Artist Uniform: From Bottega to Visvim, This Artist Knows His Shit

In Artist Uniform, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas traces how personal style shapes an artist's identity.

Arthur Jafa dresses the way he creates: matter-of-fact, with a bit of flourish. The artist will pair an almost sterile, American workwear-inspired piece from Japanese label Visvim with a single statement earring from Balenciaga. He’ll string together a sequence of found footage of Black joy and death, brutality and triumph, for Love Is the Message, The Message is Death — and set it all to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” 

There’s a careful balance between his own pared-down look and the work he creates — not unlike a fashion designer wearing simple clothes, then creating extravagant collections. But Jafa knows his shit, just as likely to be in the studio as he is to be front row at Chanel Haute Couture shows or in head-to-toe Fear of God at the Met Gala. He loves Visvim, but he’s also found his way to the supremely hyped Japanese label a.PRESSE; his studio is littered with works, but he’s also got a pair of black mid-calf Bottega Veneta boots with a transparent sole on a table and an “exquisite” pair of white pony-hair Rick Owens boots on a shelf.

The artist is keenly aware of the power of presentation, and everything he touches has a rhythmic flow. Jafa is driven, in work and life, by feeling more than form. That’s clear from the very title of his next big exhibition: I Am Tony, opening today across two floors of the New Museum, named for legendary (and incredibly stylish) jazz drummer Tony Williams. When Williams performed onstage with Miles Davis, the musician understood that how you look was just as important as how you play. 

This attention to detail has carried over to Jafa, albeit less overtly. (He only occasionally engages in self-portraiture.) Still, whether it's the soul-stirring Love Is the Message — which made viewers burst into tears when it debuted in 2016 — or the fashion collaborations he engages in, or simply the way he speaks on his influences, Jafa knows image is inseparable from art. 

“Trying to assess Michael Jackson’s or James Brown’s greatness purely on musical terms misses the point,” he argued last year. “It’s the way they move, their presence, the way they look. Michael Jackson’s look alone. It’s a paradigm shift.” This argument forms the scaffolding for one of his most fashion-centric works, 2019’s Black Apparel. The photo montage shows a cadre of Black icons — from Stevie Wonder to West, Davis, and Brown — juxtaposed against African sculpture and fashion imagery, making the case that the way you dress and move is part of the art. 

This ability to tie together cultural cues has made him a favorite among some of fashion’s most ideologically astute designers — people who also understand how to imbue good clothes with a deeper message. He’s been a front-row fixture at shows for Prada, Balenciaga, and Chanel, and has modeled in fashion spreads. This year’s ongoing Helter Skelter exhibition, a duo show with Richard Prince, is held at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, while some of his art appears in SCAD Museum of Art’s Denim Tears from the Pool of Black Genius exhibition, charting Denim Tears founder Tremaine Emory’s cultural impact. 

Both Emory and the late Virgil Abloh — two fashion designers whose centering of Blackness matched Jafa’s own focus — are among Jafa’s closest partners. And it was Jafa who became central to the messy departure of Emory from Supreme in 2023; the designer had planned a collaborative collection with Jafa that would’ve allegedly shown lynchings and a freed slave with whip scars on his back, before the project was “secretly shut down,” according to Emory’s since-deleted Instagram post. 

That episode speaks to the dichotomy between Jafa’s personal style and public art: While his uniform favors simplicity — sometimes just jeans and a T-shirt, with an accessorized flourish — his art doesn’t go down so easily. Even when translated into clothing, his collaborative projects have to carry all the weight of his messaging. 

Think of his creative output and style like the jazz he keeps returning to: Jafa may hold a steady beat, but he’s no stranger to slamming on the cymbal. 

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