Welcome to Brain Dead World

By Cam Wolf

Photography by Sandy Kim

Kyle Ng, the designer behind the Los Angeles–based brand Brain Dead, describes the project as a collective. The range of friends and collaborators he rattles off in conversation sounds like the bathroom line at the Met Gala: the actor Seth Rogen (“He’s gonna do a whole thing on ceramics”); the actor Jeff Goldlum (a supporter of Ng since his early days); the rapper Freddie Gibbs (who hosted a screening of Predator at Brain Dead Studios, the brand’s movie theater on Fairfax); the band Portugal, the Man (“He hit me up randomly about fishing”). Oh, and the weekend we met up in July, Ng was preparing for the harcore music festival Sound and Fury, which Brain Dead sponsors. Its merch booth has attracted lines that stretch longer than five hours.

The spectrum of Ng’s passions and interests are dizzying. If he weren’t already channeling them into a successful wide-spanning clothing brand, I’d suggest he tour the country hosting seminars for lonely men hoping to understand the impossible art of making friends in your 30s.

Inside the smaller, craftier half of Brain Dead’s shop in Silver Lake, Ng wants to show me one of the brand’s upcoming projects. He loads up a lookbook starring Goldblum on his phone. A photo of the actor posing is pasted next to a reference painting that an artist will recreate with Goldblum transposed onto the canvas. “He's a friend of mine,” Ng said. “I thought it'd be cool: paintings of himself in this clothing.”

Goldblum knows by now to trust Ng’s taste and instincts. “He’s a person who knows everything: movies, food, places, culture,” the actor said over an email written in his typical stammering staccato replete with many instances of “uh.” “A person of unusual passion and enthusiasm and inspiration.”

Ng’s friendship with Goldblum is a perfect example of this. The actor said they met when Ng was still working on his original brand, Farmtactics, and they’ve since dipped into each others’ projects on multiple occasions. “Brain Dead makes cool, smart, unusual, interesting, and fun clothes,” Goldblum said. His Disney+ show The World According to Jeff Goldbum featured Brain Dead clothes, and the brand designed the cover and merchandise for his latest jazz album. They still hang too: “[Kyle] took me to the theater and, uh, went to see Upstream Color by Shane Carruth,” Goldblum said.

All of Ng’s hobbies and interests are channeled into Brain Dead, less a clothing brand these days than a way of life. In embracing friends and indulging his curiosities—from film to Minions to Goldblum to hardcore music—Ng is creating a more welcoming version of streetwear, and maybe the future of the genre.

For much of its time in the limelight, starting around the early 2010s, streetwear has operated as a prescriptive mode of dress. At its most banal, fans simply tried to get as close to looking like Kanye West as possible. This gave way to a starter-pack culture, the idea of treating dressing like arithmetic by adding up a few approved items to create an outfit. “It gets very formulaic and very systemic until, like, what's cool?” Ng asked. Streetwear was less about actual taste than knowledge of the correct signifiers.

Streetwear acted similarly to an older brother. Once you discovered, say, Supreme, the brand would get to work putting you onto what it thought was the really cool shit: artist George Condo, rapper Raekwon, and porcelain ceramists Meissen. This felt prescriptive, too, creating a list of co-signed artists and musicians. “I think so many people don't even care about the real cultural side,” Ng said. “They care about the fashion side. I always think about what's our responsibility as a brand nowadays? Because now streetwear or the brand is trumping the authentic movements that existed before it.” Ng instead wants to start with community, making physical groups and places—once the backbone of any subculture—part of the experience again.

For instance, earlier this summer the musician Faye Webster held an event at Brain Dead Studio. A concert? Of course not. Instead, Brain Dead invited Webster to host a ping-pong tournament, mining her own personal hobbies to create something unexpected. One of those attendees was Ben Johnson, a 22-year-old student at the California Institute of the Arts. Johnson knew of Brain Dead but was never sucked into its vortex until Webster—he’s both a fan of her music and ping-pong. He made it to the tourney’s quarterfinals, where Webster was knocked out by a member of the Little Tokyo Table Tennis Club. “They created such an amazing vibe with the event that they completely reeled me into the Brain Dead ethos,” Johnson told me. “Now it’s kinda my go-to spot to bring friends visiting LA. Since Faye I’ve been to a few other events there, including [hip-hop duo] Paris Texas and Portugal, the Man. It’s such a good community binder.”

Somehow, Johnson’s story, which immediately belongs in Brain Dead’s marketing materials, gets better: He became a customer. “I’ve bought a few regular pieces while I’ve been there as well as a couple event tees,” he added.

Ng hosts plenty of these culture-building events through Brain Dead. There was the Magic: The Gathering tourney early this spring where participants used Brain Dead–branded play mats and dice. Rather than signal coolness through a series of esoteric references, Brain Dead wants to “take things that are not thought of as cool or are not yet established,” said Ng. “Because that's the challenge, that’s when you're actually trying to be part of a new culture. That's really exciting.” Brain Dead and Ng are less likely to scope out emerging talent at Frieze art show than host a tournament for a card game, sponsor its own wrestling league called Brain Slam, or make its own in-line skates. Rather than team up with McDonald’s on a corporatized link, Brain Dead cheffed up its own (very good) vegan burger with LA’s Burger Lords. “What I want to do with Brain Dead is create merchandise for culture,” Ng said. The spirit of Brain Dead comes through in every spoke of the brand. “I can serve your coffee, and that's just like you buying your hat,” he said. The idea that java can be as Brain Dead-y as a logo tee is informing how Ng is taking his company to the next level. It used to be that the graphic tee was essential to communicating the culture, but “that's been checked off. So now that we've gone so hard on the cultural side, it's like, no, the culture’s the movie theater. The culture is Magic, the culture’s skating.”

Inside Brain Dead’s shop is an array of freaky Oakley shoes. They seem designed for some barren future, where populations are divided into purpose-driven factions. The footwear resembles water moccasins, carry bulging bubble-like outgrowths, or sport spiked soles, and come in dusty beige, faded purple, or deep aqua. Few shoes look anything like what’s coming from the Oakley Factory Team. “Some people are like, ‘That's the ugliest shoe ever,’” Ng said.

The footwear is the result of another rabbit hole that Ng burrowed during the pandemic. He became obsessed with vintage Oakley shoes from the ’90s, leading to what is maybe the purest expression of Brain Dead’s new way forward. Ng, who had collected the brand’s shoes for some time, started wearing them frequently. The partnership between Brain Dead and Oakley came together easily. Ng’s business partner arranged a meeting with Oakley with the idea of potentially making eyewear. Instead, they found out that Oakley’s parent company Luxottica was interested in relaunching the shoes Ng was also obsessed with. They were given six months to create the footwear.

Ng started Oakley Factory, a subsect of the sunglasses brand devoted to bringing these shoes back. Factory Team went through the comprehensive Ng process. They started as a personal passion that turned into a branch of his business. He could have easily done color-ups with a big-name sneaker brand, but what excites him is the difficult way forward. Ng and Brain Dead have to recreate these retro models fully from scratch, building the mold each shoe is constructed around—one of the trickiest steps to making footwear. Like Teddy Santis’s appointment at New Balance, the Oakley Factory Team is a totally separate enterprise from Brain Dead, but clearly fired in the kiln of Ng’s noggin.

The collaboration is a huge hit inside the super-technical world of outdoors enthusiasts. “Brain Dead's Oakley stuff is sick,” said Jonah Weiner of the style newsletter Blackbird Spyplane and an expert on the outdoor aesthetic known as gorpcore. “They understand something cool about Oakley, which is that, whereas you might think of them as this straight-down-the-middle, mainstream sports-gear brand, in the ’90s and early ’00s they put out a bunch of beautiful, insane, avant-garde designs…. The ads and imagery from that era have been all over mood boards for the past couple years, but now you see Brain Dead really digging deep, having fun, tweaking those weird old Oakley designs and accenting the lines with playful color combos. My favorite of the new pieces trigger nostalgia for 20-odd years ago, but at the same time feel fresh and alien too.”

Ng did a lot of metaphorical gardening during the pandemic. Sitting at a coffee shop in LA’s Frogtown neighborhood, he starts to arrange the array of coffee cups and water bottles that have accumulated during our conversation. Each one represents a different seed in the Brain Dead harvest. “If you can garden, you can do that,” Ng said. “But we got to, like, not be mid.”

The pandemic, particularly the Black Lives Matter uprisings, inspired an identity crisis for Ng and the brand that’s an inextricable part of him. What was the point of merely making clothes? “We're raising a bunch of money through charity-donation stuff,” he said. “That was really cool, but I was like, ‘What more can we do besides fundraising and selling T-shirts? For me, the idea of inclusivity and diversity had to happen through actually problem-solving.”

Ng did end up making a T-shirt that raised half a million dollars for BLM, and the brand ended up growing by around 200%, he said. But Ng threw the rest of the playbook out the window and decided that the path forward for Brain Dead was to double down on building real, physical communities—places where people from all walks of life can gather together.

“These places like movie theaters and punk clubs were closing down, [the owners] couldn’t afford it.” Ng said. “How do you save these things?

“I'm a for-profit business, but my business is built off culture. If we're saying we’re a lifestyle brand, then we need to create culture.”

Ng’s life changed on the mirrored surface of a mixtape burned onto a CD. Like a video game protagonist, the disc appeared in front of teenaged Ng one day in the hallway of his middle school. It was filled with bands like the Get Up Kids, Alkaline Trio, and Saves the Day. Ng, who grew up in the Bay Area town of Orinda, just a short drive from Berkeley, started going to punk shows. He joined bands and attended shows in roller rinks. Eventually, he dropped out of high school to study film and came to LA when he was 18, in 2005. “Since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed with the idea of not fitting it,” Ng said. “Not, like, in a corny way.” (That, too, could be the Brain Dead ethos.)

He started hanging around 181 Martel Gallery, which is run by Dr. Romanelli, the artist famous for repurposing vintage clothes. Romanelli asked him to create a window display for a collection of patchwork Jordan jackets. The idea inspired Ng, then 22, to start making bags and T-shirts out of scraps of found material. He would bike around to retailers with his wares all stuffed inside a bag and started finding interested stockists. Levi’s wanted him to make bags, and the legendary Japanese retailer Beams called to place a sizable order. He christened his fledgling brand Farmtactics.

In 2013, Ng started working with Urban Outfitters on an outdoor concept that would stock brands like Fjallraven and Outlier alongside Farmtactics. Although the retailer was obsessed with Americana at the time, Ng saw its future. “I'm just like, ‘Kids don't care about this, kids want to wear graphic T-shirts.’” He started work on a streetwear brand built specifically to fill this need for Urban Outfitters. “They canceled it because the owner didn't understand it,” Ng said. UO was dead set against graphic tees. “So, I was like, ‘Fuck you guys. Let's launch it.’” Brain Dead was born.

Nearly 10 years into the brand he started in 2014, Brain Dead is making a radical change. Ng always bristled at outlets’ description of Brain Dead as “graphically led,” which he felt was reductive. Now, he’s going to shed that label entirely.

Those graphic tees the brand is most associated with are no longer anywhere near the top of Brain Dead’s best-selling items, according to Ng. A simple $240 button-up sits at the top of that metric. Next is sunglasses and fragrances, the touchstones for any good upscale brand. (Most notably, they’re key sellers for brands with established luxury identities and established signatures—labels with worlds that customers want to access.). The movie theater is profitable, if not a money machine.

The next collection of Brain Dead will look radically different from previous seasons. The brand is stripping away most of its graphic tees—strategically positioning them at Brain Dead Studios or events—and reducing the overall amount of clothes to the bare minimum. “I want to make four T-shirts a season,” he said. “And I want to release merch at the theater, so when you visit these things it's special.”

The new collection is where Ng’s community-oriented vision clearly comes into focus. It won’t just be about speaking the language of Magic players or Rollerbladers, but engendering diehard clothing fanatics too. Ng uses an upcoming denim release as an example. Jeans, he said, have an enthusiastic subculture of denimheads as well—why not appeal to them in the same way Brain Dead does to hardcore fanatics? “So if you're someone who's into denim, you're like, ‘Damn, these guys made this like insane made-in-America 15-ounce denim with all these little nods. It shows these guys have done their research,’” Ng said. “Our product needs to speak to customers as much as we did with Magic or hardcore.”

Ng’s desire to do the most regardless of whether he’s whipping up cult denim or Magic decks applies to even the silliest of Brain Dead’s collaborations. Inside his Silver Lake shop, Ng reaches for a shelf of basket-woven Minions, the dimwitted yellow henchmen from the Despicable Me franchise. Ng swears he’s nothing but genuine. So serious that he enlisted Fred and Della Cruz of the Tohono O’Odham tribe near Tucson, Arizona, to make this row of seven Minions that sit on a shelf inside his shop.

Ng encourages me to pop the head off of one of the Minions—they are real-deal functional baskets. I asked if his affection for these oddball kids-movie characters is real. “I love the Minions,” he said.

Cam Wolf is a GQ senior staff writer.