LEVI’S® & GIANNI LEE: THE ART OF STORYTELLING

Multi-hyphenate Gianni Lee knows a little something about art, and fashion, and music, and–well–just about everything. Whether you know him for his street art that incorporates colorful skeletal figures, or for his fine art which focuses on alien-like subjects, or for any number of his thought-provoking multimedia creations, you know that his style is anything but conventional. “I decontextualized, reconstruct, and regurgitate everything I see and feel,” The N.Y. and L.A. based artist says of his work. So, when we partnered with Gianni, on a limited-edition collection, we could not wait to get his take on our iconic favorites. Read our full conversation with Gianni and shop the colorful collection below.

My inspiration behind this collection was the art of storytelling and how we can find our own stories, manifest them, and bring them to life. Like for me, when I started off painting a few years ago, I just randomly one day decided to start, and I was always looking for “what will my inspiration be?”. And it was so hard for me to find my inspiration that I decided to just write a story, and look at the story, and build the characters, and build the world, and the world kind of ended up being my source of my inspiration. My inspo material. That’s where I’d pull my reference from. 

I feel like the best painters build worlds and the worlds become recognizable if you think of Salvador Dalí or even some current artists; they build a world and then they build recognizable elements. So for me I wanted to build these recognizable elements and be able to just communicate them through one of the greatest fabrics of our generation that’s so reusable and it’s timeless, and that’s denim. What better brand than Levi’s® for that–a timeless denim brand? So that served as the canvas–the denim. I was like “How can I make this thing look like a painting but also take elements of my inspiration in art?”

No, I approached the denim as a gallery. How can I make the denim look like an art gallery? So, when you look at an art gallery it’s always just one color–it doesn’t necessarily have to be white–but it’s a clean color. The reason why is that you want to have it serve as the host or the house for the art. So, when you walk into galleries you see just white walls, and you see the image right there. Whatever it is that the artist is presenting you, you just see it and you see another one next to it, and then you see the little tag that tells you about the art and you have to read that. So, for my designs, I wanted it to look like that. If you look, it’s all very deliberate. 

I wanted to think of the denim jacket and the jeans as a structure that houses a work of art. If you go to any art gallery you just see these vivid images and these very structured minimal spaces, and it looks cool together. It’s a good flow. It’s good interior design, so I wanted to communicate that element in the jacket. I did things like deliberately putting the same image on the sleeve, but it’s boldly on there. It’s not like it becomes a part of the piece. When you see paintings like that in real life it’s like Andy Warhol. He’ll have three of the same images next to each other and you’ll see that in a gallery and it’s like the same image three times.

I also wanted to accent the sleeves with a yellow tag with nothing on it because I think sometimes we look at art and we want to know what it means and what the title is and I think sometimes having something untitled and thinking something is supposed to be there is a juxtaposition, and an oxymoron at the same time. So, it’s kind of like figuring out how to accent the form of the denim jacket and the jeans but also have something that is also fun to look at. It just sticks out and you just have to live with it and I think that’s what art is in general you know?

A lot of it is in my head. I’m still building it, but it’s like a pretty basic figure at the center. The art really just chronicles a variant of earth­–you could call it earth, but it’s in a society where an alien race comes back to earth. They were on earth before and they decided to come back and pretty much just live with the people. So, because of that, the aliens are going to procreate and create life. These drawings are the offspring of the aliens and people. The aliens are usually blue, so their offspring have these blue hands and these red nails. This person has blue hands, but you don’t know if it’s gloves or if it’s a part of the person already.

I also really was inspired by Egyptian drawings and the whole communication of hieroglyphs and how so much information was packed into drawings on walls and I wanted to kind of reference that a lot of my work is on walls. As much as it is in a gallery, I’m a street artist at heart, so I kind of wanted to compare and contrast the idea of modern graffiti artists and the artists who drew these amazing hieroglyphs and pictograms all over the walls of ancient Egypt and so many other cities. So, it was a nod to that and also to me being black. That’s like my African lineage and it all comes together. I wanted to highlight the black body vs. my skeleton; I think I use my skeleton so much I wanted it to take a back seat so that I could embody and show love to the image of a black person. And I wanted to do that by just showing a black person on a garment.

Colors play a tremendous role in my artwork because I like to play around with colors in ways they wouldn’t normally be played with. A lot of my paintings honestly are very chaotic–some of them could even be dark–and to juxtapose bright colors to show those intense environments; it brings a different attention to things that I’m trying to communicate. A lot of the time colors just attract you, so I wanted to use brighter colors on this collaboration because I wanted something more positive. Brighter colors, warmer colors, they just communicate different things to the person that is consuming it. It’s kind of a science of colors.

I’m really a modular person - I’m into modular things. I’m just really into the idea of putting things somewhere and then if you want to, you can switch it out and put something else there. With this collaboration, we couldn’t do that exactly. So instead, we ended up having that element of this visual modularity you can see. We have this pink element here that could also be a blue element, it could be red, it could be white, maybe the tags could be a different color. So, it’s just showing how things can be plug and play with design.

Art and fashion go hand in hand because they’re both expressions. The thing with both art and fashion is you can think about it and the meaning behind it, but you also don’t have to think about it sometimes. You can just enjoy what it looks like, or how it looks on you. Some people might not even think about the thought that went into the character that’s on this jacket. They might just like the way it looks. They might just think it looks cool and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes people buy art because they don’t know, they’re just drawn to it. They want it in their house or in their office. I guess I like the super layered explanation of why art and fashion go hand in hand, but I also like the fact that fashion can be timeless, and generational, and it can be all these things because sometimes when you see something you just like it and you don’t know why. Sometimes when I look at this jacket, and at these pants I actually don’t know why I like it, but if I saw it as a customer and didn’t know about it, I would like it and I probably wouldn’t be able to explain why.

There’s just something about a brand that you grew up on and being able to have your own contribution to that entity. When you think of Levi’s® you think of all these different moments in history. I could think of so many people that probably had on a pair of Levi’s® at some point like Tupac Shakur in the ’90s, or Kurt Cobain, or Andy Warhol. You know what I mean? There are so many people that probably had a pair of Levi’s® - there are iconic photos of so many people wearing Levi’s®. It’s one of those things. From the richest person, to the poorest person, all of them have owned a pair of Levi’s® jeans. It’s just one of those legacy brands, so to be able to have your mark on something like that is cool. I’m excited that a brand that I grew up on has faith in my ideas and we can try new things. Because this silhouette right here, these little tags in this style, these are things that haven’t been done before. It’s beautiful to see Levi’s® take that approach and be able to step into the next generation of what fashion and art is, and then still have that legacy to still have a pair of jeans that hold up for years, that a plumber could wear, or that could end up on the cover of Vogue magazine and it all makes sense. That makes it all worth it.