You might never have owned a pair of Buffalo London’s platform sneaker-boot hybrids. But if you picked up a music, fashion, or youth culture magazine in the 1990s you will remember the ads: monumental Buffalos front and center, black-lit club-kitted models crouched behind. The ads were channeling the scene where the boots first blew up – the rave and techno explosion in mid-1990s Frankfurt – but it was the Spice Girls that marched Buffalo’s platforms into the mainstream, towering 10cm off the ground. These were shoes that make the still-trending chunky “dad” sneakers of the last few seasons look svelte. Shitkickers as good for the club as for the Y2K apocalypse.
When Buffalo London relaunched a line of unaltered classics a couple years ago, a new generation embraced the rave-era treads. This time their popularity is about more than goths or girl bands: they represent the excitement of the underground and the creative potential of the hybrid. (One continuity: who doesn’t want to look taller?)
So how do you elevate the world’s loftiest sneaker? Buffalo London by 032c takes the material route, combining 6cm of Buffalo’s signature industrial-grade sole with luxury leather uppers that nod to the equestrian-inspired boots of Europe’s heritage brands. True to 032c Ready-to-Wear’s fusional ethos, where experimental clubwear meets high-end womenswear, Buffalo London by 032c’s Jodphurankleboots and Over The Knee thigh-highs look great at the rave – and at the end of the world – but also at the cocktail party, the conference, the studio. (You’ll certainly see them around the 032c Workshop, which combines most of the above.)
For the campaign, 032c fashion director Marc Goehring tapped our sales director Nunguja Kislaya and photographer Vitali Gelwich for a studio shoot in Berlin. The resulting visuals channel the up-close energy of the original Buffalo London print ads, and update the look with clothing from the latest 032c Ready-to-Wear collection.
Buffalo London by 032c styles were teased on the runway during the first 032c Ready-to-Wear fashion show, which took place at 180 The Strand in London in late 2018. Today, they launch globally, after an event in London last night at Brown’s East.
At their store on Alte Schönhauserstrasse in Berlin, Japanese footwear mainstays Onitsuka Tiger held a Japan-themed mini festival to herald the arrival of the OK Basketball MT and the OK Basketball Lo: two new shoes inspired by the groundbreaking design that ignited the Onitsuka Tiger brand almost 70 years ago.More
Omar Epps is a 21st century Renaissance Man. After an early life rapping as part of hip hop crew Wolfpack in Brooklyn, New York, the young Epps followed his talent into acting alongside Tupac Shakur in Harlem drama "Juice." Now a father of three who recently published his first book, "From Fatherless to Fatherhood," versatile Epps was tapped by basketball and streetwear retailer KICKZ, who have partnered with Champion for a limited capsule collection, Never Not Ballin', on the occasion of their 25th anniversary.More
WHAT WE BELIEVE began as a series of keywords designed to circumvent the conflict adverse atmosphere of a “post-everything” culture. As it evolved, it became 032c’s guide for doing business, a fluid set of protocols for an age of uncertainty.
WHAT WE BELIEVE is provocative of the present-tense tensions that contribute to the new. It embraces doubt not as a critical scapegoat for techno-cultural insecurity, but as a starting point towards decision-making. As Kanye West once told a group of Oxford students, it could be “completely fucking with you, and the world, the entire time.” It then moves past doubt, with a Kanye-level measure of conviction. WHAT WE BELIEVE harvests energy from the irritations and confrontations of the now, in the service of the future.
Energy is the capacity to do work, and to produce change. It may well produce change, but will never quantitatively undergo it. It is contained in every object, person, animal and system. By the laws of energy conservation, it cannot be lost or, despite the usual eco-vocabulary, wasted. Thermodynamic entropy will cool your soup or melt the ice cubes in your drink, but as a measure of disorder and chaos in media as well as physics, entropy is an overlooked function. With information entropy, noise balances that information by increasing with it, as nonsense does with sense. Messages are thus communicated transformatively, without for a second losing power. That is the process that incurs the most powerful and productive kind of change.
Sex is at once the most commercialized thing on the planet and the most resistant to commercialization. It has been made phenomenally public and yet it remains deeply private. It is an instance or state of being that is thought and talked about constantly, but not in any proper terms, because it is a physical matter, a question of impulse, not intellect. It is beautiful and it is horrifying. It is impermeable to the perversion of culture and it is the perversion of culture. So it is, officially, the most mysterious non-mystery ever – a paradox so unfathomable that the only thing to do about it is embrace our fascination. Obsess about it. Reproduce it, and sell it. Censor it. Celebrate it. Practice it as much as possible. It will never lose interest, and it will never lose power. Fighting it is to fight a losing battle. So just let sex win.
Below: Robert Mapplethorpe, “Joe Rubberman,” 1978. Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Schulte. Copyright Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. READ Wilson on Mapplethorpe.
