The Fabric of Existence A Studio Visit with Denim Painter Korakrit Arunanondchai in New York “Now everyone is connected," artist Korakrit Arunanondchai says, sitting at his desk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The exclamation points to a landscape where abstract painting, smartphone screens, and faded denim have become the surface of a new global language. After doing his first museum show at New York’s PS1 at the age of 27, the Thai-born Arunanondchai has become notorious for his must-see performances, which often feature him shirtless and covered in paint, rapping in front of an all-denim-clad posse he calls the “Bangkok Boys. 
The Vetements-Balenciaga Complex Demna Gvasalia Heralds Fashion's New Order Vetements was founded in a Paris living room with a simple mission: to bring fashion’s focus back on clothes. Demna Gvasalia, the brand’s enigmatic initiator, was born in 1981 in Sukhumi, a Georgian town notable for its charmed setting between the Black Sea and the Caucasus, as well as the extensive damage it endured during the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict of the early 1990s. After formally training to design men’s clothes at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Gvasalia arrived in Paris in 2009 to work at Maison Margiela , where he absorbed the technical mastery and garment-focused methodology of the house’s founder. 
New Icons: This Jacket Is Armor Designer Kerby Jean-Raymond and Artist Gregory Siff Discuss Pyer Moss’ Spring 16 Motorcycle Jacket and Race In America Is there a signifier of rebellion more resilient than the biker jacket? It’s long since passed from gang regalia to closet staple, but the style worn by everyone from James Dean and Mad Max to The Ramones retains its aura of danger. Black leather and zippers are still shorthand for the liberty celebrated in and embodied by musicians whose lifestyles are the opposite of 9-to-5. The motorcycle jacket’s ongoing popularity reads as confirmation that, sartorially and socially, freedom remains the ultimate currency.