Hood By Air Is Back and There's Nothing You Can Do About It

Shayne Oliver’s Hood By Air has a complicated history – one characterised by meteoric rise and, without fall or decline, something close to evaporation.

First founded in 2006 yet only really active between 2012 and 2016, the label has been a favourite of Kanye and Rihanna, the recipient of an LVMH Award Special Jury Prize, frequently name-checked as the originator of luxury streetwear, and its Creative Director was named as one of the "25 Greatest Black Fashion Designers" by Complex. First HBA was nowhere, then HBA was everywhere.

True to Oliver’s roots in New York’s queer subculture, in the Ballroom scene, in vogue well before he was ever in Vogue, which had given birth to Hood By Air – to its dark, Ghetto Gothic, “banjee” aesthetic, which materialised in the form of oversized silhouettes, harnesses, zips and straps; in rubber and in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it uncanny flourishes – HBA arrived in style. Something which BOF’s description of the Autumn 2014 NYFW presentation captures in vivid definition: “During the finale,” Robert Cordero and Chantal Fernandez recall, “an army of toned, hair-whipping dancers stormed the runway to booming ballroom beats. Their duckwalks and gravity-defying dips shook the audience of industry insiders who had assembled at Pier 60 on Manhattan’s West Side, starting the budding label on a rapid ascent to the very top of the fashion world.”

But those who burn brightest always have a tendency to burn the fastest.

And so, once more, with just the same bombast as it appeared – collapsing in on itself, like the Big Bang reverse – as of 2017, Hood By Air was nowhere again. Gone up in a puff of enigmatic and fittingly industrial smoke.

But, while many – if not most – announcements of an indefinite hiatus, a break to “focus on other projects,” end up being just another way of calling it quits without all the accompanying drama and paperwork, Oliver, it seems, is true to his word.

That is to say, yes, certain internal differences were doubtlessly at play around the time that HBA officially went on leave. Most notably the designer parted ways with his longtime business partner, Leilah Weinraub, in the immediate aftermath of the label’s surprise dissolution just before Paris Fashion Week in February 2017, and a fractious relationship with the New Guards Group also came to an abrupt end after just a year.

But, more than this, Oliver really did have other things to do – not least of all a year as the designer in residence at Helmut Lang; a match made in heaven and sealed by bondage straps. He also had some serious thinking to do.

And now? Well, after an announcement heralding its return back in 2020, Hood By Air is now officially back. And, I think it’s fair to say, Hood By Air is back in a big way. With a new campaign starring Naomi Campbell, Oliver’s return is a statement of intent – a second round at shaking the pillars of the fashion industry which just a few years past had proven far to sturdy at their foundations, returning – yes – with a lot of important lessons learned, after a lot of personal growth, but also with the same iconoclastic attitude that so gratuitously rubbed the right people up the wrong way.

That HBA should be back now, too, makes perfect sense.

We are in a time of unprecedented change; of Digital Fashion Weeks replacing in-person presentations, of questions finally, rightly, and effectively being asked of the industry’s gatekeepers – questions of race, of class, of sexuality, and of what it really means to “pay your dues.” All questions which sat central to the core ethos of Hood By Air and its origin story.

That HBA is back in an era of distance – an epoch with minimal human interaction and without the concept of touch in our daily lives – is most striking of all. Having come from ballroom, from a thriving and close-knit community, from underground GHE20G0TH1K parties and spaces of cultural invention – places of coming together, above all else – returning now, erupting into a world where every interaction that we have is at a degree of separation, is, if not a cure, then a tonic for our collective disconnect.

It’s not just a way of thinking either; as a concept, it permeates the reality of Oliver’s designs. His clothes are made to be felt, to be touched, to be lived in and experienced: they move, they breathe, the change on the whims of those who wear them. They are full of surprises.

And, realistically, that’s what we – in fashion and in life – have been missing out on most of all this past year. We have been in stasis; a time when it feels like nothing is changing and when the few things that are, are well beyond our control.

Hood By Air is back, and there's nothing you can do about it. But why would you want to?