Ignacio Quiles in New York

Ignacio Quiles in New York

MITT MAGAZINE ISSUE Nº1

An excerpt from MITT magazine issue Nº1.

Words by Andrew Geeves
Photography by David Urbanke

Ignacio Quiles is all about the hustle. Born, bred and based in the Big Apple, this stylist, model, artist, fashion consultant, storyteller, designer, documentary star, blogger, vintage store owner, self-described dandy and collector has a motto: “Enjoy what you wear, wear what you enjoy and go out and show the world.” Quiles is a man who practises what he preaches.  

The word “character” springs to mind upon meeting Ignacio Quiles. The East Village resident is immaculately put together, engineering a distinctly crisp, rakish look that makes him stand out on the street. His laugh is long and loud, he enjoys using the word “wow” (pronounced “wuh-owwwwwwwwwwwww”) for emphasis, and he isn’t shy about sharing anecdotes and stories from a life fully lived in New York City. 

Growing up in Harlem in the 1960s as the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Quiles has always been surrounded by fashion. “New York City was my playground. You realise early on that the city moves faster than the rest of the country. I moved fast. I grew up around clothing. My mum was a seamstress, so there was always sewing going on. I got to see the old garment district when it was in its height. The hustle and bustle and fashion was really, really big in New York. Fashion and tailoring and ready-to-wear was the number one thing. New York was the fashion capital of the world. I saw guys trying to knock people over because they were in the way of them getting their clothing carts from point A to point B. The city was super alive. One of my fondest memories is of the garment district; how alive it was and how many people were given opportunities there. My mum was able to build our house in Puerto Rico based on the money that she earned in the garment district.” 

As he entered adolescence, the urban playground of Quiles’s childhood transformed into a training ground for acquiring street smarts. To survive life in New York City, Quiles had to learn quickly a number of important life skills. He was schooled in the art of the haggle on the Lower East Side. “I learned how to hustle down on Delancey Street. That was considered the bargain area. I learned how to negotiate with Harvey and Shlomo and the other guys. I learned the lingo of how to say yes and no and how to walk away and act like I wasn’t interested in something I really wanted. New York was good that way. No one taught me how to do this; I learned on the streets.” 

Through his friends, Quiles learned how to educate himself about designers and current styles. “My friends took me to this French guy who was selling couture clothing in a little tiny shop on Atlantic Ave. We’d catch the train over there, and I’d go in and see a heaped pile of pants and shirts and have no idea what was going on. Designers, I had no idea! Then my friends showed me a place down the block where all these rich people threw out men’s magazines. I would make it my daily journey to walk down these little side streets and pick up my GQ and my Esquire. I’d go home and read them cover to cover. I knew that I’d hit the treasure trove. This was my first window into learning about designers: Gaultier, Valentino, any designer of that period. I would memorise all the brands. Then, when I went over to the French guy’s little shop, I would go in there and I would know these brands. I could identify them all and it was a great learning experience.”

Without the resources to support his growing interest in fashion, Quiles learned to tailor so that he could emulate the latest looks while sticking to a budget. “I was always a big fan of tailoring. Back then, there was something called ‘the continental style.’ It was all about having a tapered shirt, with darts in the back. I would go into one of the big department stores and look at one of these shirts I don’t know how many times. The guard probably thought I was trying to steal it! But I studied the shirt, really looked at it, and thought ‘I can do that.’ I didn’t know what darts were but I went and researched it. I’d end up ruining a shirt because then it was just too tight or I didn’t measure. It was a lot of trial and error. I figured it out along the way. I remember doing the tapering on the shirt, taking the shirt in, finding my zero, getting it all done and tapering these sleeves so that everything fit. I realised that I didn’t have to go and pay 50 dollars for the latest shirt. I could buy a cheap shirt for three or four dollars and turn it into a 50 dollar shirt.”

The resourcefulness Quiles was forced to learn as a teenager equipped him with a sense of fearlessness that influenced the evolution of his personal style. “It’s been a long sartorial journey for me,” he sighs. “I can remember some horrors and nightmares, buying something and then it wouldn’t work and I would be embarrassed. But I was never afraid to try. It’s not where you got it from; it’s what you do with it. It’s not where you were born; it’s how you shape your life that will really define you. You can take a simple piece, a garment, and really define it and really make it your own. I like showing my personal style by taking something and redoing it.” Quiles has a particular passion for a customised aesthetic that showcases the quality of a fabric. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t love the skinny suit. “People have finally realised that a suit that is so tight that it is like Lycra is not going to look good. I’ve been a big proponent of the anti-super-skinny suit because it just doesn’t look good. What’s more beautiful than seeing the way a fabric moves? Look at the crispness on that fabric! Look at the weave, look at how it layers, look at the drape. When you have a skinny suit, you can’t see that.”

Quiles’s sense of style is inspired by a diverse array of influences. “I’ve always loved suit jackets,” he reveals. “I think I picked it up from a lot of the English musicians that came into the Village in the 70s. Musicians used to spend a great deal of money. They were basically doing the same thing we were doing but they were calling it bespoke and we were calling it tailor-made. I remember running into Mick Jagger and seeing him in a white jacket, with Warhol. I thought, ‘I wanna try that look out.’ ”

Continued in MITT magazine issue Nº1.

An American in Paris.

Women's Wear

Just about 2 more weeks until the Women In This Town book is out worldwide! Today, I wanna share an excerpt from Louise Brody’s profile in Paris, one of my favourites!

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK ➝

Graphic t-shirts

STREET STYLE GALLERY

When it comes to the warmer months in Sydney, Australian men understandably resort to the humble t-shirt as a way to stay cool. Sometimes this makes my job a little tougher as they’re a bit uninspired. Although there are times when I’ll come across graphic t-shirts that just add a little bit of art to the streets.

Women's Wear

Just about 2 more weeks until the Women In This Town book is out worldwide! Today, I wanna share an excerpt from Louise Brody’s profile in Paris, one of my favourites!

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK ➝

Women's Wear

Working style.

Baguette.

Style Matters

WITH ANDREW GEEVES

STYLE MATTERS WITH ANDREW GEEVES

“This is perfect for summer,” chirps the retail assistant as he hands me the canary-yellow raincoat I am purchasing from his streetwear store, a welcoming space hidden down a cobblestoned, postcard-worthy Shoreditch laneway. I glance at my expat friend beside me and raise a puzzled eyebrow. She smiles slightly and issues a subtle nod as if to say, “They do summer differently in London.” She used to live in Sydney. I still do. We both associate summer with levels of humidity so oppressive that even thinking about moving causes you to break into a sweat and with heat so intense that, in the words of my eccentric great-uncle, “the trees lean towards every dog that walks by in the hope of getting a drink.” Not exactly raincoat weather.

Thousands of kilometres and many months stand between the moment I bought that raincoat and now. Yet still, whenever my fingers brush against its rubberised material, my first thought is always that it is perfect for summer. This association is all wrong for a Sydneysider. Yet it persists. It is one of many thoughts that pass through my mind when I pick up that raincoat, all of which spring from memories of my time in London: the smell of freshly baked bagels from the Brick Lane Bakery, the taste of the handmade ricotta and black truffle ravioli at Burro e Salvia, the rainbow splay of colours across peonies, begonias and more at Columbia Road flower markets, with its cockney soundtrack of stallholders’ pitches. These memories are inextricably linked to my raincoat: meaning and experience have become interwoven with the fabric of the garment itself.

When I was a teenager, my mother threw out my maroon high-top Converse All Star sneakers without consulting me. To be fair, they were not in the best state. On each side of both shoes, the canvas had separated from the rubber sole so that they functioned more like poorly made sandals than proper shoes. They emitted a smell capable of stopping a cheetah in its tracks, thanks to years spent absorbing the juices of sockless teenage-boy feet. As an adult, I can almost understand why my mother mistook—or, perhaps, “mistook”—them for rubbish. At the time, though, I was devastated. While they looked like hazardous waste to my mother, to me they were a record of formative moments from my adolescent life. They were the first pair of shoes that I had ever chosen, the first time I had been in control of what I would wear on my feet. They were shoes I could imagine being worn by my new-found heroes Billy Joe Armstrong from Green Day and Tom DeLonge from Blink 182. These were the shoes that I paired proudly with my favourite pair of statement shorts, an aqua-blue jersey number trimmed on either side with lime-green terry towelling, to wear to the local shopping centre as part of a very teenage move to impress upon the world that “my sense of style is very UNIQUE and DIFFERENT and SO AM I but you’ll never understand what it’s like to be me and you don’t care anyway so shut the fuck up.” They were special shoes.

I am no longer that revolting teenager wondering why his mother threw out his favourite pair of—let’s be honest—completely revolting shoes. A decade or so of life experience has freed me from my adolescent sense of self-importance and the need to exert so violently on the world who it is I feel I am and how I feel I am different. Yet, as it did back then, clothing continues to absorb and retain my memories and experiences.

When I travel, I buy clothes as a tangible reminder of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. This vintage Adidas jacket recalls my obsession with Freud in Vienna, sourced from a street-side vending machine for second-hand clothes on the way to the Freud Museum after sitting in Freud Park, reading Freud. This royal blue Opening Ceremony sweater with an applique alligator is Berlin Berlin Berlin: unpolished floorboards in an apartment overlooking the Görlitzer, Kreuzberg’s VooStore, weaving through the many rooms of Peristal Singum (a labyrinth constructed under an old block of apartments on the outskirts of Friedrichshain) and losing hours to the Berghain. These H&M tobacco boat shorts are a summer conference, buckets of beer beside the old bullring and karaoke in Granada, all en route to a wedding near Toronto. And on and on and on. Browsing my wardrobe opens an interactive archive of my life, through which I dive straight back to moments, moods and feelings from my past.

Our style reveals more about us than we are aware. We purchase or receive our clothes for particular reasons at particular times in our life when we are with or without important people, aspiring to be someone, hoping to appeal in certain ways, holding particular values, or in a location that feels like home or makes us feel homesick. Clothing shares significant links to the people, places, ideas and objects. Cleaning out a wardrobe requires more work than the physical labour it demands. As we sort through our clothing, we are sifting through past versions of ourselves. We purge parts of the person we no longer want to be by throwing out the clothing we associate with that time, while keeping other pieces in the hope of retaining the parts of ourselves that we want to carry into our future.

Based in Sydney, with a background in psychology, Andrew has written and interviewed people about music, theatre, film, art and fashion for a variety of popular publications and academic journals.

In line.

Similar look: Club Monaco Leather Biker Jacket.

Women's Wear

Women In This Town

STILL LIFE

WOMEN IN THIS TOWN

It’s hard to believe in only a couple short weeks, my second book Women In This Town will be available around the world. This project has been a labour of love that has really pushed me out of my comfort zone. Photographing inspiring individuals with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II in hand, the women featured in this book are really pushing the boundaries both in life and in fashion. I can’t wait for you guys to see it.

The book is available to pre-order now and will be in bookstores November 1st.

Also pictured: Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II.