Growing up in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, Kerby Jean-Raymond, the founder of Pyer Moss, worked after school at a sneaker store called Ragga Muffin, which kicked almost everyone he knew. For four years, aged 13 to 17, he walked from the store home past a billboard that dominated Flatbush Avenue and advertised services such as divorce assistance and class action attorneys.
“This is what people expect in this neighborhood,” he said recently. But Mr. Jean-Raymond has built his business on challenging expectations: of what a luxury brand looks like, what (and who) it can represent and where it can come from. He couldn’t understand why the main signage in his youth center should be different.
So he decided to change the picture.
Over the next month, the billboard, shot by Shikeith, his longtime collaborator, will be the first large-scale advertisement for Mr. Jean-Raymond’s first full line of shoes and handbags. It’s also his first real foray into ready-to-wear other than sneakers for Pyer Moss since his last New York Fashion Week show in September 2019, which was held just down the street at the Kings Theater. And as the company’s 10th anniversary looms in 2023, it represents an effort to forge a real business alongside the shows that have become famous as political theater dressed as fashion collections.
“It’s an experiment,” Mr. Jean-Raymond said, about the billboard as well as the bags and shoes. “I realized we couldn’t just be entertainment.”
As he spoke, he drove around East Flatbush in a large, black, custom Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV (one of his seven cars), pointing to childhood landmarks: PS 181, where he went to school; the three-story brick apartment building he grew up in; the cemetery where some friends were buried. In 2020, he moved into his first home, on the Columbia Street waterfront in Brooklyn, and during the pandemic, he moved his father out of the family apartment, first to Long Island and then to Florida. But he still considers East Flatbush his community.
“Bottega Veneta sells clothes and has shows,” said Mr. Jean-Raymond, 35. “Chanel sells clothes and has shows. Pyrer Moss was known for shows, but people are going to get their base from somewhere, so they should have the opportunity to get them from us.”
He took only a slightly detour to reach that conclusion.
The problem, he said, was that the shows that made his name—which helped him win a Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund award and become Reebok’s global creative director—were a trilogy created in response to what he saw happening in the world around him—an attempt to put black contributions to culture and history back at the center of the conversation.
Collection 1, for example, focused on the black cowboy in February 2018; the second, the following September, imagined a black leisure class with no fear of police brutality; and the Kings Theater show was inspired by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose gospel recordings influenced early rock and roll musicians.
But then, between 2020 and today, things started to change so quickly that by the time he finished a collection, “the world looked very different. I started Collection 4 six times and deleted it six times.”
In the midst of it all, he founded a company dedicated to supporting young designers called Your Friends in New York, and did a couture show that doubled as a Hall of Fame of black inventions, but it wasn’t. determined commercially. (Some people also didn’t think it was exactly couture; Mr. Jean-Raymond called it “a coup.”)
Then two dead – an uncle and a close friend – sent him in quick succession to a “dark place.” He had left his position at Reebok in early 2022, unhappy after the company sold to new owners, and flirted with several creative directors, but not seriously.
He had also discovered the Hoffman Process, an intensive seven-day retreat heralded as a way to “become aware of and break free from negative patterns of thought and behavior on the emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual levels” and talk therapy. He learned, he said, “not to care so much about what people thought.” He no longer worried that people would see accessories as giving in to the trade or betraying his first principles.
“I spent so many years trying to avoid classifying the brand as what it wasn’t,” he said, referring to attempts to categorize his work as streetwear rather than, as he insisted, luxury. Now he is less concerned about outward differences.
“I feel like a designer again,” he said. Unlike, for example, a performance artist.
The accessories are made in Italy, in factories that also work with Kering, the parent company of Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta. (Francesca Bellettini, the chief executive of YSL, who calls Mr. Jean-Raymond his “fairy-meter,” hooked him up.)
The bags come in three styles: a trapezoidal shape that’s aerodynamically blown to one side; a hand reminiscent of both an opera fan and a palm traced on paper; and a combination of the two with a pair of cartoonish hands folded around the front. The latter was created for one of the collections that never took place. (It would be called “Getting Together” and was about socializing after Covid, when “post-Covid” first seemed like a possibility.)
Each style is available in a variety of sizes, and in black or bright yellow; other colors will come later. The shoes, also offered in red, have a convex heel, as if Play-Doh had been squeezed through an hourglass. There’s a gladiator sandal version with high heels that excite the calf and soft sock-like ankle or thigh-high boots. There are also mules with padded straps and a block heel cut from Jolly Rancher-esque material for a good vibe. Plus purses and key rings.
Everything is sold directly on PyerMoss.com in drops, with items priced between $200 (for small leather goods) and $1,800 (for the largest bags). That is expensive, but less than if regular retail prices were added. In addition, he said, his Sculpt sneaker costs $600 and is sold out.
The plan is to roll out more discreet product collections, which, like the bags and shoes, will exist independently of the shows. Jean-Raymond has hired Andre Walker, a former New York Fashion Week name who grew up around the corner from him, in Ditmas Park, as a designer. The two are working on developing brand codes for ready-to-wear, which (when it happens) is made from sustainable fabrics.
And there’s another show coming, but when and where is unclear. Though it might even be wrong to call it a show, said Mr. Jean-Raymond, who already wrote the music for it. It will be more like “an experience”.
“It will probably be in the next few weeks,” he said. Or maybe not.
“I might not even tell anyone when it happens,” he said. “I want to do something special for our 10th anniversary, but maybe the special thing I can do is finally sell clothes.”
