground is a word that gets thrown around a lot in fashion. What does it mean to you?

Shayne It’s an incubator. A shared private moment to generate and perform ideas.

Shayne, could you tell me how you met Leilah? And Leilah, how you met Shayne? What were your first impressions?

Shayne We met at night. Do you remember? It was at Happy Ending, a bar in the Lower East Side. Our friend [designer] Telfar [Clemens] was DJing. Leilah was visiting from LA. Then we met again through [DJ] Venus [X]. There was always a middleman, until we actually started talking and texting in late 2010, or 2011-ish?

Leilah He’s not telling you about this crush, this enormous crush, he used to have on me.

Shayne Ooooooh. It was coy. I was being coy.

Leilah Okay, so. I remember this one night in 2009 or 2010. There was some party in Brooklyn, Shayne was there, and I had on these thigh-high boots. This was when I still used to strip dance. I remember walking backwards in these thigh-highs, and looking back at Shayne and a friend, and you both were like, acknowledging my curvature. We acknowledged each other. It was very scenester. Creatively, though, it was very simple. I knew he had a collection, and I learned that we shared a lot of aesthetic ideals.

Like what?

Leilah Like a ready-to-wear idea, an interest in identifying necessity-based invention globally and culturally.

Shayne Right. Which in itself is anti-fashion. Because even though people need to wear clothes, in fashion there are so many ideas that have nothing to do with people, because of the reference points.

Leilah I actually had this other idea about ready-to-wear that…

Shayne What?

Leilah It’s kind of… It’s a little too… It’s a little political.

I think of your brand as political. Is that not something you want to identify with?

Shayne I used to be over that, but now I think, those values are there. We’re interested in stripping down things, in shutting down certain avenues of gluttony and celebrating excess in other areas. Those are political statements.

Leilah Political is not dogmatic. Political, to me, just means charged and relevant, honestly. Apolitical is an active choice.

I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier Shayne, about design theory and materialising ideas. Could you talk about one idea and how you’ve made it material?

Shayne In the early days of the brand, it was about making objects that served multiple purposes. Like, a statement on the ability to be a sexual deviant and also be respected in a business platform – putting that into a trouser. There was this one pair of business trousers with shorts on top, and with side gussets and slits, all made out of the same technical fabric. That gave you the idea of a man undressing, but also this utilitarian attitude. The trousers were meant to actually be that person, a person who will wear these trousers to go to the office and to a sex dungeon. It’s not just fetish, it’s serving a purpose.

Leilah I also think that the whole thing of having a secret life is an idea of the past. It’s actually impossible, if you’re close to someone – there’s denial, but there are no secrets. So, if that’s an idea, or a way of living, we might materialise it by having exposed zippers.

Tell me about your backgrounds. Where did you grow up?

Shayne I’m from the Midwest. I was born in Minnesota, then moved to the Caribbean with my granny and lived there until I was ten, then moved to New York with my mom.

Do you remember when you started dressing yourself?

Shayne That happened early on. From five or six, I was already sewing up stuff.

What were the first things you made?

Shayne I actually made a pullover like I’m wearing now. I customised it with drawings. I would tell stories of my childhood on garments with paint. I was also making bellbottoms with floral print. It was fun. We had this shop called Joanne Fabrics in the Midwest, that’s where I’d hang out with my mom. We’d go to the supermarket and then we’d go to Joanne Fabrics and I would go nuts.

Were you sewing on a machine or by hand?

Hand sewing. When I was in the Caribbean, I started deconstructing things, because it was so hot. It would be like me getting American clothes from my mom, and then fucking that stuff up, so it would be appropriate for the Caribbean climate and trends. Can we do Leilah’s story? The fashion shows – we need to talk about that.

Leilah Talk about what?

Shayne When Leilah was a model. Yasss. Let’s blow it up!

Leilah I’m from Koreatown, Los Angeles. My mom was always into fashion. She had a lot of fashion friends. When I was a preteen, I was kind of androgynous, so they thought the place for me was modelling. My mom’s best friend was a choreographer and he taught models how to walk. I’d come home from school, put on the En Vogue album, and he’d teach me to walk!

Did you like doing that?

Leilah I hated it. I think when parents have like gay kids, they go crazy. Like they want to party too! But yeah… I was nonverbal for the first part of my life. I only turned into a person who spoke in my twenties, when I went to Antioch College and was activated in this political setting. Antioch in the late 90s was this utopic place. It was actually one in a series of utopic scenarios that have been really influential. Do you wanna hear my theory of utopias?

Definitely.

Leilah My theory is that utopias happen – they’re totally natural and amazing. Utopias are these amazing moments where people come together in agreement. They ultimately end, maybe they’re interrupted by external forces, or egos that come into play. Anyway, that interruption is necessary, as it explodes the bubble, letting people outside of it interact with its energy. A lot of articles on HBA talk about the GHE20G0TH1K parties we used to throw. That was a utopic moment – this condensed moment of creative interaction and freedom. HBA is part of the aftermath of that moment, but I hope that it can exist outside of utopia.

What was utopic about Antioch College?

Leilah It was very free, very queer. I remember the first week that I got there, the programme was all about sex education, like how to practise safe fisting – that was my second day. Antioch at that time was highly political. The school graduated people who turned into real activists, who run unions and work in government and policy. Mostly, it was just very free.

What does freedom feel like, or mean, to you?

Leilah It’s very structured.

Shayne Yeah, it has a lot to do with control. You work to build a space within a greater system, so that you can live within that space, like this studio space we’ve built here. You’re aware of every single thing that’s going on around you, so you don’t have to worry about anything. That’s how I feel free.

Leilah To me the idea of freedom is an analysis of power, so to be free you need to know where power lies, how it moves and who is benefitting. It’s structured in that way. A not-free situation would be if all these things are going on, but you don’t know where it comes from, or who made that decision, or how to interact with it – you’re just affected constantly, in your place.

Shayne Right, exactly. You’re really experiencing the repercussions of someone else’s actions at that point. You’re the laboratory mouse.

Leilah Freedom is an informed place.

How do you organise yourself to have freedom within the fashion industry?

Leilah It’s about knowing ourselves. How do we want to interact with this structure, like the endless calendar? There will always be another show. We have to decided where we go.

Shayne That’s where the job lies, for sure. It’s analytical, but it’s also intuitive. To me, it’s all about attraction. It’s like, what turns me on? What am I attracted to? Is that idea sexy? If it’s not sexy, is it relevant? How unsexy is it, and does that make it more relevant?

What are some of the struggles of manifesting that freedom? Or the pleasures?

Leilah Having a unisex collection in a men’s and women’s calendar. Or even having to use the word unisex, because it’s not unisex. Having to create a language for gender to sell clothes on a fashion calendar. Like what do you tell a store that wants to know where to put its men’s budget? You have to be able to answer questions like that very clearly. Our job is to make our ideas applicable.

How do HBA’s concepts come about? I remember reading about a group text message where you’d share screenshots from Instagram, Tumblr and Grindr. Are you still doing that? Who are you sharing with?

Shayne We’re getting back to sharing live now that we have this office, which is so healthy, I’m so happy. We’ve been so physically international that we haven’t had that. It’s usually [stylist] Akeem [Smith], Leilah, myself and Ian [Isiah] texting and talking.

Leilah HBA really is about taking these disparate conversations that happen between excited friendships and turning them into concrete ideas. We talk like friends, and the work is turning that into something.

What are you conversing about now?

Leilah I heard this really good Black Sabbath song the other day. The lyrics are, “Is it the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?” I think we’ve been asking ourselves that. We did so much work this year that we’re like, “Was that even this year?” We did four big shows this year, in Florence, New York, Paris and again in New York. I liked them all, but now the conversation is, “What next? Do we want to be travelling all over the world, or do we want to put our focus here?” I think that’s the next thing – being physically here in this room we’re in right now, centralising our intake and output, and creating this idea of an American house.

Shayne I do believe in the end of the beginning. The whole newcomer thing. It’s like, we are here. We’re no longer teaching people the vocabulary of HBA – they get it. Now we need to master our aesthetic, to be the only ones who can do it, because we’re the best at doing it.