Lunch with designer Luke Meier

Do you come here often?

Yes, I come here quite often actually, I really like it.

It’s my first time, I’ve always heard about this place but I never came for some reason.

It’s a spot that Arnaud (Faeh, the co-founder of OAMC, ed.) put me on to. What I really like is that it’s quite simple and also creative. What I’ve found about food is that you don’t really know how something tastes until you have the truly authentic version; in other words I never knew how pasta tastes before I came to Italy. I grew up in Vancouver, which has a lot of great restaurants. My parents are Europeans; my mum is English and my dad is from Switzerland, so my sister and I grew up in a sort of European way, without a dominant cultural identity, more a sort of mixture of different cultures. West Coats culture is very recent, it’s great, something very new and very open, there’s no really heavy dominant cuisine culture.

I had a great pizza in San Francisco!

San Francisco is actually a great town for food. Even in New York I could find great Italian food, but I felt I only ate real Italian food when I came to Italy. What strikes me the most is that food here is still very traditional, but not in a way that is boring…

Each area has its own way of cooking, very traditional.

Exactly. It’s great. It’s something so simple that you don’t have to mess with it. But what’s interesting to me in Paris now is that they have restaurants with a new approach, where they use traditional techniques but do something simpler, lighter and more contemporary feeling. These restaurants are run by younger people; chefs that are trained by Pierre Gagnaire or Alain Ducasse and have the skills to present a super high level of cuisine, but they prefer to do something more relaxed. I think that it’s a new European kind of approach and it’s really cool; it’s not something big and heavy, but fresh and small, like this place. It’s a very cool place that I enjoy being in. There are restaurants where everything’s a big performance…

So that’s why you chose this place.

That’s right.

So, let’s look at the menu. Well, my favourite thing on Earth is salmon, followed by mackerel and sardines. The artichokes must be delicious, pumpkin too, and even the broad beans. Well, I think I’ll have the broad beans and chards soup.

I’ll have the Paccheri and let’s have a bottle of red wine too.

Maybe a Negramaro from Apulia? It’s my favourite lately.

What do you struggle to find in Milan that you eat in Sicily?

A lot of zucchini! In Sicily, we have a particular kind of very long zucchini and we use them to make soups. In summer, we even eat the leaves of this zucchini, called tenerumi, by cooking them in a sort of summer soup, it’s delicious.

There’s lot of rules in Italian food for some reason, like no cappuccino after lunch…

Of course. It’s bad for digestion, because it ferments in your stomach. We drink it in the morning because it’s a heavy drink.

Or even any cheese anywhere near seafood? Like, spaghetti and clams with Parmesan.

Not in Sicily. It covers completely the amazing taste of the fish. In my area, we are pretty strict about fish: just a little bit of oregano and salt – because fish is naturally salted – and that’s it!

So, you are from Canada. I don’t know anything about Canada.

It’s very big.

Ha. What’s the situation now with Trump and everything? Do your parents still live there?

They live in Vancouver, I grew up there. Being next to such a great power means you become very good at being almost voyeuristic, so you’re able to study what’s going on there. Vancouver was a very cool place to grow up because there was a very good music scene, a very good art scene, too. It’s one of the first places outside California where skating become a big deal and it was very quick to adopt the good parts of contemporary and youth culture. For example, I grew up with punk-rock and hip hop music. The scene in Vancouver had some good DJs and record stores, sure but you share so much. You know, some people they think that I am American when I speak, you wouldn’t necessarily say I’m Canadian…

I know a few Canadian people and they are very different from Americans.

On a certain level Canadians are forced to consider things outside their own country from the beginning. Americans don’t need to think in the same way, and can be very inward focused, which is a good thing and also a bad thing.

I noticed that when I travelled from New York to San Francisco by car: when you cross the borders of New York State and go through the centre of the country, they don’t know much about the rest of the world.

I see… I wouldn’t say it’s fault of the people, more that it’s fault of the systems: media, school… you don’t learn as much about other places as you should. But I’ve felt the same sort of thing in Europe as well. It’s all about exposure…

For sure. If you’re exposed to the same sort of people at school, for example, you don’t really learn much about the outside world.

It depends where too, though. New York City’s a different story. New York City is incredible. It’s one of the few places in the world to give a good example of honesty. Obviously, there are problems. People can criticize you in many ways but they will tell you to your face what they really think about you, there is no need to guess how people think about things. And that’s what I really appreciate about New York.

How long have you been living there?

I’ve lived there for 20 years.

You were working for Supreme first?

For a long time, since 1999.

Wow, the big time.

Well, it wasn’t so big when I started there. Back then, it was just an interconnected group of people interested in cool things. This idea of ‘streetwear’ and all that stuff didn’t exist. I don’t know if you ever went to Union when it was in New York on Spring Street? It was a place where you could make 12 t-shirts with something really cool, silkscreened or drawn on and sell them there. At that time, you could go to the store and find clever, artistic amazing stuff. You didn’t have this huge industry targeting 18-25 year olds. That didn’t exist. There were very few clothing lines built to service this specific demographic. The styles that emerged in the ‘90s were more about re-appropriation than a company building things for this specific target and so what we were doing was very natural, we did what we thought was cool. Like “Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver is a great image, we’ll put him on a t-shirt”. It was cool to us.

We were just doing things that seemed interesting and relevant for the time. There was no big brand plan, or “how are we going to penetrate the Japanese market in the next 10 years”. No, it was just let’s just make cool shit and see what happens, you know.

I think that is the special ingredient of all successful projects. So, how did you start OAMC?

I met Arnaud in New York through a couple of artist friends in common; when I left Supreme full time, I was still freelancing for them, and I wanted to look outside New York. My wife was living in Paris at the time and we got to the point when I said “okay I either have to come there more or you have to come to New York more”. I always wanted to come to Europe to see how the fashion business and making clothing works here. It’s always been interesting to me. So I came over, we talked about it for a long time, and in the end, we just said “let’s take a car, go to Italy and see what we can do”.

Maybe your needs have changed as you’ve grown, from streetwear and Supreme when you were younger, maybe you’ve noticed something was missing?

Maybe, but I think more that I became more and more interested in the product itself. I became interested in fashion design because to me it was a socially powerful thing, like a brand or a logo. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a twelve-year- old kid going into a skate shop and instantly knowing what is cool, what is lame and what sucks. Why are certain things cool and how does this kid know? That’s really powerful question to me. But the more you work, the more interested you become in the product, its fabric and construction. You start to get why different brands are more interesting (and honest) than others, and I wanted to know more about that stuff. After a while it’s not just about the brand’s name, it’s about the actual piece itself.

Do you live in Milan or in Paris?

Neither.

But your wife lives in Paris.

Yes.

How long have you been together?

We got married almost ten years ago.

So, have you and your wife ever worked together?

Not really. But I mean, it’s natural that you talk about things, you know. She has always worked in the business. When I actually met her – I went to school in Florence for four months, she went there for three years – we already shared an interest in this kind of work, so there’s always been a common ground. I think it’s also quite cool because we both understand when you have to disappear for two or three weeks around a presentation or a show. So, there’s at least a good understanding about how it works.

That’s really important.

Yeah, you know what it means to be near a deadline and what it takes. It’s not business as usual, you have a deadline and you have a lot of things to do.

Let’s get back to OAMC. Can you tell me about the upcoming collection?

It’s quite magnificent because it’s about this idea of access. The idea that you still have to dress a certain way in a certain context. I thought a lot about the ritual of tailoring this season, like “do I really care?” or “does it really affect me?”, “is it necessary?”.

Interesting questions…

My approach is usually quite personal. A lot of it has to do with what I’m interested in, what I care about and what I’m after. That was somewhat the approach even when I was at Supreme. It was always like “let’s just make things that we think are cool”. If you’re trying to make something for some guy over there, well, I don’t know that guy and it can’t be authentic anymore because if you make something a little bit more relevant to yourself or to the people who are immediately around you it feels more real. So that was the beginning and then there was this idea of gaining access through the way you present yourself. Also, over the last couple of years there’s this paramilitary feeling in the air, after what happened in Paris or crimes in the United States by law enforcement themselves. You know, I feel we’re at a point you where we are reading about this kind of story every day in the news. So, there’s this idea of uniform suggesting that you can wear something tailored and you can gain access into a high-level event or to high-level and powerful people. On the contrary, you can wear something tactical, similar to a SWAT team, and gain access because those guys take access to anywhere they want. In both cases, the context is typically under the veil of the night. So those are the main points: tailoring vs tactical in a nocturnal context. We went very deep into the fabric development. Everything we make is custom-developed, we work very intensely. I really like traditional, historical menswear, and I imagined an inner sanctum where powerful people are sitting around running the world. I’m not a big conspiracy theorist but at the same point you ask yourself how could all this stuff be happening if there wasn’t this power structure. So even fabrics that would be a tapestry on the wall in one of these environments are appropriated. We also studied a lot of the super functional paramilitary shapes, fabrics, cuts, materials and we just clashed those things together.

How would you describe the OAMC crew?

Very intelligent.

Too easy.

I think it’s more me and my immediate friends than anything else. And of course, my wife. She was there all the time. It’s what we have built over years during this work and through traveling, meeting a lot of people from a lot of different places. I have my crew in L.A., New York, Tokyo, London, Paris, here. We grew up like a sort of family and those are the people I think about when we make something.

What can you tell me about your future projects?

We’re working with this imagery, getting across who we are and what we are working on, our perspective on what we think is cool and interesting. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit old-school that I see the importance of having an actual store, somewhere physical you can go, see and touch. At the same time the reality is that everybody likes seeing things on their phones, so it’s important to have a balanced relationship with what’s going on online and what’s happening in the real world.

And where do you think this will happen?

I think that we will probably be in Paris to begin with and then somewhere in Italy, then London and New York perhaps.

I read somewhere that the OAMC is about the present. So, what’s your present like?

Well, people have lost faith because things aren’t working. But whether you like it or not, it’s up to you now. The world isn’t really capitalist or socialist.

It’s easy for me to say that because I come from the West Coast of North America where we have opportunities and you don’t have to rely on anybody else. But, as I was saying, people have lost faith. I don’t like to read the New York Times anymore because it’s just one Trump story after another. Fortunately, there are a lot of people who react to this kind of thing by being creative. Even if you’re not a politician, you can change the way things are, you can put something relevant into the world. So, it’s going to be a really creative period. I don’t blame people for voting for Trump, I can’t blame them for wanting a change. Certain people in America took it for granted that things were going okay, but now that community has woken up, seen things as they really are and want to do something about it. The wilder a situation gets the more positive reactions grow out of it. The greatest creations come from chaotic situations.