WAYNE S WORLD

mall, thin, bespectacled and pale, Wayne Hemingway doesn t at all look like he might be the son of a Native American world heavyweight wrestling champion. But he is. Wearing a dung-coloured ensemble of brown wool, leather and corduroy, nor does he look even remotely like somebody who might own one of the most innovative and successful fashion houses in Europe. But he does.
Me shirt s Red Or Dead but everything else I m wearing is second hand, he declares proudly in a strong Manchester accent. I was brought up working-class so the cheaper something is, the more I enjoy it.
This bargain-hunting attitude is what seperates Wayne Hemingway from most other international clothes designers. Over the past 15 years, his Red Or Dead label has built a reputation for producing quality and challenging fashion at affordable prices and on a non-elitist level (or quality at the right price, as the mother in that awful Centra ad would undoubtedly put it).
Unsurprisingly then, he actually began his career in the world of haute-couture selling second-hand clothes from a small stall in London s Camden Market. Importing ethnic fashions from all over the world and seeking out bargains wherever he could find them, his stall was highly successful and quickly spawned more. Within a year, he was running sixteen of them. Six months later, the first Red Or Dead retail outlet opened in Kensington and he hasn t looked back since. Today the ever expanding company is internationally famous and has made him a millionaire many times over.
Despite the fame and fortune, however, he still hasn t forgotten his working class roots. Nor has he forgotten his American Indian ones. The name Red Or Dead is a proud reference to his father s ancestry.
My dad was Billy Two Rivers, he informs me. He had an affair with me mum and a while after I popped out he became heavyweight champion of the world in wrestling. Then he went on to become an actor he was in that film Black Robe and now he s a politician who fights for Indian rights in Quebec. I was with him until I was three and spoke to him fairly regularly for a while after that but we haven t seen each other for quite a while now.
In Dublin to speak at the launch of the Hudson Blue Club Look 1997 student design competition, the man whose label has twice won the British Fashion Award for street style is quick to state his enthusiasm for clothes inspired by the penury of student life. It s his considered opinion that nobody should have to pay the prices some designers are charging.
Street fashion is the big new market for designer clothes, he says. We ve been going on about it since the 80 s how it was kind of immoral and obscene that people were expected to pay #1,000 for a jacket by Gaultier and Armani and all that crap. We ve always said it s not right, there s better things to spend a fortune on and there s no reason why designer clothing shouldn t be available to the masses.
Like, we re all bombarded with Hot Press, with all the style mags, with MTV. We all grow up knowing about music, knowing about fashion. And yet, when you get to the age where you should be able to afford to buy it, you can t afford anything because it s just being sold on quite an elitist level. We ve always been non-elitist. We re very socialist in our views and finally things have come around to our way of thinking. We want people to be able to buy our stuff and still be able to afford to go out to a bar or the cinema or a club or wherever. There s a lot of people who spend everything they have on a designer jacket, forsaking everything just to own it. The Red Or Dead idea is that you can have the jacket and still be able to afford to go out and show it off!
Red Or Dead clothes won t put your bank balance in the red. A shirt will set you back around #40 or #50. A jacket will cost about #100. Still not that cheap but, seeing as wearing either will make you look a million dollars, it s not a bad exchange rate. He reckons that the key to his label s success lies in the fact that he and his design team still think like their customers.
We are our customers really, he smiles. When we come to designing a collection, we re not just picking an idea out of thin air and expecting people to wear our ideas. We re actually getting into the heads of our customers and hopefully we re clever enough and sussed enough to know what our customers want next. We re getting into their heads. We believe that everybody knows what they want to wear next but we ve gotta bring it out of them. That s our job to stimulate people and bring it out of them.
Music and fashion have always been closely interlinked and, according to Wayne, watching today s musical trends is one of the best ways of predicting tomorrow s streetwear.
When you re designing a collection you re doing it a full year before it ll be in the shops, he explains. The clothes that we showed at last September s London Fashion Week for delivery next Spring were designed last January and February, so it s a full year in advance. And when we were designing it we were looking at the music industry and where it was going. At the time Oasis were just about reaching their height it was pre-Knebworth and all those summer concerts and we were thinking if we were Oasis what would we be doing next? And we figured that they d be doing the Beatles thing of going to India. They were talking in interviews about listening to John Lennon circa 1969 which was his big zitar period.
And at the same time Kula Shaker were just starting to be played on the radio. Their music is a mix of East and West and their dress is a mix of East and West. And we thought if we had to pick a group out of all the bands starting up around that time, we d pick Kula Shaker. So we did and we designed an Indian collection. And then the week we did the catwalk show in London in September was the same week they went to Number One with their debut album. And we generally get it right like that, season after season.
Although Red Or Dead get their ideas for nothing from pop stars, pop stars don t get their clothes for nothing from Red Or Dead. Encouraging corporate whoredom is not approved of in Wayne s world.
We don t give our clothes away to anybody because we don t think it s right, he opines. We ve got quite strong principles on that. Like, if somebody s a celebrity and we think that they re right for our clothing then they can come along and buy our stuff very cheap and quite far below retail price, but on principle we won t give it to them. Pulp regularly buy our stuff but they pay for it. It s at a vastly reduced rate mind, but we don t give it away just to get pop stars wearing it.
Pop stars aren t the only design influence. Politics can also provide clues to what the youth of a nation will be into wearing. The mood of the moment in the UK is quite socialist because of New Labour and all that, he says. And that also inspired us to do a collection based around the fusion of East and West culture. I mean, we re very lucky in these islands really, in that generally whatever cultural background you re from, the youth still mix very well. I mean mix in the sense of going to clubs and things like that. They don t ghettoise the way they do in America. So the new collection is kind of a celebration of youth culture mixing. We were able to mix and dip into it all and come up with a collection that was very ethnic, very streety and wearable by all the different cultures.
Despite capitalising on the mood created by New Labour, Wayne is a little sceptical about the party itself.
I m not gonna vote in the election, he says. I just don t think it makes that much difference really. They talk a good talk but at the end of the day they re all the same. Like, I m not sure if Tony Blair listens to Oasis really. I m just not convinced. I think what really put me off was his speech at the Brit Awards. What a fake!
And how would you kit him out if Red Or Dead landed a contract to design a new image for the aspiring future PM?
I d dress him as a transvestite, he replies laughingly. Tony Blair would look really good as a transvestite actually!
Despite all the design awards they ve won over the years, Red Or Dead are probably even more famous for their footwear than they are for their clothes. In fact, the company can take sole credit for making Doc Marten boots fashionable in the mid eighties and totally reinventing the public s perception of them. They quite literally put the boot into fashion and made a fortune from it.
We changed them from being workwear to being high fashion really, he claims. It was just about being able to recognise movements and the big movement of that time was a French designer called Azzelaine Alaia, who was using lycra in a big way. Very bodyconcious stuff, kind of tight fitting black party dresses and things. I don t know if you re familiar with the Robert Palmer video for Addicted To Love with all the girls swaying in the background in black heels and tight dresses but that was Alaia s stuff.
And that look wasn t a very U.K. thing really. You know, pointy Italian heels and black dresses looked a bit tarty. So we decided to take that look and subvert it a bit. We put a big pair of black boots on the end of it and they just happened to be Doc Martens. And Red Or Dead kind of built up a relationship with them after that. You know, the idea of wearing a big pair of Docs with a pretty dress was something totally revolutionary. It even carries on now. And what it did was it totally revolutionised women s footwear. Women no longer had to totter around in really uncomfortable high heels like our mums had to do.
The idea of designing clothes that are actually affordable, comfortable and suitable for just about anyone isn t something that sits particularly well with the rest of the industry. This doesn t bother Wayne in the slightest and Red Or Dead s non-elitist policy is practised as well as preached.
We don t use supermodels to model our clothes, he says. For a start they re damned expensive and I d rather put the money into making the clothes better. And I also think that using them would alienate our customers. The supermodels have a kind of unattainable beauty. How many women are actually 5 11 or six foot tall? How many women have the time to pamper themselves all day? Very few! So we d rather not go for that.
At the same time we don t use totally normal people because obviously the models we use have to look good in the clothes. If they don t then the style magazines won t run pictures of them and help sell the clothes. So obviously we can t use totally normal people but still, half the models we use aren t actually professionals, they re just people who look good on the street. If we see somebody who s gonna fit the clothes and seems to have the right attitude then we ask them. A lot of models will wear your clothes on the catwalk and look great but then an hour later they re wearing somebody elses designs at a different show and looking great in those as well. We don t want actors. That s not what we re looking for.
And what will you be looking for in the entries to the Hudson Blue Club Look competition?
Originality is important but it must be able to translate into something that s wearable, he says. There s no point being original for originals sake if nobody wants to wear it. Anybody can do that. I ll be looking for something original and wearable on the street.
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