Sam Nivola is Obsessed with Movies
For all of the complex and diverse mechanisms that can go into producing a good performance, acting is always ultimately distilled into a final product: something to watch. To love acting, it follows that you first have to love watching. And when I speak with Sam Nivola—breakout star of The White Lotus—in the few days following the show’s finale, he talks a lot about simply loving movies. Raised by two exceptional actors, Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola, the young actor’s path to our screens for the past eight Sunday nights was informed by his love of sitting down and watching a good movie.
VMAN 54: A Day in the Life of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
On the court, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is an assassin. The Canadian basketball player boasts a unique play style, equally beloved by basketball nerds recognizing specific moves and counters and newfound fans who get lost in his balletic flurry of movement. It’s a chameleonic game in the modern era. Eschewing the current NBA’s hyperfixation with three-point shooting, Shai is the league’s most lethal midrange shooter, a crafty and dynamic finisher—a threat from every spot on the court. He’ll even float a left-handed finger roll loftily past a suspicious but helpless defender. Then, he’ll head to the post-game conference in head-to-toe Ferragamo and tinted shades.
OKANE is Bringing Fashion's Past Into the Present
With the dissolution of the boundary between high fashion and the more utilitarian forms of clothing in the past decade or so, a new obstacle has emerged. How does an artist create clothing that nods to the beauty and delicacy of the ornate without sacrificing wearability? The process of overcoming this dilemma is at the center of the design ethos for Alex O’Kane, the man behind his eponymous NYC label OKANE. A collection of immensely well crafted minimalist but inspired pieces, OKANE is a demonstration of the means through which historical garments can be anachronistically thrust through time into the present, while maintaining a cohesive vision.
Summer Is For The T-Shirt And Nostalgia Dressing
Summer is the anti-clothing season. Whereas fall and winter are characterized by their excess—layering, the clashing of textures, superfluous draping—summer is often about wearing the least you can. And for many of us who love getting dressed, it can feel harder to dress distinctively when operating within these parameters. That said, the practice of finding deeply personal and reliable pieces—even in the hottest season—is a surefire way to maintain a sense of self.
The Passion of Hoops: How Bristol Studio Brings Basketball to Life
In a sequence of He Got Game that uniquely breaks the fourth wall, ”Jesus Shuttlesworth'' delivers directly to camera, smirking: “Basketball is like poetry in motion.” This motif of Spike Lee’s 1998 homage to basketball embodies how a lot of us appreciate the game throughout our lives. When you strip back the sport’s largely unachievable pursuit of greatness and acclaim, what remains is perhaps the purest distillation of the game: poetry. Whether it’s the aesthetic or the rush of endorphins that perfectly coincides with the trademark sound of leather swooshing through nylon, basketball is a feeling. And this feeling will endure far longer than the actual quest to become a professional player.
The Revival of Volcom Entertainment: A Conversation with CMO, Snowboarder and Punk Rocker Ryan Immegart
“I feel Volcom is the embodiment of this irrational pursuit of passion,” Ryan Immegart, former Volcom athlete and present-day CMO, tells me as we wrap up a conversation about the future of the iconic boardsports brand. As a member of the Volcom family for over three decades, Ryan is uniquely poised to share some insight about what’s going on with the brand right now—specifically the exciting revival of Volcom Entertainment, an initiative he worked to start in the ‘90s. He and I caught up about his journey as a pro snowboarder, the pivot into the brand side at Volcom, and the future of the brand.
A Sartorial Cure For Shin Splints
There’s an impostor syndrome that looms over anyone adjacent to the world of fashion who cannot actually design. It’s a feeling akin to shame; How am I supposed to be able to competently interview designers—or even simply get dressed—if I have no idea how the fuck to make clothing?
The thing that has given me some solace in this anxiety is the concept of wearing clothes themselves as a process. The production of clothing is not a binary: garment doesn’t exist, garment exists. Rather, each instance of wearing is part of an ever-evolving voyage towards concocting an item that is singularly mine. The loafers I bought in Amsterdam five years ago were not the loafers I am wearing today.
Danny Cole Has Broken the Mold of a Traditional Artist, and Countless Records Along the Way
“I think that Creature World's ability to magnetically attract people that have wonder in their eyes, and put them all together… That’s really special to me,” Danny Cole smiles to me, cocooned in a bean bag chair in his sun-lit Williamsburg apartment. It’s been a busy year for Danny. Over 38,000 versions of Crowd sold on OpenSea—a record-breaking quantity. He just minted a whopping 109,000 iterations of Size Creature, essentially an unorthodox mechanic for distributing the lookbook for Creature World’s on-going clothing collection.
Bandit Running is More than a Brand, It’s a Community
“It's a really stylish, community-centered, performance running apparel brand,” Tim West, co-founder of Bandit Running explains to me, the adjectives rolling off his tongue with an agility that suggests there are many more to come, before he continues: “That kind of hits all the notes in a short sentence. But if you ask me how it was different, I might dive into community. Or the nuances of the design, and the feeling that you have. And why it's not products that are chasing trends.”
Tim's brother and co-founder Nick elaborates: "The mission is 'Evolve Running.' We're thinking through every touch point in the runner's journey." I spent an afternoon at Bandit’s sunny Greenpoint storefront to catch up with co-founders Tim, Nick and Ardith Singh, to hear about the trajectory of the brand thus far and what’s to come.
Podcast
For two years, I was a cohost of the 7:31am podcast, a daily news show covering the intersection of sports, pop culture, fashion, web3 and gaming. In addition to cohosting the show, I helmed the script writing for a majority of episodes. We produced over 400 episodes and netted over 1 million listens throughout its run, garnering sponsorships from HP, Washington DC”s tourism bureau and more.