Downtown Mourned This Streetwear Brand’s Hiatus—Now Its Back
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Five years ago, New York City rapper Princess Nokia was recorded throwing a cup of hot yellow soup on a man spewing racist slurs on a Brooklyn-bound L train. I’ve thought about the video a lot since then, mostly when I’m on the train and someone tries to test me, but I thought about it again the other day, when speaking with MadeMe founder and Supreme vice president of design Erin Magee.
On Zoom, Magee mentioned the incident while sitting in front of a blown-up image of Nokia from MadeMe’s Fall 2017 campaign. In the photo, the musician is wearing a beret with the brand’s name written over a red star, a white T-shirt with an orange cartoon lamb standing below the words Toxic Shock, and a pleated tartan miniskirt with bold white stripes hitting at her mid-calf. But the photo isn’t really about what Princess Nokia is wearing. It’s about her stance: strong with her legs separated, exposing her underwear, one hand cupping another while she points a finger gun at the camera, her index on the imaginary trigger. It’s the kind of thing you would theoretically see if you were being racist on the train and someone decided to throw you on the ground, step on your chest, and call you out.
Magee points at the photo and brings up the video when I ask her who she designs for. “Did you ever see that viral video from a couple years ago of Nokia?” I nod and she gets excited. “Yes! That is our girl! The girl that’s a hero! The girl that’s gonna throw soup in some dude’s face when he says something fucked up! It’s always that girl.” I’ve asked plenty of designers who their girl is, but a soup-slinging female rapper who isn’t afraid to say or do whatever she thinks and wants has got to be the best answer yet. Magee founded MadeMe for those girls.
When people talk about the label, they use the words streetwear and drops, both words Magee doesn’t really like. “Someone needs to come up with new words,” she rationalizes, because the ones readily available have come to define a scene made up of gatekeeping skater dudes instead of unapologetic cool girls. MadeMe exists outside of that, in a realm almost entirely its own. Magee decided to create it as a form of artistic expression and as a way to build something for girls by girls, outside of her nine-to-five at Supreme.
The common thread in what she does is: “The idea of this girl who does what she wants. And there’s so much power in that and rebellion in that, because as women we are always told that we have to be a certain way to do certain things. And I’m always really interested in this idea of somebody who doesn’t feel like they have to.” That same idea is also exactly why, when the then 13-year-old brand went on hiatus in 2020, plenty of girls were disappointed. MadeMe made a comeback that has been appropriately categorized as “epic” last year. But it is yesterday’s fall drop that truly marks the beginning of a new comeback era, one with more consistent “drops”—although Magee would love it if we could all come up with a different word for it.
The MadeMe fall collection is particularly denim-heavy; Magee was interested in the way designers like Glenn Martens at Diesel or brands like Vaquera have manipulated the classic fabric. This experimentation is at odds with the preciousness around jeans that has also become popular, thanks to vintage heads’ renewed interest in Japanese selvedge denim. “I like it feeling less precious and kind of exciting. With new washes! New colors! New fits! I was thinking about how I dress and I wear a pair of jeans almost every single day. It’s just really a part of the daily wardrobe,” she says.
MadeMe’s imagery has also always been a key part of everything, because it sells you what Magee is actually making. Yes, you want the clothing, but you want to be the type of girl wearing the clothing even more. And to Magee, this collection felt particularly right to be shot in a sex motel, a venue the designer and her creative collaborator and photographer, Mayan Toledano, find themselves shooting in often.
“Mayan and I always liked intricate settings,” she says between fits of laughter. “I don’t really love shooting in a studio, and neither does she. We kind of put our heads together, and we always come up with weird places … and lots of times it's a sex motel.” They also put their heads together to cast the models by scrolling on Instagram, DMing each other with anyone cool they come across, and settling to cast the “coolest” once the collection comes to life. For this fall campaign, the chosen ones were two rising skateboarding stars, Akobi Williams and Efron Danzig.
“For a really long time. I wasn’t really all that interested in skateboarding, because what skateboarding traditionally represented to me was something I was not into. When these types of girls came along into skateboarding, then I kind of felt like, Wow. When these kinds of people get involved, it is really changing what it means to be a skateboarder. And they look really fucking cool and they’re super punk, and just who they are,” Magee says, before adding, “To me, that’s what I do too.”
Back in 2020, she notes, she actually decided to bring back the brand after passing similar girls on the street wearing her pieces and thinking, “Oh, I can’t stop doing this! There is this girl that I feel like I’m serving. And then I think if I was her, I would feel like I needed it, I would want it.”
Plus, Magee says: “The clothes just look really fucking good on them.”
She’s right—they do.
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