fashion

Andre Benjamin, best known as half of OutKast, is not the first hip-hop
star to design his own clothes. But what sets him apart is his very
individual take on some traditional British staples, says Simon Mills.

Slight, polite and genial, rapper-turned-fashion mogul Andre
Benjamin – aka Andre 3000 – arrives for breakfast at Harrods wearing a
duffel coat, polo shirt and baseball cap. Ostensibly, he is here to
have a look at the corner of the menswear department where the
Knightsbridge store will be displaying his latest Benjamin Bixby
collection, a range of 1930s-influenced American football clobber,
including cashmere cardies, numbered sweaters and fitted sweat tops.
But evidently he couldn’t resist a retail detour: a big white tote from
Hackett, his favourite British shop, sits by his off-white and brown
“saddle” shoes, bulging with sweet-smelling, tweedy booty from his
morning spree. And it’s only 10am.

Shopping in London is the ultimate pleasure, admits Benjamin. He finds
it inspirational, educational and thrillingly old-school. “I love old
things,” he says. “In the US, we are not that old. We have old stores
and cool vintage stuff, but nothing like you have over here.”
Benjamin is an oddity in the sartorially prescriptive rap fraternity. A
renaissance-man alternative to the aggressive knuckleheadery of, say,
50 Cent, Benjamin paints, reads, acts and plays the violin (and many
other instruments). A vegetarian, he campaigns for Peta, the anti-fur
lobby. Musically speaking, the 32-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, who
is one half of OutKast, is at the cutting edge of gonzo hip-hop with
hits such as Ms Jackson, Roses and Hey Ya!, but when it comes to his
wardrobe, he’s 80% Brideshead.

He likes the rake of our straw hats and the equestrian cut of our
traditional suits. He favours shirts with cutaway collars, rugby
jerseys, brightly coloured hoop socks and co-respondent shoes. He likes
the temperate British climate because it means he can wear one of his
many Scottish tweeds. Talk to him and he’ll reference the Duke of
Windsor and Beau Brummell. When it comes to dressing, “those guys
killed it,” he’ll tell you.

Benjamin’s frequent trips to London find him trawling Portobello market
for vintage tweed, cords and old shoes. On Jermyn Street, he’ll check
out the shirts and ties at Turnbull & Asser, Hilditch & Key,
New & Lingwood, then make a short diversion to St James’s to see
the hats at Lock (“If you ask me, a good hat can make or break an
outfit”) and Lobb’s exquisite bespoke shoes a few doors along. Then
it’s Henry Poole on Savile Row, where he’ll finger some gold-braided
Napoleonic livery, leaf through one of the old order books, maybe order
a blazer.
Hackett, the young Sloane’s outfitters, is his favourite stop-off.
Benjamin spends a small fortune there and knows all the staff. “You
might think that a rapper from the deep south of America might not be
our typical customer,” admits Hackett’s co-founder Jeremy Hackett. “But
the fact that Andre comes at our clothes from a different perspective,
not burdened with any of the preconceptions about class and sartorial
stereotypes that a British customer might have, means he looks at the
clothes in a new and fresh way. He puts our stuff together in a way
that we never imagined and he is totally fearless with colour
combinations. He’s got a really good eye.”

Benjamin has got the fashion thing bad. It’s been like this ever since
he was at Sutton middle school in Atlanta. Back then, there were two
rival gangs stalking the corridors and hanging out by the lockers – the
prep crew and the soul kids. “The soul kids wore Jordache jeans cut at
the bottom, Stan Smith sneakers, silk shirts and Starter jackets,” he
says. “The preppy kids were from better homes and they could afford the
preppy clothes. Tretorn tennis shoes, madras pants, Ralph Lauren polo
shirts, mostly. They had the coolest girls and they had Volkswagen
Rabbit [Golf] cars.”
Sometimes the two gangs would clash in elegantly wardrobed street
violence. “You know, like in the 1950s when you had gang fights? Like
West Side Story? It was like that. You had a whole other side with guys
that were from the streets but dressed like they were rich preppies.”
Most notorious was a preppy gang called the Stray Cats, who wore
Benetton tennis bags slung over their shoulders. “Only thing was,
nobody played tennis. But they used to take the racquets to school and
use them as weapons whenever they got in a fight.”

Benjamin, an only child, wanted to be a preppy but he was never in a
gang. “My mom was too strict to ever let me get involved in that
stuff.” After his estate agent mum and collections agent father split
up, his mother worked on the production line at General Motors to make
ends meet; money was tight. “If I wanted nice clothes I’d have to wait
for Christmas. I couldn’t wait. I got a job. But if you couldn’t buy
them, you stole the clothes. Or you’d get your girlfriend to steal them
for you.”

Increasingly frustrated by his hometown’s lazy, parochial attitude to
fashion, Benjamin and a school friend would buy dye to colour their
jeans. “We were trying to find ways to be individual, find our
identities, I guess.” They would pore over men’s fashion magazines and
watch old movies. Benjamin became fascinated by the understated
Anglophilia and Gatsbyish exotica of Ralph Lauren adverts, which
peddled dress codes that appeared to have been handed down from father
to son like family heirlooms. “I think a lot of African-American kids
don’t have fathers to teach them how to dress, so you end up being
taught by pictures in magazine and movies. You see cowboys, Indians,
old Hollywood films, Cary Grant. It has an effect on you.”

Was there something subversive about a poor young black kid dressing up
in the preppy duds that were the privileged mufti of the Wasps? “A
little. I guess it’s all about the twist, really. Everything is slower
in the south. But we wanted to educate ourselves. Every kid was a
fashion victim back then, but as you get older you learn and you become
the killer not the victim.”

But before Benjamin could mutate into a gentleman designer, he embarked
on a sartorial journey that took him beyond button-down collars and
deck shoes. “When I decided to become an entertainer things became even
more extreme,” he says. OutKast – Benjamin and another high school
friend, Antwan “Big Boi” Patton – released their first album,
Southernplayalisticadillacmusik, in 1994. But despite the influence of
Cameo and George Clinton in the music, they looked fairly conventional.
Hip-hop seemed to tame fashion-forward Benjamin for a while. “If you
watch the career of OutKast, look at all our pictures and videos,
you’ll see that at the start, even though I was writing
out-of-this-world lyrics, I really just wanted to fit in, wearing
baseball jerseys and sneakers. But the more I got into what I was
doing, the more I started to think, to hell with what everyone else is
doing.

“When the OutKast sound changed and I started producing my own records,
I would mirror what I thought that character doing that music would
look like. As the sound got a little wilder, freakier and funkier, so
did the clothes. Then when the sound got more sophisticated, the
clothes changed again.”

At first, he channelled the outlandish get-ups of his funk and rock
heroes – Cameo, Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Hendrix even. He wore white wigs
and designed himself a pair of fake-fur pants. He scoured fabric shops
in Atlanta for material – “upholstery fabric, mainly” – commissioning a
reliable and creative network of seamstresses in the area. Then the
outfits got crazier. Once, on the Chris Rock TV show, Benjamin decided
to debut an outfit that included American football shoulder pads
customised with multiple feather boas and ski-boots. The only problem
was he had forgotten the trousers. “Big Boi dared me to go out and
perform on stage in just my underwear. So I did. And it was the most
fun.”

But beneath the boas and ski boots, hip-hop’s peacockish, dapper rapper
was nurturing commercial fashion ambitions. “And I knew that fur pants
and white wigs are not sellable.” The market is now thick with rap and
urban musicians who have tried their hand at (or lent their names to)
designing clothing – Justin Timberlake’s William Rast, Gwen Stefani’s
LAMB, Pharrell Williams’s Billionaire Boys Club – but Benjamin is
determined that Benjamin Bixby (the “Bixby” was added for its pleasing
alliterative qualities) should develop into a label that might compete
with fashion’s major players.

When he showed his collection in a hotel suite last year, Vogue editor
Anna Wintour came to have a look. “‘I can see longevity in this
business,’ she told me, ‘but you have to get with people in business
who understand that this is not just an overnight entertainer brand,
that you want this business to grow.’” Benjamin took her advice. He
chose not to use the apparently readymade brand name of Andre 3000 (one
of several alter egos he has). “Andre 3000 would be cool if I wanted to
do a low-end brand and sell it in Wal-Mart, but this is not a celebrity
brand. I am not a fan of celebrity brands, to be honest.”

As well as sketching designs for tweed plus-fours, bomber jackets and
waistcoats, he now makes factory visits, has the help of collectors and
fashion archivists, and employs a technical director and a
vice-president of design. “I would like to go to fashion school to
learn the correct terminology and the correct technique,” he says.

Benjamin seems thrilled at how well the label has been received. The
major menswear magazines have featured the line, admiring its quality,
detailing and tailoring. And, much to his delight, the other day that
perennial rock’n'roll dandy Mick Jagger was spotted taking a picture of
the clothes in a window at Barney’s New York. “That,” says Benjamin,
finger-snapping the air with unbridled satisfaction, “felt pretty good”

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