Through the Lens of Xander Ghost

The contemporary eyewear labels' refined looks are embraced by the likes of J Balvin, Billie Eilish, Kaytranada and more. With a label turning the heads of some of the biggest stars, one has to wonder, who is the mastermind behind all of these pieces?

office caught up with the founder and creative director behind this forward-thinking brand and had an in depth chat about where it all began, sustainability, inspirations, and more.

Check out the interview below.

What is the overarching theme of your work and where did your design journey begin?

The overall inspiration was brutalist architecture and specifically with kitchen design. A lot of the inspiration comes from that, it’s minimalism combined with the kitchen aesthetics and brutalist architecture. It wasn’t originally planned to be specifically eyewear, it was organic for me. I like eyewear in general and this was my interpretation of eyewear. I wanted to use materials that aren’t usually used, like rubber, thick titanium, and 3D printing that’s functional. Right now we’re doing the fragrance with the candles, we went to the south of France where the fragrance lab is and we fell in love with the process and we wanted to do something that wasn’t done before so we sourced aluminum and went in that direction. So, a lot of it is organic and a gut feeling, not necessarily a full strategy and we work better this way. Our next product is actually jewelry but again, this idea was organic as well.

We live in a world where it is imperative that we adopt a more sustainable mindset to reduce the waste of materials. Have you implemented sustainability into your work?

So that’s actually one of our main things, I just don’t like to market ourselves as a fully sustainable brand because we’re not and I think a lot of people use it as a marketing thing. We’re trying out best with the materials that we’re using so we reduced plastic from our original packaging by about 80%, so we don’t really have any plastic components in our packaging. In terms of the actual product, we mostly use aluminum and stainless steel, which is sustainable. However, we still have a few acetate models within the eyewear and now it’s 70:30 more metals and we’re trying to reduce that as we go and as we’re able to. The easiest thing for us is to actually do the packaging first because a lot of people waste a lot of plastics with that and never really think about it, so we tackled that and we’re working on other things as we go.

Your designs have a playful mixture of ultra modernism and futuristic elements to them 一 it’s sexy, but in the most refined way. What makes this such an irresistible combination for you and the consumer?

Firstly, I’d like to say the references that my team uses are crazy and we have a head designer, Lily Max. She's really cool and I would say she’s on the more playful side while I’m more on the brutalist side. It’s a combination of our two thoughts with what we produce and for me, I didn’t want to take a monotone direction, I didn’t want to exclusively focus on metals and silver and be super minimal all the time. I wanted to do a mix and showcase that we can implement colors 一 actually, our color products have been selling almost as good, sometimes better, for example, with our bold red, we did a 3D printed pair, it’s a really bright red color and it always sells out. This made us realize that this is something we should do and now we’re heavily into color and we’re finding that balance.

I love the concepts of each design. How do you come up with these ideas and how long does one design usually take?

We’re very content-driven, so weirdly, sometimes the actual designs are inspired by the content. So, say a specific shoot that we really like, or even artwork 一 we try to transfer those inspirations into our products. I don’t think the products are just the physical thing itself, it’s a 360 because you can see a product shot in a certain way and you like it more. So, I think we’re more visual in terms of how we want it to be seen and then we design based on imagining how that would fit. Aside from that, we have the technical aspect, which Lily our head designer is super good at, she 3D models the product and we actually 3D print it so that we have a rapid prototype because eyewear takes about 90 days to get produced. It’s kind of like slow fashion, we see the physical product and we tweak it and then it goes to manufacturing.

Fashion has drastically changed over the past few years. You know, eyewear brands like yours or even Gentle Monster have completely shifted the way we look at things. How do you feel like you witnessed the evolution of it?

I think firstly we have a new wave of brands that don’t really depend on big wholesalers or brands that don’t really do a big showroom to get noticed. I’d say Gentle Monster started that with their stores and they just went crazy with that and it was a full experience. For us, we mostly showcased ourselves on Instagram but overall, designers are going down a more experimental and experiential path. It’s more in your hands, you can make it and succeed or not, but you don’t need that channel to depend on the store to buy your products for you to be popping. I still think having wholesalers is still good overall because it gives you exposure in different ways that you don’t know about and people want to touch the product in real life, so I still think physicality is a thing.

Correct me if I’m wrong but The combination of conceptual and inventive detailing seems to be the core elements of your work. Why are these elements so important for you to explore?

Definitely and firstly, we enjoy the super technical side of it and we try to prove that we’re all about precision, which is our signature. For me specifically, it’s always been about being precise and not doing something with 90% effort, we want things at 100% like a finished product. It just keeps evolving in general but we wanted to explore other avenues that weren’t traditionally in eyewear like engraving on the inside and not just printing on the frames or on the temples. Just going the extra mile and layer and treating and treating our eyewear almost like sneakers. You know, we have hype for eyewear almost like sneakers and with eyewear, we discovered that it has its own cult following as well.

How have your designs helped you morph your vision into a living, breathing reality? In other words, back in 2018 when you first started the brand what was Xander thinking?

I don’t think it was ever really fashion, in the beginning, it was more like, ‘okay we’ll just do a couple of products’ and we were actually doing events. At first, we just placed our products on some cool people that we knew and it just took off online. I'd say it was more of a content-type brand but then it fully turned into a product that we spent way more time on developing and finding the correct manufacturers that support certain complexities. This was actually one of the biggest challenges because it’s hard to find a correct partner but it definitely paid off. I think it has definitely evolved from content to product.

Your modern interpretations of the line between masculinity and femininity bleed through your designs and its versatility is constantly blurring the preconceived ideas that most have about fashion. Everything is unisex. How do you continue to shatter these perceptions?

I think in general, fluidity is in front of us, things change all the time. We’re never really designing for men or women, it’s always unisex and it’s crazy because, from a content perspective, we usually shoot a lot of females, which wasn’t really planned. We just knew a lot of female models and a lot of them actually aren’t signed, we just photograph people who look cool to us. It just kind of evolved like that but weirdly, our sales are 50/50 split between men and women but men also buy a lot just based on the female content. I don’t think things are correlated like the book, I think it’s all about doing what you think is cool and whoever gets on board is kind of your customer, instead of trying to cater to the commercial audience. I think commerciality is changing, like, people come to you, instead of you going to them.

Where do you hope to take your designs in the near future? What can you tell us about any future collections that you have coming out?

For now, we have a lot of eyewear coming up and the fragrance line is expanding as well. Right now we have candles and we’re dropping a fragrance toy and it’s a ceramic dragon, which evolved from a CGI creature that we did for online content, we got a lot of good dm’s and then we actually did a ceramic version of that takes in fragrance oil and then it diffuses and we’re dropping that next month. So, we’re really just exploring these fragrance stories and doing things that a lot of people aren’t really focused on. We also have the jewelry that we’ve been working on for about 6 months and we’re also working on a sneaker collab. We hope to launch this collaboration in 2022 but obviously, there is a lot of politics around that because it’s with a bigger brand, but yeah, we designed it and they approved it and we’re just waiting for them to give us a date.

Fashion

Happy 424 Day!

Simon Rasmussen — What's going on?

Guillermo Andrade — Right now we're just setting everything up.

So, what are you doing, is it a party?

Well, I kind of felt universally forced, right? Because 4/24/24, I was just like, I don’t really have a choice here. The stars also just kind of aligned, so to be honest, I got this settlement that came with a bunch of clothes so I had this idea to give back to the kids who fuck with us by allowing them to buy our shit first. Not handing stuff out for free, but to do it in a way where we could skip the middleman of the industry, so to speak, and not allow clothes to disappear into the abyss of Farfetch or whatever else. So what we’re going to do is a sort of warehouse sale, which we’ve never done before so that was really exciting for me. I didn’t want to do just another warehouse sale, so it’s like a sample sale turns rager. We teamed up with Adidas and a couple of other sponsors, then drinks, DJs, and a performance.

Sick, I love it.

Yeah. My dream sample sale. Also, it’s not just hoodies and t-shirts here in there, it’s proper collections from the past three seasons. I’m also not picking and choosing, trying to make it accessible, like this was the only way I could afford to buy shit when I was a kid, bro. Sample sales were the thing I looked forward to the most.

I feel you. In New York, there's the annual CDG sale, which is when I used to cop all my CDG.

The only time I could afford Rick. I flew to New York once for a Rick sample sale and I was like, Wow, I can't believe I got invited. And it was mental. I still have those pieces. I will never sell them. Not even because I got 'em cheap. It was also just really fun. Even on the flight to New York, I was like, I can't believe I'm going to New York for a sample sale, what a fucking loser I am. But it was like the adult version of when I was a kid and I was like, Wow, I can't believe I'm 20-something and I'm still doing the thing I was doing in high school. So I hope we can create moments like that for kids here in LA.

Yeah. I love that. It’s important to connect with them; they’re essentially creating the brand. If you don't have them, good luck.

I mean, yeah. Fuck, bro. It's cool that we've been around for this long. I mean, it got a little rocky there for a second I think, for all of us. So coming out of it, tomorrow is a celebration. And it’s like an odd day of the week. It's a Wednesday, super random. And now that we've set it up, the homies are all like, Yo, I'm coming. I'm coming. Let me jump on stage, let me do this, and that's really what it's always been about. It's not some other strategy to get likes on the internet.

That’s how the best things happen, you just couldn’t help yourself. It was intuitive.

Yeah, it all came together in a really nice way.

Would you say that’s how 424 started as well? I remember we met in like 2010 on Fairfax and I was visiting with Rasmus…

Oh bro, it’s probably the time when I started the branch… do you remember Cecilia from Black Dakini? She’s the one that introduced me to CIFF and honestly, I didn’t even care what she was doing, I was just like, I’m coming, I’ll go with you. She said she’d give me half of her booth and I said, Awesome count me in. At the time, I had just gotten my green card and I wasn't allowed to ever leave America, so Copenhagen was one of the first cities I went to when I could finally travel. I mean, you see what we did at CIFF bro? It became our fucking hub for half a decade.

That was a moment for sure.

I remember the first account I got was Antonioli, and he came super gangster, being like, You're going to sell me these clothes. And I was like, bro, I didn't come to sell clothes. I'm just kind of catching a vibe with my homie and I made these things. And he's like, No, you're going to sell it to me. And then I was like, Oh my god that’s Claudio Antonioli. So then I went home, I googled wholesale, and figured that shit out. [laughs]

[Laughs]

Like you said, I couldn't help myself, but I didn't just make t-shirts and hoodies either. I was really on my Rick wave, so I made my version of the Rick things. It was that meets like The Boondock Saints, because I'm still a little bit of a Cali bro, sort of rock kid, but not really. I like hip-hop, but I like the way the rock stars look. I like the contrast. I thought it was cool. After that, I just never stopped.

It was clear to me when I first met you that you were onto your own thing in LA. It made a lot of sense, and it was so cool. It was before 424 was its own brand; you just had the store and this really cool curation.

It was all my shit, bro. I was very, very invested in sharing all of these things that I was finding from all over the world, like Astrid Anderson. She was one of those designers at the time, so important to 424. The connection to Copenhagen specifically for me was huge. I had a big fan base there. It was incredible. And then here in LA, we were sharing the things that we were a part of and finding; it was still the early days of Fear of God, Rhude, Martine Rose. A lot of these brands, we were the first store to ever sell it — we were selling Hood By Air on the West Coast.

You had Rick as well, I remember.

Oh yeah. It took me a long time. But I got Rick, bro. By the time I had to close the store on Fairfax, I already had a Raf Simons account. I had reached my ultimate dream. It was really all the stuff I wanted to wear at the time. It was dope. The best of the best.

We had an office magazine newsstand in there as well.

Oh yeah, we did! I came to visit the one you had, and I was like, Yo, I got to bring this whole fucking thing over here. But yeah, in LA, after two days people forget you exist, but everyone’s been super supportive. We’re all 10 years older now. We've been around forever at this point.

It can be dangerous to take those breaks when you’re figuring shit out, but there’s something very genuine to this comeback you’re having.

Thank you, thank you. We’ve been in and out of those fucking showrooms in Paris for long enough. I've been in and out of these factories for the past 10 years of my life. We had to figure something out. And I think now really diving in, being in Italy full time and being there to develop these products over time, I think that the whole thing just really shows the suppliers respect you more. The people who are making your goods understand why you're making them. And I think now I finally got to the place where I'm not making Italian things, I’m making my clothes, I'm making Cali-centric shit, but with that European technicality and execution. With this Fall / Winter collection, it clicked.

So what’s the vision for the next year? What are you manifesting?

I'm just fucking relentless, bro. This is the way I want to live my life. Now that we are more aligned, more prepared, and have more experience, moving forward it is just more of becoming a fully functioning company that can provide and create opportunities for all of the people around me. We’ve been operating just on instinct for a long time.

Sustaining a business is scary, trust me I know.

Scary as fuck, dog. I just opened a store next to Bottega, bro, and it’s like what am I even doing? You have to just believe in the thing you're doing more than anybody else.

100%, and it seems like that’s what you’re doing.

And fashion’s kind of a competitive sport, as much as people don’t think it is. We can reach a certain level without losing ourselves. My biggest ambition at the moment is to create something that, when you leave one of our neighbors you come into our place you don’t feel that the level has been sacrificed at all. And it’s not easy.

Definitely. I wish I could be there tomorrow.

Thank you, bro. 10 years now. You’ve always shown me so much love. We have to do a booth or have the office part of the next 424 day. Shit let’s do a 424 day in New York.

That would be sick. Let's do it. I'm here. Let’s catch up soon.

Next season’s right around the corner so I’ll see you in Paris.

Yes, see you in Paris and Happy 424 day!

Fashion

Luis De Javier's Puta Takeover

April 25, 2024

Last night with Luis De Javier, guests were overheard confirming this generation's most vital conundrum: “If I’m cunt, I can still be pussy.” “And if you’re pussy, you can still be cunt.” This sentiment echoed throughout the night as we celebrated De Javier’s first-ever streetwear collection, "Puta". We spent seven hours at Ella Funt at a dinner turned party that only he could’ve thrown (co-hosted by emcee). It was too dark for even the most aspiring-to-look-mysterious of us to wear sunglasses inside. Under the semi-oppressive flash of party photographers, we danced as much as the space would allow, drank tequila out of teacups and kissed each other on the cheeks with a vaguely European intimacy. “I’m doing streetwear!” De Javier could be heard exclaiming — whether it be in disbelief or excitement, we couldn’t tell you.

Words and photos by Izzy Capulong

The Spanish-born London-based designer has been well-loved for his genderless tailoring, latex mastery, and overall message of empowerment. Dressing everyone from ravers to A-listers, De Javier’s latest drop pushes his design repertoire to a new level. “While designing for my celebrity clientele and showcasing my creations on the runway has always been my dream,” he notes, “It’s equally important to me that my brand resonates with a wider, more diverse audience.” While this collection’s medium has shifted from corsets to sweatshirts, the classic LDJ avant-garde sensibilities remain. Bikinis and booty shorts are shamelessly emblazoned with “PUTA,” blazers are constructed with ample shoulder padding, and I had my eye on the cheekily-named “Faguette Bag.”

The Puta collection will be available exclusively on emcee.

Fashion

Nadia Lee Cohen Celebrates Paris Texas Launch at the Chateau

To celebrate the launch, Cohen and founder and creative director of Paris Texas, Annamaria Brivio hosted an intimate dinner at the Chateau Marmont pictured below. Arman Naféei entertained guests throughout the evening with a special playlist he curated for the occasion.