A Party to Dye For
October 12, 2024
JFP Dye Haus Party - 10/12/2024
I landed at JFK around 6:30 AM on the morning of 09/11/2024. The redeye I had taken marked the end of one of the most stressful days of my life, and I was woefully unaware that the sleepless night spent sandwiched between an overweight latino man and an overly anxious waspy woman would deliriously bleed into an equally painful day. I managed to drift off for the 45 min Uber into Dumbo, a potentially peaceful moment that was drowned out by cortisol and self-loathing. On paper, it was going to be a fun weekend - potentially the most exciting my schedule had been in a month, and balancing an attempt to be meaningfully present for the experience while gracefully handling my remote responsibilities 3,000 miles away felt insurmountable.
I arrived at JFP around 8:00 AM and was greeted by an overly composed Jason and a warm cup of JFP Coffee 002, a natural process coconut lemonade Caturra that still needs a minute to off gas. Our Dye Haus party was 30 hours away. We had a fairly meticulous plan in place, a solid guest list and almost everything we needed in-hand. As Ka, Mike, Alex and Sam trickled in over the course of the morning, the growing group thoroughly cleaned every surface in the studio and arranged the studio for our Dye Haus event. We went through the vintage shirts Ka had collected over the previous week, each with a graphic ranging from Shania Twain to H.R. Puffinstuff, but otherwise mostly white cotton, which Mike offered would help the Dye take. We had a 1:30pm tasting at Paramount Caviar, and for the first time in the history of the studio, almost nothing to do until then.
We spent the rest of the morning prepping the dye itself, mixing the natural pigments with warm water in plastic squirt bottles in various dilutions. We then stickered the bottles and then proceeded to aimlessly rearrange furniture for an hour or so. There was a heated debate on the commercial viability of Usher’s post-Confessions catalog, which felt like an extension of on-going studio conversation where Mike and Ka remind Alex and Jason that they are old heads. I was concerned that the older contingency in the room hadn’t quite absorbed the internet’s impact on perceived relevance, which itself has been a tired topic for the past 5 years.
I had other things on my mind, and spent the duration of the morning on the phone with various lab directors in Los Angeles, while the conversation shifted to Jay-Z and then regional slang. It all came to an abrupt stop, and Jason loudly proclaimed “Time to go!” As I’ve spent more time in New York, my reductive understanding of its geography had come completely untangled, so the suggestion that it would take 30 minutes to get from Dumbo to Long Island City felt reasonable. I drove with Jason, Alex and Sam, which Ka and Mike drove separately. My car arrived at Paramount Caviar first, but Jason wanted to wait for the full group to arrive to announce ourselves. When Ka and Mike showed up shortly thereafter, we entered what felt like a well-to-do optometrist’s office in 2001 and were greeted by a very educated woman. She showed interest in our Dye Haus Event, and even shared some of her own ideas. When Mike showed contrived interest in her designs by calling them “cool” - she authoritatively agreed.
The guts of Paramount Caviar looked like a cannabis distribution center out of central casting, with a complex looking PC with proprietary software, a myriad of scales and heaps of compliance materials. We tried a bunch of different Caviar and Roe, and settled on Paddlefish and a more classic Osetra. Mike reacted very strongly to a Beluga sample that we quickly passed on, and the proprietor of Paramount Caviar called his face green and his stomach sour. We then purchased the caviar, allegedly at a good price, and then went our separate ways. Jason, Sam and I went back to the studio, via an apple store, and Mike, Ka and Alex all went home.
The rest of Friday was fairly irrelevant. I saw some friends, Jason went to a Rashashona dinner with his kids, and Ka and Mike did cool young guy stuff that I didn’t get to hear about. I’m not sure what Alex or Sam did Friday night, but neither of them were scheduled to attend the event the next day. I was the first to arrive at the studio on Saturday, quickly followed by Mike. Jason was meant to spend the morning at a youth lacrosse tournament in Florida, New York, but ended up back at the studio before 10:30am, right as Ka and his guest arrived. We arranged the various shirts and rugs around the studio, ordered popcorn chicken from Bonchon to pair with the caviar, and then waited for our guests to arrive. Folks started trickling in around 2:45 pm and were directed to pick a vintage shirt from the pile and begin soaking it in soda ash.
Within an hour, the group had grown from seven to over a dozen, and to all of our surprise, things were going smoothly. Our guests were entertained by the food offerings and seemed legitimately excited by our Dye Haus concept. As the shirts soaked, we went through our existing inventory of Dye Haus shirts for inspiration, and the growing group seemed to separate into three camps. One group went for a more transition spiral dye, while another gravitated for a more abstract splatter type pattern. The third group, led by the more fashion forward friends in attendance used the liquid dye to draw patterns and letters, almost giving the finished shirts an airbrushed effect. For the first time in JFP history, we decided to incorporate drinks, which seemed to help people loosen up and enjoy themselves. The crowd nearly doubled in size, which was impressive considering that only one guest had properly RSVP’d to the event. Things were beginning to take shape.
Though very few of the guests knew each other, a sense of community began forming in the room. We had photographers, designers, rappers, models, dancers, skateboarders and business people together, all entirely out of their element, experiencing the child-like joy of being able to create. People collaborated, creating and partying at once, while splashes of color began to adorned the studio. As it began getting dark, the energy in the studio became more crowded, as people shifted from their own creations to walking around and observing those of others. Beneath the tiling of shirts, with graphics ranging from Marni to Veeze, the Dye was slowly seeping into our studio rugs, creating a symbolic carbon copy of our activity, with the consequence of each attendees process creating a literal stain on the studio. As more folks arrived, guests brought everything from a white denim vest to a pair of Air Force 1s, forcing Mike to brilliantly improvise. It was one of Mike’s friend’s birthdays, which helped the event slowly devolve into a real party. I went downstairs to smoke and decompress for 15 minutes around 7:00 pm, at which point I checked the studio’s instagram story, which brought a legitimate smile to my face. I returned to the studio and walked into a real party. Some people were shirtless and some were taking shots of tequila. Others were doing Tik Toks, while a small group was ostensibly passed out on our couch.
Around 9pm, about 90% of the guests left to go to a birthday party, and the remaining guests started to wind down, feeling a combination of exhaustion and awe. JFP has had a number of successful events in the past, even ones that felt like we had thrown the premier party for our little slice of culture in a given moment, but nothing that had really captured the spirit of the studio. The plain truth is that each member of the studio could likely make more money elsewhere. We could each respectively have more control over our lives, both creatively and structurally, but we chose to work at the studio because of a genuine trust in each other and belief that collaboration can create works that are much more meaningful than the sum of their parts. Though the event, and Dye Haus as a whole, had been generative of considerable dissonance and conceptual confusion, our party felt cohesive. One guest described the studio, and all of its subsequent work, as an embodied stream of consciousness, one that finally felt cogent, organic and genuinely fun.
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