At Stüssy, the design team lives by a rule: If your friends don’t want the stuff you’re making, you’ve got a problem. Put another way, it’s a potent piece of design
wisdom: Surround yourself with tasteful friends and just...make clothes they want to wear.
Stüssy has been doing that for 40 years now, and the brand is celebrating the occasion with a series of collaborations. For the latest, they went straight to a few of those friends, working with Tremaine Emory, Ade “Acyde” Odunlami, and Brock Korsan—a.k.a. No Vacancy Inn, the creative collective and DJ crew whose projects range from soundtracking GQ parties in Paris to designing limited-edition New Balance 990s—on a plush corduroy suit, an easy trench, tailored sweats, a tie-dye sweater, and a bag to put it all in. Okay—but did their friends want in?
Stüssy has gone through several eras since the departure of cofounder Shawn Stüssy in 1996, and the current one, under the direction of CEO David Sinatra and brand director Fraser Avey, is deeply intertwined with No Vacancy Inn. As the story goes, around the time Sinatra and Avey took the reins, in 2011, they met Emory and Acyde by chance at a club in London.
This was years before No Vacancy became the fashion world’s hottest party headliner, but both were deep Stüssy heads: Emory had ended up in London after attempting to get a job at the NYC Stüssy store, and Acyde came up in the city’s nascent streetwear and DJ scene. “In London in the mid-’90s, if you saw someone wearing a Stüssy T-shirt, you pretty much had to talk to them, because it wasn’t available in the way it is available now,” Acyde said on a recent Zoom call. Back then, the brand had relationships with DJs and party people from Los Angeles to Tokyo to Bali: the so-called International Stüssy Tribe, which included the likes of culty Japanese designer Hiroshi Fujiwara and Clash guitarist Mick Jones. Sinatra and Avey were looking to reboot the brand’s legendary hangs for the hype generation.
Stüssy and No Vacancy started throwing parties together in a mutually beneficial arrangement: Stüssy got to rekindle the chaos and exuberance of the ’90s, and No Vacancy, which officially formed in 2015, got to pop off in LA, London, Tokyo, and Bali, building their reputation with every stop. “We came together at a great time,” said Sinatra, whose father, Frank Sinatra Jr. (no relation to the other Frank), co-founded the brand with Shawn Stüssy in 1984. “Fraser and I were kind of starting out at Stüssy, and while a younger kid might look at Stüssy and think we always had great events and our parties are always going to be popping, that might not have been the case before this. We kind of built that part of our brand again with [No Vacancy] the same time they were building their brand.”
Accordingly, the clothes, according to Emory, are “not really a collaboration. It’s more like a summation of friendship and work together.” “We all had the idea of a wardrobe that would encompass everything a man might need to go to Miami for the weekend,” Korsan said. If it didn’t seem glamorous in the pre-pandemic era, the life of a busy fashion DJ now seems impossibly so. But when you’re flying in and out of different cities every weekend, you’re faced with a profound packing conundrum, which is that you need to drip like a king on Friday and Saturday night and hold it down in the Delta lounge the next morning, all while cramming your fits into a carry-on.