CARLOS wearing a superleggero in Napoli, Spring 2011.

We say branding is a kind of cultural location of the object, you have the object then you have the branding which locates the object.  When I was in New York in the offices of the world’s leading streetwear brand’s offices they said ‘You know J. will do expensive things of an excellent quality but he’ll also do cheap things, but if they’re cheap they have to look cheap, you know?  You have to get that cheap look just right.”  Nobody likes it when the branding’s wrong.  We’re in a period of analysis right now, we’re taking stock, the giants left on the face of the earth are brands, things that started just as surnames, live on powerfully, their image has a life of their own, the designers in the offices get sucked into it, work in its thrall.  The most subversive thing you can do is make the brand so potent its copy-able.  Designers 20 years ago were still thinking that the politics was in the object and they were interested in perfecting pocket details, now all the cutting edge people know production of the brand’s object is just a symbolic sideshow, a carrier for the digital dispersal of information.  Photo and text Lodovico Pignatti Morano.

New Museum toilet self-portraits are turning into the new New York autoportrait tourist essential, my companion on the visit told me the ladies was full of a group of gossiping Venuzuelan women marvelling at the tiles also taking photos with snatches of themselves in the mirror.  There really is no need to be ashamed there everybody knows exactly what you’re hip to – just point, hold and shoot it clean.
The hat is sottozero, black, worn with a cuff (slightly older kids wear it with the cuff a little longer and higher on the crown of their head).  The jacket is the legendary Futuradosmil’s personal old Descente cycling jacket (FL version) gifted to me by him personally in his flat the previous day – he gave it to me worn, with smells and everything, a smell which wasn’t for everybody so I sprayed some of my friend’s Hermés scent on the collar, a small bottle from an airport 3 pack, and wore it like that the whole trip, with a very distinct mix of scents wafting up pressing against my neck’s obscenely young skin. Photo and text Lodovico Pignatti Morano.