Stüssy and No Vacancy Inn Want You to Get Your Trousers Right

At Stüssy, the design team lives by a rule: If your friends don’t want the stuff you’re making, you’ve got a problem. Put another way, it’s a potent piece of design wisdom: Surround yourself with tasteful friends and just...make clothes they want to wear.

Stüssy has been doing that for 40 years now, and the brand is celebrating the occasion with a series of collaborations. For the latest, they went straight to a few of those friends, working with Tremaine Emory, Ade “Acyde” Odunlami, and Brock Korsan—a.k.a. No Vacancy Inn, the creative collective and DJ crew whose projects range from soundtracking GQ parties in Paris to designing limited-edition New Balance 990s—on a plush corduroy suit, an easy trench, tailored sweats, a tie-dye sweater, and a bag to put it all in. Okay—but did their friends want in?

Stüssy has gone through several eras since the departure of cofounder Shawn Stüssy in 1996, and the current one, under the direction of CEO David Sinatra and brand director Fraser Avey, is deeply intertwined with No Vacancy Inn. As the story goes, around the time Sinatra and Avey took the reins, in 2011, they met Emory and Acyde by chance at a club in London.

This was years before No Vacancy became the fashion world’s hottest party headliner, but both were deep Stüssy heads: Emory had ended up in London after attempting to get a job at the NYC Stüssy store, and Acyde came up in the city’s nascent streetwear and DJ scene. “In London in the mid-’90s, if you saw someone wearing a Stüssy T-shirt, you pretty much had to talk to them, because it wasn’t available in the way it is available now,” Acyde said on a recent Zoom call. Back then, the brand had relationships with DJs and party people from Los Angeles to Tokyo to Bali: the so-called International Stüssy Tribe, which included the likes of culty Japanese designer Hiroshi Fujiwara and Clash guitarist Mick Jones. Sinatra and Avey were looking to reboot the brand’s legendary hangs for the hype generation.

Stüssy and No Vacancy started throwing parties together in a mutually beneficial arrangement: Stüssy got to rekindle the chaos and exuberance of the ’90s, and No Vacancy, which officially formed in 2015, got to pop off in LA, London, Tokyo, and Bali, building their reputation with every stop. “We came together at a great time,” said Sinatra, whose father, Frank Sinatra Jr. (no relation to the other Frank), co-founded the brand with Shawn Stüssy in 1984. “Fraser and I were kind of starting out at Stüssy, and while a younger kid might look at Stüssy and think we always had great events and our parties are always going to be popping, that might not have been the case before this. We kind of built that part of our brand again with [No Vacancy] the same time they were building their brand.”

Accordingly, the clothes, according to Emory, are “not really a collaboration. It’s more like a summation of friendship and work together.” “We all had the idea of a wardrobe that would encompass everything a man might need to go to Miami for the weekend,” Korsan said. If it didn’t seem glamorous in the pre-pandemic era, the life of a busy fashion DJ now seems impossibly so. But when you’re flying in and out of different cities every weekend, you’re faced with a profound packing conundrum, which is that you need to drip like a king on Friday and Saturday night and hold it down in the Delta lounge the next morning, all while cramming your fits into a carry-on.

That reality might not feel relevant for the foreseeable future, but the casual elegance and studied dishevelment of the comfort-class DJ is unusually consonant with homebound pandemic style. The silhouette of the double-breasted corduroy blazer was based on one of Emory’s well-worn Balenciaga jackets, and the pants are Stüssy’s easygoing elastic-waisted design. “You can literally wear it to the Emmys or you can wear it to go grab a coffee,” said Emory, who added that he was inspired by the style of GQ’s late, great Style Guy Glenn O’Brien, who could make a Savile Row suit look as easy as pajamas.

Likewise, the sweatsuit is made to be worn out. The No Vacancy crew cut the sweatpants with a higher rise so that they could be worn with the blazer; the hoodie fits perfectly under the overcoat. “I’m aesthetically obsessed with people who can wear the wrong things really well and wear the right things in a really interesting way,” said Acyde. “Good taste is such a boring idea now. For us, there’s no difference between a track suit and an actual suit-suit.” No Vacancy Inn has screen-printed their name on plenty of T-shirts before, but in designing a total wardrobe they didn’t waste the opportunity to articulate their collective style philosophy, which is radically personal and beholden to neither luxury nor hype. (Anyone who has been to a No Vacancy party knows the best fits are usually behind the DJ booth, where Acyde and Brock are invariably in sharp A. Sauvage suits, Emory in Kapital and destroyed Levi’s.) “The whole idea was to look in clothes in less of a strict way. It’s like, if your drip is right, you can drip it right. The whole collection is made to enforce that,” said Acyde.

Before we hopped off Zoom, Acyde wanted to make sure he got one thing across, a point that’s obvious to him—a bespoke tailoring fiend—but perhaps less so in the streetwear suiting universe. “Please, get it fitted to your body!” said Acyde. “They’re called tailored suits for a reason, ’cause you have to tailor them. Guys, don’t embarrass yourself and don’t embarrass us.”

“If you kids don’t learn nothing else from Acyde, Brock, or Nast wearing suits: get that break right!” said Emory.

“When the boot don’t meet the suit right, it ain’t right!” Acyde added.

“They’ve got to shake hands!” said Korsan.

“They’ve got to know each other! It’s not just a date, it’s a marriage! Whether you’re wearing flip-flops or whether you’re wearing cowboy boots, where the break happens is the most important thing,” said Acyde. If you’re wondering where that should be, lookbook star ASAP Nast’s ’Gram is a good place to start.

The collection drops Friday, smack in the middle of an unparalleled Stüssysance brought about by smash-hit collaborations with Our Legacy, Nike, Comme des Garçons, the revival of the Stüssy archive, founder Shawn’s collaboration with Dior, and a collection that’s as smart and compelling as any streetwear brand. You might want to act fast, because the friends of No Vacancy are already making tailoring appointments. “I’m sick of requests for fucking free suits!” Acyde laughed. “A free T-shirt, sure, but a free suit?!”

Originally Appeared on GQ