Dead Meat is the Italian label that isn't like any other Italian high fashion label. By that, I mean it doesn't make me want to drive a nail through my scrotum to tide over the pure boredom I feel every time I look at it. Instead of tailoring their designs to be worn by Charlize Theron and the cast of Glee at some lame red carpet event, they cover them in all-over prints of stuff like panthers and JFK, put three-eyed, nightmare-inducing monsters in their lookbooks, Dirty Harry, Futurama mash-ups on their scarves, and an animation of some nematodes on their website homepage, which, if you didn't know, are these gross tapeworm things that excrete ammonia through their body wall. Eurgh. The perfect mix of light-hearted irreverence and dark, fucked-up-ness that makes a good fashion label, basically. Oh, and they also make non-fashion art that I want to spend all my money on. I spoke to one of the founders, Giovanni De Pol, about loads of stuff that gradually got more and more confusing.A scarf from the Foulard collection.VICE: Hey, Giovanni. Who is Dead Meat? Just you?
Giovanni De Pol: No, Dead Meat is myself and three other graphic designers: Vera Todaro, a musician, Fabio Galavotti, our fashion eye, and Stefano Landini, a comic book artist. If you read comics, you'll know his stuff from Hellblazer. If you don't, it's the comic about a supernatural detective called John Constantine that they turned into a movie with Keanu Reeves.Whoa, OK. Why did you all end up starting a fashion label together?
Because it was sort of a challenge. I don't like fashion, and as time goes on I realize how much I hate the fashion system, but clothes are important—they're a necessity, a way to express yourself, and a fundamental step in the process of constructing an identity, which I find very interesting.That's kinda weird, though. I personally wouldn't be starting a brand if I hated fashion.
Yes, but I appreciate the language of fashion. Clothes are a way of turning people into living commercials and they're a great way of being an artist without having to go through galleries and the whole art system. Also, I'm learning a lot about society, because designing clothes involves studying people, behaviors, and needs, so that's a satisfying part of it. Everything I do is with the intention of provoking an internal dialog, rather than just the simple creation of clothing. I don't know if I'm achieving that, but I feel like my job is at least giving me the chance to study a lot of things, which is the most rewarding part.Fair enough. Your clothes are quite avant-garde compared to a lot of contemporary Italian design. What are your thoughts on what other Italian designers are doing?
I don't know. I mean, the standards of production are so high and so impressive that you can't help but wonder how you could be more like them, but I do think there's definitely a general lack of creativity going on. There's a lot of fashion, sure, but no good, honest, sincere, original ideas, just a visceral need to be present and seen as much as possible. There are a bunch of great self-promoters, but few people who are really aware of the medium they're working in, in my opinion.So are your designs a reaction to that kind of vacuous, glitzy thing, then?
No, I don't think so, actually. My work is all just an expression of my curiosities, mixed with lots of incidental things I come across that inspire me.What are all those inspirations? The new collection seems to be split into a different one with each piece.
Well, the project as a whole was inspired by the works of the writer H.P. Lovecraft, one of the first influential authors of weird fiction. But the prints themselves, well, we used the JFK print because his image has almost become a sort of logo and a symbol of a generation. Also, he was president, which came with great power, and if you've ever watched Star Wars, you know where that can lead, so that's why we made his eyes the mirror to his soul, black.Wow, deep. What about the killers cats?
The tigers and panthers and skeletons, and all that stuff, are just part of Lovecraft's dark, exotic, imaginative world. He investigated the dark corners of the human soul in his writing and imagined a world of chaos and despair, so that's just our visual interpretation of that.And what about the bastardized The Lady with the Ermine print?
Yeah, that print is Da Vinci's The Lady with the Ermine with the head of a Raffaello Sanzio self-portrait. I worked on that image with a friend of mine and found the result both beautiful and disturbing. He/she starts to resemble a form of Nyarlathotep, a deity from Lovecraft's writing. Every pattern and graphic has a precise inspiration, but I used images to communicate those and I'd rather not explain each one, because the language of an image is not verbal—it has to be interpreted by each viewer.Why use images so often, though? What made you want to do that?
I think it's a natural social commentary, holding a mirror up to our new reality where everything is image-based. Turn on your laptop and you're instantly met with a logo—Windows, Mac, whatever—then a few moments of darkness before your interface to this parallel, virtual universe loads up. Then it could be anything from Facebook, Google Images, Twitter, Instagram, to YouTube—you're always being confronted with images and they're all in different styles: post-constructivism, post-futurism, post-post-art, etc. Images are everywhere, so using them in my work was just a natural exploration of that.A page from the FW12 men's lookbook.Cool. There seem to be a lot of religious references in those images, too.
That's a mega-giga-tera-huge statement, there. To me, religion is simply a social mechanism. I used to ask myself lots of questions about God, but I've given up on that, stopped letting Him punk me by making me confused as to what I think, and decided to concentrate on spirituality instead. Spirituality is important to me. It's the engine behind Da Vinci's work, Sant'Agostino's diaries, John Coltrane's pieces, and Terrence Malick's movies—it's a way to look beyond desperation and find goodness in the world. Religion and pseudo-religions, like Scientology, are fed by desperation and are just examples of how man is able to exploit the fragility of others.On that cheery note, let's finish off by talking about your lookbooks. They never really show any of the clothes, what's the deal with that?
Well, to me, a lookbook is just another way of telling a story. The clothing becomes the subject of the story when it reaches the showrooms and the shops, but the lookbooks tell a different part of the story and everything eventually combines to form a more complex piece of work. Like I said, the story for the FW12/13 lookbook is focused on Lovecraft's mythology, so the guys covered in prints represent some of the Cthulhu Mythos deities from his writing.Well done, I think yours is the most concept-heavy brand I've ever encountered. Thanks, Giovanni!JAMIE CLIFTON
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Giovanni De Pol: No, Dead Meat is myself and three other graphic designers: Vera Todaro, a musician, Fabio Galavotti, our fashion eye, and Stefano Landini, a comic book artist. If you read comics, you'll know his stuff from Hellblazer. If you don't, it's the comic about a supernatural detective called John Constantine that they turned into a movie with Keanu Reeves.Whoa, OK. Why did you all end up starting a fashion label together?
Because it was sort of a challenge. I don't like fashion, and as time goes on I realize how much I hate the fashion system, but clothes are important—they're a necessity, a way to express yourself, and a fundamental step in the process of constructing an identity, which I find very interesting.That's kinda weird, though. I personally wouldn't be starting a brand if I hated fashion.
Yes, but I appreciate the language of fashion. Clothes are a way of turning people into living commercials and they're a great way of being an artist without having to go through galleries and the whole art system. Also, I'm learning a lot about society, because designing clothes involves studying people, behaviors, and needs, so that's a satisfying part of it. Everything I do is with the intention of provoking an internal dialog, rather than just the simple creation of clothing. I don't know if I'm achieving that, but I feel like my job is at least giving me the chance to study a lot of things, which is the most rewarding part.
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I don't know. I mean, the standards of production are so high and so impressive that you can't help but wonder how you could be more like them, but I do think there's definitely a general lack of creativity going on. There's a lot of fashion, sure, but no good, honest, sincere, original ideas, just a visceral need to be present and seen as much as possible. There are a bunch of great self-promoters, but few people who are really aware of the medium they're working in, in my opinion.So are your designs a reaction to that kind of vacuous, glitzy thing, then?
No, I don't think so, actually. My work is all just an expression of my curiosities, mixed with lots of incidental things I come across that inspire me.What are all those inspirations? The new collection seems to be split into a different one with each piece.
Well, the project as a whole was inspired by the works of the writer H.P. Lovecraft, one of the first influential authors of weird fiction. But the prints themselves, well, we used the JFK print because his image has almost become a sort of logo and a symbol of a generation. Also, he was president, which came with great power, and if you've ever watched Star Wars, you know where that can lead, so that's why we made his eyes the mirror to his soul, black.
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The tigers and panthers and skeletons, and all that stuff, are just part of Lovecraft's dark, exotic, imaginative world. He investigated the dark corners of the human soul in his writing and imagined a world of chaos and despair, so that's just our visual interpretation of that.And what about the bastardized The Lady with the Ermine print?
Yeah, that print is Da Vinci's The Lady with the Ermine with the head of a Raffaello Sanzio self-portrait. I worked on that image with a friend of mine and found the result both beautiful and disturbing. He/she starts to resemble a form of Nyarlathotep, a deity from Lovecraft's writing. Every pattern and graphic has a precise inspiration, but I used images to communicate those and I'd rather not explain each one, because the language of an image is not verbal—it has to be interpreted by each viewer.Why use images so often, though? What made you want to do that?
I think it's a natural social commentary, holding a mirror up to our new reality where everything is image-based. Turn on your laptop and you're instantly met with a logo—Windows, Mac, whatever—then a few moments of darkness before your interface to this parallel, virtual universe loads up. Then it could be anything from Facebook, Google Images, Twitter, Instagram, to YouTube—you're always being confronted with images and they're all in different styles: post-constructivism, post-futurism, post-post-art, etc. Images are everywhere, so using them in my work was just a natural exploration of that.
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That's a mega-giga-tera-huge statement, there. To me, religion is simply a social mechanism. I used to ask myself lots of questions about God, but I've given up on that, stopped letting Him punk me by making me confused as to what I think, and decided to concentrate on spirituality instead. Spirituality is important to me. It's the engine behind Da Vinci's work, Sant'Agostino's diaries, John Coltrane's pieces, and Terrence Malick's movies—it's a way to look beyond desperation and find goodness in the world. Religion and pseudo-religions, like Scientology, are fed by desperation and are just examples of how man is able to exploit the fragility of others.On that cheery note, let's finish off by talking about your lookbooks. They never really show any of the clothes, what's the deal with that?
Well, to me, a lookbook is just another way of telling a story. The clothing becomes the subject of the story when it reaches the showrooms and the shops, but the lookbooks tell a different part of the story and everything eventually combines to form a more complex piece of work. Like I said, the story for the FW12/13 lookbook is focused on Lovecraft's mythology, so the guys covered in prints represent some of the Cthulhu Mythos deities from his writing.Well done, I think yours is the most concept-heavy brand I've ever encountered. Thanks, Giovanni!JAMIE CLIFTON