Page 96 - The Book For Men Spring/Summer 2023

FOR MOYA GARRISON-MSINGWANA, FASHION IS LESS ABOUT adornment than transformation. “I love how fashion amplifies or changes the architecture of the human body,” the artist explains. “The shapes and structures are fascinating to me; it’s an art form that’s become so ingrained in humanity.”
Also known by the artist handle GANGBOX, Garrison-Msingwana works across a variety of mediums — including painting, sculpture, and digital rendering — to conjure his own uniquely absurd vision of the world rooted in fashion, pop culture, and the supernatural. He has collaborated with clients including Loewe, Adidas, and Stüssy, and recently launched his first U.S. solo exhibition of paintings, “LAUNDRY 002 - A Thread is a Vein,” in New York and Los Angeles.
The collection of 12 paintings is a continuation of his remarkable LAUN- DRY series, which is predicated upon the idea of piles of clothing possessing their own life and sentience. In Garrison-Msingwana’s “uncanny universe,” clothing is near biological. “Who knows what the internal structure of these piles actually looks like,” he explains, “beyond just the regular human form.”
The Book for Men caught up with Garrison-Msingwana to discuss his upcoming multimedia projects, how anime continues to inspire his work, and why he thinks AI could never truly replace artists.
You grew up watching and drawing Japanese anime, which often features characters with an almost supernatural stylishness. How important was fashion to you and your art from an early age?
I didn’t really associate the two for a long time, but I was really interested in character design. Especially in anime because they have these really bizarre characteristics — like Kenpachi, in Bleach, has bells at the tips of all the spikes on his hair. Things like that were just so beyond, bending physics and reality, and I always really admired that.
Japanese storytelling, and honestly most cultures’ storytelling, stories from
my dad’s culture — he’s Tanzanian from Dar es Salaam — are so reality-bend- ing and folkloric and magical, and I realised that I could blend it all together easily in my work.
With “LAUNDRY 002” there’s a wonderful absurdity to how unwieldy the piles are. How inspired were you to create fashion that is similarly physics-bending?
That does totally tie in. I just don’t really worry about the rules. I think it’s important to keep that dreamlike nature to it; a kind of floatiness that can exist, or a rigidity with some of the clothes and the fabrics that would be so technically hard to achieve. I’d need a whole other career just to be able to make a lot of that stuff, or to even understand where to begin with real textiles and real fabric. So painting it just liberates me to experiment, and then maybe I can collaborate and leave the other areas of expertise of making it real to somebody else.
You recently exhibited this collection in L.A., and New York before that. What was it like going coast-to-coast with your work?
Spectacular. I’ve never felt more accomplished and proud. And so much of that is due to Hannah Traore, my gallerist, and her belief in me and support in getting people interested in what I’m doing. It’s really beautiful to encounter people that have their own completely different interpretations of my work. Honestly, that keeps me going in many ways. I have a lot of theories about what I’m doing, but mostly I’m just doing what comes natural to me.
96 BFM / SS23 FEATURES / A THREAD IS A VEIN