An Exclusive Interview With Jeff Staple On The PUMA x STAPLE Collaboration, New Book And Streetwear Culture - Men's Folio
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An Exclusive Interview With Jeff Staple On The PUMA x STAPLE Collaboration, New Book And Streetwear Culture

  • By Charmaine Tan

It’s not every day you get to meet someone as influential as Jeff Staple (née Jeffrey Ng), the only person who has managed to elevate the New York City pigeon into an international status and street cred symbol. So when he came down for the launch of the PUMA x STAPLE collection and the attendance of Sneakercon SEA, we had to have a chat.

As a part of the trailblazers that saw and helped transform an underground subculture into a multi-million-dollar cultural force, Jeff saw the best and worst of this ongoing era, taking notice of what from history has gone for good or come back to make its rounds with a new crowd. This latest PUMA x STAPLE collection is proof of that wisdom and his influential hand at mastering meaningful connections with creatives and fans — read on for an exclusive interview with Jeff, where he shares the story behind the PUMA x STAPLE collection, his new book with Rizzoli, the streetwear climate today and more.

How has Singapore been treating you so far?
Singapore has been amazing. Honestly, I had such an incredible trip. The people really came out and supported all the different endeavours I was doing, whether it was a Puma drop, a book release or a collaboration with Mr Sabotage. It’s just been an amazing time. Of course, the food is amazing too. The weather could have been a little bit better, but c’est la vie. It’s Singapore.

What does it feel like to see STAPLE come all this way? It must have been impressive for you to see an overview of all your work and your journey put in this book.
On one hand, I just feel blessed and honoured when I look back at the work that I’ve done because for most of the 25 years, since I started STAPLE, I was very much just head down, working really hard on it and not ever really looking backwards and patting myself on the back. I think that’s a kind of a normal Asian thing to do, right? We never want to celebrate our wins too hard; we just want to work hard. So I think I’ve been doing that for most of my career. Even the book itself wasn’t even my idea, so when I was given the opportunity to do that and look back on my life like that, it still is crazy.

But honestly speaking, there’s still a part of me that is uncomfortable looking at the book and seeing everything I’ve done. I think both from the point of “Oh my God, this is a lot of stuff that I did” and the fact that I get a little stressed out about all the work that I’ve done. I just want to move ahead and not look back.

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Were there any moves or projects in your career that you would undo or redo have given a chance?
Absolutely not. I’m so, again, blessed and honoured to be in the position that I’m in now that I don’t regret any of the missteps I have made in the past or the things I may have regretted doing at the time. All those paths led me to where I am today, so asking myself constantly if I could have been better is not a way to live. You should always be very appreciative of the current moment you’re living in.

Did compiling the book also lead you to rediscover projects that surfaced any interesting episodes or memories?
Yes. Something really cool about the book you’ll notice if you get to look through it is that on some of the projects we featured, we reached out to the other party — collaborator, artist or brand representative — that worked on the project as well. So it was really cool to see the project through their eyes in interview format, so you’ll be able to read some of those transcripts where we interview people that I collaborated with.

We worked hard together on it, we released it, and it’s really great, but it’s not often that you get to sit back and have the luxury of being able to do a post-mortem and talk about how it went, how it could have gone better. And you also know what they loved about it. So it was fun to do that and read that.

Actually, I wasn’t involved in that process. My editor, Emily Suzuki, was involved, so I didn’t really read those copies until the book was printed. So it was kind of a surprise to me, too, to see some of those words.

Personally, do you think you have shaped streetwear culture to be what it is today? How do you feel about you and STAPLE’s influence on this industry?
It’s hard for me to say. I don’t know, I think. I’ve done a lot, been around a lot and seen a lot of things. I’d like to consider myself an expert by virtue of the amount of time and exposure that I’ve been to this, so I will say that whether I helped shape it or not, is not something that’s for me to decide. I think the public and the community at large are to say that. I think it’s weird for someone to be like, “I shaped my industry”. I think the industry has to say it.

 

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If you could name someone that has been a big inspiration to your creative work or ethic, who would that be?
The name that jumps out to me is Hiroshi Fujiwara of Fragment. This is actually how my book came to be. When Hiroshi came out with the Fragment book with Rizzoli a couple of years ago, he asked me if I would be interested in writing the foreword for it, and of course, I was more than honoured to do so. And so he told Rizzoli, “Oh, my friend Jeff in New York will be writing the forward”, and they didn’t think anything of it. When I finally submitted the copy to Rizzoli, and they saw the e-mail address, which was my work e-mail, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re Jeff Staple. We didn’t know that you were the Jeff that was writing the foreword” and they said that they would love to do a book with me as well. That’s how my book came to be — through writing Hiroshi’s foreword. Hiroshi has to be mentioned at the top of the list when you ask this question about inspiration and creative work.

A large part of your work comes from collaborations. What has been your favourite or most memorable STAPLE collaboration?
There’s a section in this book in the back half that is dedicated to all our collaborations, and they’re alphabetically listed from A-Z. One of the reasons why we did that was because if they were in any other order, it would have been unfair. You know, if we put them in from the deepest to the shallowest, the most long-standing, or if in chronological order, none of that would have been fair.

Alphabetically was really the most diplomatic way to treat them equally, and that’s the way I thought about them even when we did the event at Limited Edition because people were bringing things from my collaboration with Mighty Jaxx, PUMA, Nike, and even a pet toy brand called Zee.Dog. We did a pet supply collaboration, which is not something that you would necessarily think about when you think “streetwear”, but here is this fan who has cherished this pet toy so much that they never even took it out of the box, and is now having me sign it — these moments bring me huge joy as well, even just as much as the sort of obvious choices like a sneaker or something like that.

I think they all hold equal value. For me, it’s the entirety of the collection of collaborations that’s the true thing that I’m most proud of.

 

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As someone who has pioneered what has somewhat become the go-to survival plan for streetwear brands today, do you think collaborations have reached a saturation point?
That’s funny. The go-to survival plan for streetwear. I don’t know if that’s really the way, to be honest. I honestly question myself sometimes if I did it the right way by having a clothing line, a creative agency, and even now a Web3 NFT company and then, you know, having sort of like me be a “speaking head” or KOL of the industry. Those are kind of like four separate businesses, and I’m also involved on an advisory level in other businesses too. Sometimes I wonder if I took all of that time and energy and I put it into just one thing, like just the creative agency or just the clothing line, would I be more successful, happier, richer or more famous? I’m not sure, so I don’t know if I would advise a youngster or a kid to follow my path exactly because I sometimes second-guess it myself.

But to answer your question about collaborations. I think there’s a lot more. I know there’s a lot more. There used to be, maybe like, one a month. Now there are about 40 a day. If you just look at Hypebeast or a similar site, you’ll see it. So I think there’s way more. And with that, there are way more bad ones. If you add tons of quantity to something, you are inevitably going to get poorer quality standards, and I tend to think that the really good, timeless ones still rise to the top.

Just by virtue of the law of averages, there are going to be more great collaborations. So, for example, back in the day, out of ten collaborations, eight of them were probably really, really, really good, and two of them were bad. Now, let’s say you have 100 collaborations. I think you have more than eight really, really good ones; maybe 20 really good ones and 80 not-so-good ones. But the net of it is that you still have more good collaborations than you did before; you just have to sift out the bad and trashy ones and get to the root of what’s good. I think that’s the difference between collaborations back then and today.

Speaking of collaborations, your collection with PUMA is inspired by Gidra, an Asian-American student-run newspaper created in response to anti-Asian sentiments in 1969. Since you’ve seen streetwear grow into a culture on its own, and more importantly, as someone with Asian heritage living in NYC, do you think Asian street culture is starting to influence Western street culture versus the other way around? How do you feel about the dynamics of influence in the very globalised streetwear culture today?
You nailed it about the reasoning for why I did the PUMA x Gidra collection. I wanted to do a couple of things. One is to raise awareness for anti-Asian sentiments and the fact that history does repeat itself; it’s naive for us to think that because it happened in the past, it won’t happen again, and we see proof of that. That’s why I wanted to resurrect the concept from back in the day in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that something like a Gidra is needed today, so I decided to bring it back through my collaboration with PUMA. It’s great because PUMA is a globally recognised athletic and fashion brand, so it’s great to use its platform to raise awareness of Gidra and have people talk about it.

The other thing is to raise awareness that I am of Asian descent. I think a lot of people don’t know that. I have a name called Jeff Staple, so it’s not obvious. I know a lot of my fans, especially from the clothing line, have no idea what I look like, so I wanted to raise awareness of that. I also think because I’m of Asian descent, and my business is flourishing in Eastern Asia, it’s important for us to start having conversations between the East and the West. I want there to be more dialogue between Southeast Asians, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese in mainland China with their Asian-American counterparts, and I think we could learn a lot from each other culturally on one side and authentically to street culture on the other side. If we started having more conversations, I think it’ll be better for the future of street culture in general.

I can’t talk about collaborations without asking for your opinion on this. How do you feel about luxury’s love for streetwear now?
I think it’s great. I think it’s awesome that they’re pouring in more dollars, more support, and more visibility overall into street culture. On the same token, I think people who have lived and breathed streetwear from day one have to be very cognisant and aware that luxury will leave us one day. For you to think that we can always rely on this influx of eyeballs and money, and support is short-sighted. Luxury just wants to go to what will make money, whether that is through a high fashion designer from Central Saint Martins; graffiti artist; sneaker designer; DJ; punk rocker; actor — whatever it is, they’re going to go to where the money is. As long as we’re aware of that and we know that’s going to happen, then it’s all good because this relationship between luxury and streetwear is a win-win situation.

Do you think the involvement of these heritage-rich luxury houses dilutes what makes streetwear culture a culture? Has it become just a genre of wear or do you think this involvement propels positive mutual growth for both industries?
I think it doesn’t dilute streetwear. I think the great thing about streetwear is that it is already a combination mix. When I started STAPLE, there was no such thing as streetwear or street culture. There was hip-hop culture for Black kids who rap; skateboard culture for White kids who skated; punk rock culture for White kids who rocked out; sneaker culture for athletes. That’s it. And what happens when you start to mix those things together? Black kids listening to punk rock, and skateboarding, white kids rapping. Punk rockers start listening to hip-hop music, all of them rocking sneakers. Suddenly, a punk rock head is wearing Air Jordan 1s and Converse Chuck Taylors into a mosh pit. These kinds of mash-ups were what created street culture in my mind. Luxury, to me, is just another ingredient to add to street culture.

Now, I think the other way around is where we have to be a little bit more cognisant. As I said, luxury won’t always have a place for streetwear. When Virgil (Abloh) (rest in peace) was at Louis Vuitton, his show featured Kendrick Lamar singing, Future doing graffiti, and things like that. But there’s going to be a day when luxury goes back to stuffy, old people walking down a simple runway. I can bet you any amount of money that is going to happen, and probably fairly soon, because they just want to be, again, where the money is and where the pendulum swings. So that’s an inevitability.

The good thing is you could look at it as streetwear gets to take the DNA of what it has learned from luxury, and luxury gets to have the cool factor now. We just have to be aware that one day, luxury is going to abandon street culture, and that’s totally fine because that’s their job, but we shouldn’t get upset or sad about that.

 

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Lastly, what is the story behind your most prized sneaker?
I don’t know what my most prized sneaker is. I have over 4000 pairs of shoes in my collection, and I don’t plan on getting rid of them anytime soon. I actually love the entire collection, so my goal would be to have my whole collection archived because I think a lot of my shoes are unknowns. They’re not the usual hype sneakers, and I think when you see a full collection of them, you start to understand the thinking of why I liked each shoe. You get to know me a little bit more and understand my vision through my collection of shoes.

I’m looking forward to doing that and you know to your question, I hope my whole collection is highly prized. But again, that’s also going back to being a legend or something like that (laughs). It’s not for me to decide whether my collection or prize is prized. It’s up to the people to decide, so I’m looking forward to sharing my whole collection one day.

This interview has been edited for clarity and accuracy.

Once you’re done with this interview, click here to catch up with the April 2023 issue of Men’s Folio Singapore.