Fashion outlier Shayne Oliver wants his clothes to make you cry
Shayne Oliver has been speaking for about ten minutes and still hasn’t answered a question. Just as his train of thought begins to crystallise into something vaguely decipherable, he launches into another non-sequitur, another reference, which takes him down another stream of consciousness. “Do you have air conditioning over there?,” he says, mid-monologue. “I pray for you guys.” He’s barely slept, admittedly, having spent most of the previous night in his studio, but there is a slipperiness to his speech that could easily be read as reluctance. “I don’t think the press has ever taken me particularly seriously as a designer. I don’t draw on traditional references and my work is multifaceted so people tend to think of me as some kind of artist. But I am a designer. I am a creative director.” Though critics, like the silver-tongued Cathy Horyn, have described Oliver as the only “disruptive” designer to have ever come from New York, fashion has always struggled to get pu...