Shayne seeks the meaning and philosophy behind everything – to say he is a thinking man’s designer is an understatement. Some examples: his favorite film director is Maya Deren, who has made a film about crashing her own self-image (she’s her own killer), one of his greatest sources of inspiration is the Carnival artist Peter Minshall, who takes elaborate costumery to deep and historical levels (he uses the color red, for instance, to explore beauty and evil, angels and demons), and Shayne designed, for one of his collections, a shredded “church-going” Southern gentleman’s jacket to symbolize salvation, “that last moment when you have had enough and you just feel like you need to be freed.” He loves that clothing can be a costume because of what it represents to a person, and he strives to break it down and translate it into a new language. Shayne created his line Hood by Air partly in response to the hypocrisy he observed while hanging on the street with the skater boys, whom he noticed had just as much attitude about their style as someone into high fashion, (while pretending that they were so different from someone who does care.) It prompted him to start making t-shirts that literally told the truth, “I am this.. and why not just say it?” In keeping with his need for things to remain real, the name “hood” is in reaction to “ghetto,” (which he feels means victim) and is more about getting to where you need to go with what you have. Shayne values the allure of things, the yin and yang of everything, rather than the more limited and tired definitions of masculine and feminine. As a result, he makes elegant and classy what could be a dowdy one-piece woman’s Chinese suit from Ann Taylor, with his “nasty hooker boots,” of course. “It’s those edges that make a man even more of man, to take a risk, and say I am going to go ahead with this.”

If you like Shayne Oliver, you might also like Mario Monroe and Olof Erlandsson.