May 25, 2005

Molly Crabapple

by Liberation Iannillo

After spending even a short amount of time with Molly Crabapple I get the feeling that she is from another time period. Her style, poise and wicked sense of humor seem more appropriate for a European courtesan than a present day artist living in New York City. Her illustration work possesses a sharp and worldly intelligence which should come as no surprise considering Crabapple has traveled Europe, Africa and had landed herself in a Turkish jail all before the age of 21.

Upon graduating High School early, Molly began traveling the world. “I had an epic plan of going to Europe which was based on nothing but reading The Diary of Anais Nin.” She had originally planned on being in Europe for only three months but stayed much longer. “I started doing all sorts of things to horrify my dear mother,” she says.

While in Paris and searching for new digs, Molly paid a visit to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. “It was inhabited by professional paupers,” she says, “I had heard of the place but I didn’t know they let people live there.” She spoke to the shop owner with the notion of impressing him with her illustrations. The curious man, claiming to be the bastard son of Walt Whitman, said to her “Honey, there is no miracle greater than being a young girl in Paris in the spring…be my little daughter!” The other girls living in the bookstore convinced Molly that the owner wasn't a pervert so she moved in.

Molly showed her illustrations to a Parisian boyfriend who bluntly told her the work was “crap” and bought her a beautiful notebook, saying “fill it with something good.” Not wanting to ruin the book, Molly made a conscious effort to improve her pen and ink drawings. Molly’s lavish pen and ink technique comes from hours spent copying Alice in Wonderland and A Tart’s Progess. At the time Molly was annoyed by the directness of the comment but she later found it to be motivational. “If I didn’t have someone criticizing me like that I never would have gotten so much better.”

Molly then traveled to the Middle East simply because “chicks don’t so that.” “I made a trip to Eastern Turkey. I studied Turkish on my own so I knew just enough of the language to get myself into trouble,” she says. Molly decided that Kurdistan would be an excellent place for a young woman traveling alone to be a trouble maker. “I’d say things to the Kurds like, “Say, that Turkish government …tell me what you think of that!” Amazingly Molly wasn’t killed though she did catch the eye of a few bored and lonely military police who took her into custody. “There were a lot of young guys who were drafted into the army and are stuck in the middle of nowhere with guns and nothing to do and no one will talk to them. They took me to their station and they had me there with the machine guns and the dogs and they’re giving me tea and asking me ‘so in America, do you wear the mini skirt, no?’ At that point I was convinced I was going to die, (laughs).” I wish I had some bold tale of escape but I really just burst into tears.” They took me back to my hotel where the hotel owner laughed at me. Ever since my travels there, I’ve become more tolerant of New York street harassment,” says Crabapple.

Molly’s intelligence and smart-ass sense of humor find their way into the illustrated world she creates in which playful and deviant characters hold court. “My subject matter comes from when I am sitting with my friends having coffee and bullshitting. I have a nasty sense of humor I suppose because I start mocking people and it finds its way to my illustrations,” say Crabapple. Molly did a series of illustrations based on “all the little demons that personify the vices and idiocies that afflict intellectuals. There is Prudence, she’s the one who bores people at parties and says things like ‘Truly, American foreign policy is going downhill; I wonder if we will continue to endanger the world like this.’”

Molly is currently working on a series of portraits of burlesque dancers and sideshow people. Aside from her illustration work, Molly also performs as a burlesque dancer. “I got into burlesque dancing because I wanted to sketch girls backstage,” she says. With her partner, Johnny Panama, the two perform a routine to Doris Day’s ‘Tea for Two’ which culminates with Molly raping her partner on stage. Crabapple says of her act, “It’s very crowd pleasing.”

Molly’s work has been published in Screw Magazine and New York Press.

On The Web | www.mollycrabapple.com

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Eric Orr

Eric Orr's career as an artist began in the '70s when he was writing on the streets of New York City. Now some 20+ years later, his career is going strong. In his first podcast with Trigger Radio Eric discusses his newly painted room in Hotel des Arts, a hotel in San Francisco where artists from around the world are given the opportunity to transform a hotel into a work of art.

Related Links:

www.bravemind.com/ericart/ericartindex.html

http://www.triggermagazine.com/archives/2005/03/eric_orr.html

www.sfhoteldesarts.com

Note: After thinking about it, I decided to leave the Gore B piece Eric and I discussed on its pole at 13th Street and 3rd Avenue. Instead of swiping it and sticking it on my wall next to my Rick Prol S.O.S., I made it a 'collaborative' effort.

- Liberation

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May 20, 2005

Rick Prol

Rick Prol, a prominent figure in the East Village art scene, recently sat down with Trigger Radio to discuss his roles as both artist and curator. The 'Vintage East Village' show which Rick curated is open at the Hal Bromm gallery until April 30th, 2005.

Related Links:

www.rickprol.com

http://www.triggermagazine.com/archives/interviews/rick_prol/index.html

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May 15, 2005

Spalding Rockwell

Interview by Liberation Iannillo

The name Spalding Rockwell might conjure up images of the fat, old, corporate men who should be on their way to a minimum security prison for the Enron debacle, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fronted by larger than life Nicole Lombardi and Marie Louise Platt, Spalding Rockwell bring their fusion of breathy-sleazy lyrics, dirty guitars and electronic fused rock n’ roll to the New York music scene as the latest incarnation of the downtown bombshell.

After some success with their punk band, Daughter, Nikki and ML formed Spalding Rockwell. In 2002, they worked with Electroclash icon Larry Tee and released their song “White Cotton Panties.” The song was a hit with the Electroclash scene and Spalding Rockwell found a whole new legion of fans to worship them despite the fact they are not an Electroclash band.

Their album Kate, which was written, performed, and produced entirely by Nikki and ML, is a collection of fractured personalities set to music. With Traci Lords-esque, horse whispering vocal styling mixed with aggressive guitars and sultry drum loops, Spalding Rockwell play up to their hot-chicks-with-guitars image in a very tongue-in-cheek way. They’re in on the joke.

We wanted a record you could dance to, fuck to and smoke to...something that you didn’t have to examine but if you did, you’d fine something there.

Liberation: How do you describe your sound? I found myself describing you to a friend as moody, the kind of music you put on when you’re either getting ready to go out, when you want to do pounds of coke, or when you want to fuck.

ML: That’s it! We wanted a record you could dance to, fuck to and smoke to. We wanted something that you didn’t have to examine but if you did, you’d fine something there. We tried not to take ourselves so seriously and kind of make fun of ourselves. It’s interesting because some people take certain things that we say so serious. In our song ‘Karahi’ there’s a line, “You should give me everything that I want in this life because I’m that good looking.” Who says that? It’s so brazen! If you decide that we are two hot chicks that are full of shit, then that’s what you’re going to find!

Nikki: We’ve had a lot of success with the records we’ve made. We made this other record with our band Daughter called Skin and it really hit home in the punk world. We released it on this Indie label and people were flipping out over it, the reviews were sick.

ML: Not many people know we have a legit, punk rock background.

Liberation: There are female artists like Joan Jett, Debby Harry, and Courtney Love that push things forward, and then there are the jig-dancing Ashley Simpsons of the world making an ass out of themselves on national television. Do you think it’s getting any easier for females in the predominately male rock world?

Nikki: Those two worlds are so different, the major label world and the world that we are in.

ML: Listen, when we go into a club not many people know that we engineer our own material. I can hook up and wire an entire studio and do sound at a club. So we walk into a club with heels and tight jeans and we’re like, “There’s a problem with the mic,” and they look at us like, “Yeah, like they know what they’re talking about.” There is a 15-20 minutes of adjustment time, like with the fish in the bag in the water and you let the temperature assimilate…same shit! You have to talk with them and give yourself a couple of opportunities to say something like call a cable an XLR and talk about RC connections or decibels.

And then they’re like, “Oh! OK, cool!” and then they see that there’s knowledge and I don’t know if it’s sex as much as it is knowledge and competence, where that’s the equalizer, when you can look at someone and say, “You work hard, you’re smart. I may not like your music but I respect you.”

When you’re a chick it’s almost like a smart girl’s club. You’re like a horse, you’re pulling a lot of weight behind you. It’s a burden, confidence is a burden

Liberation: That must be a funny transformation to watch.

ML: And of course when you’re a chick it’s almost like a smart girl’s club. You’re like a horse, you’re pulling a lot of weight behind you. It’s a burden, confidence is a burden.

Liberation: You have gotten to where you are because you know what you do and it’s unfortunate that you have to whip it out on the table to prove it.

ML: Right! Definitely! It’s as you say, there are so many examples of people that haven’t had to necessarily work. I think that bitch can wail, I’m being honest, I’ve heard her voice (Ashley Simpson) and I think she has a gorgeous voice. It’s husky, it’s raw. Nikki doesn’t think so.

Nikki: She’s alright.

ML: But do I resent the fact she’s had it real easy and played her first show to a stadium? Fuck yeah! But it’s like growing up and seeing someone with more money than you, you’re like, “I wish I had that dress.”

Nikki: Growing up in New York that was something that ML probably thought about more just because it’s more status conscious.

ML: I guess, but you were rich! You didn’t work a day in your life! (laughs)

Nikki: I’m not bitter. I don’t see Ashley Simpson as someone who didn’t have to work but she doesn’t know anything and she has a long fucking ride ahead of her before anybody takes her seriously. It’s cool, we’re slowly becoming these female figures that other girls will look at because we’re doing something different, and being strong. I feel like a force.

Liberation: That’s great that these girls have this respect for you based on your music and not for something vapid like a swimsuit calendar or pulling off your shirt at the Super Bowl. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a calendar or whipping out your tit.

ML: It’s different when you’re good looking and you take off your shirt, people resent it.

Nikki: We thought, we’re good looking so it’s going to be a leg up for us but in the music business but it’s actually worked against us. We thought we’d present ourselves as hot bitches and we wanted to be playful with what we wore but people were like…

Liberation: Sell out!

ML: Right! But if we were short and fat and ugly people would be like, “Empowerment! Take it all off!” It’s interesting to observe in different contexts. For us it’s about our talent, that’s what we want to shine through.

Liberation: Where did you guys meet?

ML: We met here in New York. I’m from New York and Nikki is from D.C. We ended up meeting one night through mutual friends and then a couple of years later we ran into each other again and I was dropping out of school and Nikki was a Junior at Tisch. I was like, “Dude, this whole college thing sucks” and she was like, “Dude, this whole acting thing sucks.” Fuck it, let’s just start a band!

Liberation: Do either of you have any type of musical background?

ML: Yes. Nikki was a ballerina so she was always around piano. My father played piano every day for at least three hours a night. But we started out as lyricists. When we first got together we found it really easy to write so we were seeking out people that were making beats.

Nikki: It was a very tiring process of meeting people and trying to hook it up so we just learned all the shit ourselves.

ML: All during that time we were looking over the shoulders of these people learning little by little over the year. And it was really a series of disappointments, like at the end of the day when you’ve spent all this time with these people who are donating their time and you don’t like it, it’s hard to…

Nikki: It’s hard to tell somebody that we don’t like it.

ML: It’s much easier for us when we started doing this shit ourselves and we could turn to one another…

Nikki: After two weeks of working on a track and think it’s bad.

Liberation: Do you like this ‘ Electroclash’ label?

Nikki: We’re not Electroclash. People want to call us an Electroclash band because we were associated with Larry Tee but we’re not Electroclash in the original sense of the word. Electroclash is very tongue-in-cheek and we are very earnest about the way we perform and the music we do. We never really fit in with the scene but somehow with the press we got labeled Electroclash because we worked with Larry. It was really cool at the time because before that we had had been playing in our punk band. We had played in rock clubs in the city and we thought the rock scene was pretty dead even though they say The Strokes came out of it. We were psyched because Larry would book us, we’d do our three songs and get paid at the end of the night.

ML: It was awesome! Before that we were playing for two people and now we’re playing for hundreds and they’re artists, musicians, photographers, they’re people starting magazines. We always tried so hard to fit in and make that work but there was something that didn’t fit. We were too rock n’ roll. We were too edgy, too left, or too complicated. We just grew out of it. Larry is awesome and said, “You girls are super stars! You’ve already outgrown me!” (laughs)

On The Web | www.spaldingrockwell.com

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May 5, 2005

Dan Witz

Interview by Mikal Saint George

Somewhere between quarter and mid life crisis we all realize that everything we believed in, everything that brought us to this moment in time, the very essence of our existence is a complete pile of crap. Only Paris Hilton can skip this moment, assuming she sees a shiny penny or a pretty bird.

Dan Witz is a prankster, a protagonist, an observant adult and gifted juvenile delinquent. One who can make his own bail and break curfew. Dan Witz is a home owner. Most of all Dan Witz is a painter. Regardless of brush stroke, paint, color, medium or canvas, Witz attempts to redistribute thoughts and reactions enabling one to experience a richer facet of their daily life than they had expected. Very often he succeeds.

Sometimes Dan Witz paints fires. Sometimes he paints humming birds. Sometimes the Grim Reaper. By turning the city into a personal canvas he has probably broken the law. He invites us to look but never demands. Instead he paints. And waits. He will catch your eye if you can still see beyond deadlines and the Barney’s sample sale.

He has flourished on the outside. He is comfortable on the inside. He has rebelled, repulsed, enchanted, angered, bemused, confused, kicked, smacked and courted. He has seen the acrid underbelly of urban life at its fetid best/worst. He has lived amongst urban decay, mass hysteria and plagues blacker than pitch. The only thing he has probably not done is brunch in Chelsea. Only hardened demons and retail buyers can handle that kind of heat.

MSG: You went to Cooper Union, what was your experience there like?

DW: Back then, the good art student was the rebellious art student, the one that didn’t fit in. I was actually a painter when I went there and I ended up in punk bands which was the traditional kind of trajectory for rebellious art students. It’s a good school, I did learn a lot. The only people I have ever heard of who have done anything from that school are people like me who basically didn’t belong, they didn’t fit in and were sort of marginalized. I don’t really have a great feeling about the place.

MSG: I have spoken to other artists who went to Cooper and they did not feel that they were encouraged to be artists by their teachers. They were basically told, “You can’t make any money as artists so don’t even try. We will cash your tuition check but don’t expect any support from us in pursuing your art.”

DW: Well, there is no tuition…

MSG: Right, I am generalizing while using the Cooper environment as an example but really my question is did you find that to be the prevalent academic attitude at the time?

DW: There was no conversation about career or preparation or anything. It was all about art. I guess it has changed a lot but I don’t remember any career stuff at all. It was the beginning of opportunism in the East Village but basically nobody expected to have a chance to do anything. To have a show in a gallery in the late 70’s, early 80’s you had to be in your 40’s, white, and a man. That’s why we all made bands and created performance art. That’s why I started doing street art. I did street art when I was at Cooper Union. I knew my stuff was never going to be in a gallery anyway.

MSG: When you are using the street, or the city as your canvas, what speaks to you? What says, “I am your canvas!” Is there any sort of processor does it just grab you?

DW: Well it depends on what I am thinking. For instance when I was doing the Hoodies, (referring to his grim reaper-esque hooded figures that found their way to countless, unexpected East Village locales,) it was all about the Lower East Side, all about where I lived. This was about 1994, 1995. AIDS was peaking, drug addiction was peaking. It was all abandoned buildings, everyone was sick. It was very dangerous. It was very bleak. So I put up a grim reaper warning figure. Interestingly, now it has no resonance. It has become a “brand” of mine.

MSG: What is it about a particular area or space that grabs your attention? Is it politically motivated?

DW: Sometimes it is about real estate. I did a piece in 1979 where I painted humming birds all around SoHo but not actually in SoHo because that is where all the rich white artists were but they weren’t letting me in! Then in 2002 I did another series of the humming birds. That’s when I was getting a kick out of the Lower East Side so I put them around my neighborhood as a sort of farewell. It was kind of political but still kind of a real estate – kind of a personal / political statement. Every few years I come up with something else.

MSG: Does the architecture or the economic condition of a particular area come into play with what you are doing?

DW: Totally. I am attracted to certain surfaces. I like certain graffiti, certain colors. For what I am doing now, I am looking for color. I spent a lot of time monochroming over the winter so now I am looking for bright colors. It can be something as simple as that. I cruise around, I get on the motorcycle and I look for colors I like.

MSG: Is there anyplace that you absolutely would not alter or paint or do something?

DW: Yeah. I am not really interested in “clean” places or “rich” places. I don’t really want to fuck up people’s houses. I have a house now! If someone wrote graffiti on my garage, I’d be pissed! I did a piece last year where I stapled a balloon on to someone’s house and made a clown nose…

MSG: I know. I saw it! I love it!

DW: Yeah, a very popular piece but I was thinking, what if some fucker did that to me! Would I leave it up? Would I want my house made into a clown nose house? I probably would have left it up because that is just me but I understand that people may not want that for their house. So I am looking for the in-between spaces, the spaces that are pretty much benignly neglected. It won’t bother too many but people will pass by and will see. It’s a common thing in our everyday lives, every block pretty much has a place like that.

MSG: Do you try to improve the space? The clown nose for example. Is part of the impetus to try to improve it esthetically?

DW: No.

MSG: That doesn’t play into it at all?

DW: That (the clown nose house) is to just get people to stop.

MSG: Mission accomplished!

DW: Even the little tiny things that I do, the little tiny humming birds or the little sticker things that I do, is just to make people stop and look! You think people’s eyes are open but people walk along in a trance! A lot of art is made to just keep people from walking around with their eyes closed and their minds closed. If they see some weird little thing on a wall maybe they will start looking around a little more astutely and maybe things like George Bush won’t happen. That sounds like a really big leap but artists think that way.

MSG: I happen to agree with it! What does the humming bird mean?

DW: It is a tag, a personal symbol. An animal I happen to identify with. They are fun to paint. They hover!

MSG: Some of them look so real!

DW: I learned from kids at Cooper Union how to paint very realistically. It’s kind of a parlor trick. It’s not really useful as an aesthetic strategy except, especially, on the street. The illusion makes people stop. Trompe L’oiel – to fool the eye – used to be a sort of lower caste of art trickery. I think it has great uses. It is almost kind of a low brow technique. People who see my art often aren’t “art smart” so they need an entry, a way to stop and then think about the political, economic etc.

MSG: How would you describe yourself as an artist?

DW: There is an interesting thing about me, maybe what you are looking for. I do the street and the gallery thing. I have a split and the two make a whole. One by themselves wouldn’t be enough. I am really interested in traditional white, elitist power structure art stuff. I love museums. I love old art. If I could be anything I would just make paintings and put them in gold frames but I don’t really think that is particularly nourishing enough. My opening last night at the DFN Gallery was amazing, it was huge, thousands of people. A lot of good stuff, a lot of money, did very well. But I know if I didn’t do street art that would have been a problematic experience to me. I wouldn’t feel like my life was really worth enough. I do street art which is kind of a marginalized, dangerous, stressful…

MSG: Illegal…

DW: That’s one of the good things about it. Possibly useless. I don’t think I would get enough out of that either because I have to get a job.

MSG: How do you think the attitudes have changed in regards to street art? What was once looked at as defacement has now become not only a very viable art form but in some cases a very expensive one! How did that happen? Was it because there was so much of it that people were forced to look at it and acknowledge the validity of the art form?

DW: I have been in it for so long and I have really seen what was just an isolated few people become this international movement. It definitely started with the Internet. Websites that people go to like the Wooster Collective have influenced so many people. There are probably about 1,500 people a day from all over the world that come to my site from the Wooster Collective. And then on my site they link to other sites. So, it’s the Internet, it’s these cheap stickers we can make now, the digital stuff on our computers. Also the marginalization of art where it has become this kind of corporate, Chelsea, insider, kind of boring, closed elitist thing. Now there are these kids, like art students, who grew up on skateboards and tattoos and graffiti and are not interested in the sort of boring “art gallery” artist. They are like, “fuck that shit! Let’s make some art and go out on the street and do it!” I think also, especially in the George Bush era, there is a polarization, a disenfranchisement…voices that feel like they are not being heard. And this is a way of speaking out. The last thing I get peeved about is that street art has gotten so big that it has got to go out of fashion. There is no doubt about it…

MSG: The pendulum has to swing both ways.

DW: Yeah. I feel like we are right in the middle of it right now and it seems like, “How could this not last forever?” But fashions change.

MSG: What do you hope people get from your work?

DW: I think artists make art for themselves and then they are sort of curious how it affects other people. But I really don’t have an agenda for other people. I don’t think when I start with an agenda for other people it works. I have tried that. I have tried to make art to be a “successful artist” and I totally failed. I tried to make political message art… doesn’t work. It comes out of some kind of poetic… I’m not really sure what it is in my brain but I know it is right so I go out and do it. Then I find out what it is.

MSG: Do you enjoy the gallery side of your life?

DW: Totally! Especially the DFN Gallery. They are very nice people, not pretentious, none of that fake smile stuff. I didn’t used to like that stuff. It’s very unfair, it’s very unjust. It used to bother me but now I just accept that and I work within that. At Cooper Union I was trained in the abstract expressionist… fuck up, burn bright and burn out. The kind of Basquiat world. That’s where I came up. Galleries were all about buttoning your top button and shaking hands and fake smiling, saying you like stuff you don’t. I am totally at ease with it now. I am lucky beyond words.

MSG: Is that the result of maturity? What is it that changed your mind?

DW: I had to crash and burn and almost give it all up. I kind of left the scene for a while and pretty much just made street art and then came back slowly with painting. It happens to a lot of artists. They hit a peak maybe in their early thirties and then there is a fork in the road. I see a lot of my friends who are successful, this is what I am facing now. People expect me to paint those bodega paintings, but I can’t, I am done. But my friends have mortgages and kids in college, they are going to paint more bodega paintings. I used to think that is wrong but now I understand why people do that. I think if you look at art history, they all did that. They paid their bills, they would’ve painted money if they could. I used to think that was like the death of art. But I am not painting any more bodegas!

MSG: Who are the artists that influenced you?

DW: That’s a huge question. From the 15th century on! Modern people who have influenced me? I was thinking about this show I saw when I was first at Cooper Union and was very impressionable. There was a little pocket there when I was just an open mind for about a year. I saw three or four things, kind of random, that really influenced me. I saw Cindy Sherman which blew my mind. Donald Lipski, a sculptor, kind of an oddball. He did a piece on the wall of all these things he found. He wove matchbooks together and paper clips and rubber bands… it was called Gathering Dust. It was a wall full of these odd little, exotic sculptures he made from stuff he found on the ground and that just blew my mind. And then Charles Simmons this guy you hardly hear about any more. He was this street artist in like the early ‘70s who would build these little civilizations out of little bricks! He would build these little pueblo villages on a broken down wall on Rivington Street! He was in the Whitney and he became a big deal teacher. All this stuff just kind of blew my mind open and I started thinking about street art.

MSG: If there was any other place in the world you could live where would it be?

DW: I don’t think that way. I like it here. I wouldn’t mind having a house somewhere near water. I am interested in nature and I mean to get to it at some point, but right now the urban thing just has so much more going on.

MSG: Do you know where you would like to be in ten years?

DW: No. I get asked that sometimes. But if you had asked me that question ten years ago and I answered you, I would have been so wrong! I definitely would not have been into street art any more! The closest I could get to that is I think I would like to be working bigger. I figure you get older, you get bigger. You get a bigger studio or maybe more money because it is kind of expensive to make big paintings. Maybe like ten years from now I will have a big studio and I can make big paintings.

MSG: Fair enough!

On The Web | www.danwitzstreetart.com

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May 4, 2005

Apollo Braun

by Liberation Iannillo

Apollo Braun possesses a drive that hasn’t been seen since Madonna threatened to conquer the world during her appearance on American Bandstand in ‘83. In one long, deep breath, the foxy designer let me have it: Born Doron Braunshtein, the Israeli native came to New York City a little over three years ago with exactly $13 dollars in his pocket. He quickly found odd jobs such as nude modeling, stripping, and (worst of all) retail to support himself.

While working downtown at Yellow Rat Bastard, Apollo made trips to Chinatown during his lunch breaks to purchase t-shirts which he would paint and sell, literally off his back, for extra money. “When you’re struggling,” says Apollo, “you’ll give everything to succeed.” Soon he was selling his shirts in shops around town including Metropolis and Patricia Fields. “She was very supportive,” he says of Fields, “very amazing with her blue car and the dog.” He opened a small shop at the flea market on Broadway and 4 th and struck gold the day he was visited by Brittney Spears.

Spears did some shopping and purchased one of Apollo’s signature t-shirts which read “fuck you.com” across the front. “She’s a very nice girl,” says Apollo of Spears, “she loved the clothes.” The now infamous photo of the ex-mouseketeer wearing the shirt turned up everywhere from The Enquirer to CNN. Overnight the place was packed and Apollo could boast of other celeb shoppers like 80’s teen-queen Deborah Gibson and Oz’s Chris Malone.

After a brief stint on St. Marks, “it was like a pregnancy,” he says, Braun gave birth to his current location on Orchard Street. He is the proud owner of both the urban "Apollo Braun" line and the haute couture "Doron Braunshtein" line which has been worn by the likes of Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman. In addition to his clothes, the Apollo Braun shop carries the work of over 40 designers. He doesn’t seek out designers though, “They find me and I always choose the craziest, funkiest people. There are only a few stores that will give them a chance and I’m one of them.”

The clothes are a throw back to the glory days of New York City circa 1984 with styles ranging from playful Cyndi Lauper to tormented man-hunter, Lydia Lunch. Though some items tend to be on the pricey side there are a lot of affordable gems in the bunch.

Apollo is very happy with the journey he is on. In addition to designing clothes he sees a career in music in his future. “You have to take the risk. If you don’t do it now, you’ll never do it. And then you’ll become 40, then 60, then die.”

Apollo Braun | 193 Orchard Street | NYC Ph: 212 726-8075
On The Web | www.apollobraun.com

Photo Credits:
Makeup: Bella Makeup Artists
Photos: Evan Sung
Model: Suzanne

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