Fuck, I feel older. But, so old. On the slope going along into the unloading bay of the Tempodrom performance centre in Berlin, I am stumbling in a heaving, exuberant, and really up-for-it crowd of people. We are awaiting the venue’s access for Shayne Oliver’s Anonymous Club present. It’s safe to say I have always felt every passing month as keenly—or never so strongly, more accurately—as I do at this very life moment.
A towering, lanky kid is next to me, and he could n’t look more Berlin if he tried ( this is a compliment, by the way ), while wearing what appears to be a pair of riveted No Faith Studios raver denims with an electric blue fake furry fox tail hanging off of them. However, behind me, is the very great ( and very nice, and highly skilled ) Gerrit Jacob, the architect who has been serving up all sorts of lovely looks for Dua Lipa. Berghain would be the club where we would be waiting to enter a team rather than a show.
With the sound of chirping birds, the kind of sweet stop you may hear from a small bird about to take off on Snow White’s hands, slowly turning into a grinding, incessant, tumultuous wall of sound that is making every single one of my fillings shiver as I sit in my seat. Like I said: I feel so, so old.
But I will tell you what’s not old, and definitely isn’t aging any time soon: Oliver’s brilliance at working intuitively within the idiom of the everyday—jeans, sweats, tees, hoodies, and parkas—and making it all magical. It’s been a while since I’ve had the pleasure of clapping eyes on one of Oliver’s shows. His large, bold Hood By Air heists in New York, IMO, were a must-see at the time. However, Oliver has since moved to Berlin and founded his somewhat new label Anonymous Club. New York’s loss has been this city’s major gain.
The label’s name has a kind of delicious irony, of course, because anonymous is not something that he could ever be. That creative and original Oliver’s film is outstanding. ( Sorry, kilometer: We are in Europe. ) It’s evident in this collection’s dominant silhouette, which sees the collar and shoulder line of any given garment morph upwards into a dramatic cowling hood, all of that controlled, almost sculpted volume up top contrasting with what’s going on below. Some pieces may have the Anonymous Club logo emblazoned on them, while others have Shayne Oliver, who is in script, whose work is more obscurely displayed on the back.