(CONTINUED From Page 19) with voodoo, Benner went outside and painted the entire jacket white, let it dry, and painted the fresh surface with black dots. Benner shows me several jackets in the shop, including yellow painted jacket, scrawled with unreadable black squiggles. “I was listening to Dark Side of the Moon and I just started writing the lyrics on the jacket,” he explains. Another is stroked with the words from Dante’s Inferno. ****** Buying clothing that comes pre-distressed is an interesting concept and a hotly debated one too. Sonic Youth front-woman Kim Gordon’s writes, “the radical is most interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside,” explaining why she didn’t choose to dress in a way that was subversive, even though the fashion was happening all around her in 1970’s New York City. Even rockers who adopted the style of that era like Lydia Lunch studded their own jackets and cut their own clothing. Spending $1,200 on a custom work of counterculture art won’t make the wearer punk, but does give a vicarious thrill of the rebellious. It can make the owner of the piece feel closer to iconic iconoclasts like David Gilmour and Lou Reed and even modern day punks like Christian Benner. Benner tells me he has some big clients in finance. I imagine how it must feel, after a long day at Goldman Sachs, to slip off suit and tie and slip on one of Benner’s a custom creations. Perhaps the wearer once dreamed he’d have a thrasher band of his own, but traded that vision for private school educated children and a house in the Hampton’s.
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Some artists wear Benner’s designs too, though it’s less common for someone in that field to be able to afford them. Lenny Kravitz shops at Benner’s store, and recently played an impromptu acoustic set there. Brandon from Incubus is another fan. Benner’s designs are wistful, evoking a bygone era of safty-pins, fetishware and great music. CBGB is closed. The taboo is mainstream. “No one talks to each other anymore,” Benner himself observed more than once during our conversation. The show is over. The band has broken up, our ears have long ceased ringing. And yet faded, torn, and bleach spattered, the concert lives on, a memory emblazoned into Benner’s designs. You didn’t have to be at the gig to remember it. Benner renders it for you. In truth, the concert never occurred save for in the designer’s imagination. But he’s telling you about it with ever rip. He’s describing it in such visceral detail it’s like you were there. Somehow the whole thing is more potent, because you never were there, because it is all just a fantasy. Memory renders the great legendary, it rivets our eyes with the magical hues that Instagram filters are designed to emulate. With each incision, Benner is replicating that nostalgia. Throwing paint, he’s imbuing an inanimate object with the suggestion of good times past. He’s speeding up the clock, heightening our collective yearning to a feverish intensity. The night after our interview, I fall asleep wearing the shirt Benner gave to me when I left his store. In cracked lettering it reads, “Rock and Roll Saved my Soul.” The fabric is soft and worn, like a thousand thousand memories of rock concerts. I’m transported, if only in my dreams. www.christianbennercustom.com