This past weekend during New York Fashion Week, OG brand True Religion took over Flyfish for “Iconography: That Was Then, This Is Now,” and the whole point of the night was right there in the title, Y2K New York meeting whoever’s running things now.
Dess Dior got the room moving early. Joey Bada$$ pulled up straight off a sold-out Blue Note run, still riding that high. Then Fabolous showed up and also blessed the crowd then it happened: Ja Rule walked up to the DJ booth and got on the mic too. Nobody was expecting it, and that’s exactly why it worked.
Photo Credit: Waterboy
True Religion’s CEO Michael Buckley said to Yahoo Finance that the idea was to bring back “the spontaneity, swagger and excitement of the early 2000s era in fashion” which happens to be the same era the brand itself was born into, 24 years ago now. The room backed that up. A Boogie Wit da Hoodie and Dave East held down the current generation of New York rap. Davido, Cash Cobain, and Azzy Milan, were also in attendance.
Outside the music, it read like a cross-section of everybody shaping culture right now, Shareef, Shaqir, and Myles O’Neal moving as a unit, Tyron Woodley repping a completely different lane of fame, Fergie Baby and Trim representing the Bronx’s next wave, Brooklyn group 41 holding it down for the borough, and models like Julez Smith and The Comb Twins rounding out a guest list that felt curated rather than just star studded.
What made the night matter wasn’t the flex of who showed up. It was the clear fact that it closed a loop New York had been carrying for 25 years without really talking about it.
Fab and Ja back in the same room, Hpnotiq pouring, True Religion’s new fragrance FLRT hanging in the air, it was always going to happen this way. That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s New York finally finishing a sentence it started back in 2001. As the brand put it: “That was then. This is now.”