Like many graffiti artists, Kidult has built a reputation for questioning and defying authority. His world-renowned work has sparked countless debates about the fashion industry and its exploitative practices that encourage mindless consumerism.
Labels and brands like Hermès, Céline, Louis Vuitton, and Supreme have all felt the wrath of Kidult, who has become famous for tagging storefronts around the world. But what exactly propels his work? What is his motivation for targeting fashion houses and their designers?
Well, thanks to a new video release titled Funeral Fanfare we now have a better understanding of that.
In the four-and-a-half minute video, Kidult explains his outrage and why he has so much beef with certain aspects of the fashion industry, which is just one small part of a much larger problem: mental slavery. He addresses issues like police brutality, gun violence, and racism by using disturbing video clips and contrasting them with footage of his tagging missions.
“All these ‘cultural’ fashion houses are playing with codes that don’t belong to them,” he says in the video, “worsening the gap between the rich and the poor. They fuel racism, and appropriate codes, values, and cultures.”
He goes on to explain how these brands have done nothing for the cultures that they stole from, and are simply using them to make money. Toward the end of the video, there is a sound recording of designer Jean Touitou addressing his use of the N-word for his Fall/Winter 2015 collection. It was an incident that pushed Kidult to not only tag an A.P.C. storefront in Paris, but also release of his “Double Standards” T-shirt design.
Check out the full video above.
