St. Louis, Missouri
I caught up with Sickly outside his three-day Field Club popup. From February 4-6, 2309 Cherokee turned into a community hangout with clothes, friends, and live sets from Nine Volt and Prata.
Interview Mady Mehler and Billie Huang
Photo Billie Huang and Mady Mehler
Edit Esther Brandwein
Sickly: My name is Sickly. I am an image maker and style inventor. Ghoul Ambrose is a way to channel all of the things I'm interested in. It’s creating a new world out of the materials that exist in my current environment. GA is my way to earn a living and throw events that can inspire another kid like me, from a small town in the middle of nowhere. Inspire them to get out into the world, explore and introduce themselves to people. Inspiring them to get their work and talent out there, begin worldbuilding and connecting with a network of people who do the same and take it seriously.
BH: What is Arena? Is this your first show?
Yes, this is my first fashion show, Arena. I named it Arena because it's not just a show or an event, but more of an experience. I like things that are multifaceted. GA in itself is multifaceted. It's not just a clothing brand, it’s a creative label. As a kid I was interested in doing everything. I did talent shows, played sports, was president of student council. I like to translate and transmute energy. Ghoul Ambrose is like The New World Order. It's my way to take over the world without doing it in a mean way. I’m doing it in an inspiring and motivating way.
I've always admired major movements, whether they started on the West Coast or East Coast or wherever. But being in the Midwest, it wasn’t an area to be a part of these movements. You're so far but in the middle of it all, so you actually catch a little bit of everything. Growing up as a military kid, living in Germany then living in Texas then moving to Missouri, I met people from everywhere and all over the world. They would always leave, but they would leave me with a piece of them and their experience, which has fused into what I do today. That’s why I’m interested in a lot of things.
Arena is meant to be an interactive experience. A lot of shit is going on. It's not just a static, walk in and look around; I want people to feel it. We put fences up – it’s kind of psychological, people walking through the maze and shit. We've been exhausted, like I'll forget my scissors back there and then you gotta walk through all that shit. And you know what? I appreciate it more because this was just a box, and now it’s a maze.
Mady Mehler: Where do you get your visual influences from? Do you have any movies or artists you’re specifically inspired by that helped you create the show?
As far as movies, Bullet from 1996 featuring Tupac and Mickey Rourke. In the movie, he has a brother who was an ex-military guy. His room looked absolutely fucking insane. It’s one of my favorite movies. It's not really that good, but I love it because the coloring and everything connects with me and hits me. So that kind of inspired the cords and the TVs and the randomness of everything, like the light hanging from up there [points at ceiling], but it's not even on.
I'm really inspired by Dash Snow. He was mainly a Polaroid artist out of New York with IRAK and Kunle Martins and Ryan McGinley. They used to roll together and did some shit in New York. They had this one event in 2007 called Nest where they took a white art gallery and shredded thousands of New York phone books and shit and it looked crazy.
When I originally sat down with Chris, the owner of Field Club, I showed him the Nest shit. He was like, yeah, we can do it. I was like, what? I'm showing him these pictures with dicks on the wall and shit. But I would say that those are my two main inspirations. In St. Robert, my room looks kind of like this, without the spray paint. Magazine cuttings, TVs on the floor, art on the wall.
BH: What do you want people to take away?
I can do it too. I don't want people to see this and think they can’t talk to us. We’re just like you, we’re human beings.
I am grateful that Five Dolla Cam, Malik and Ryan, showed up. It’s important to me since they inspired this. They threw shit here first during the summer, which inspired me. Then I saw Yosh Dafne over at the Pulitzer Museum. I saw that and thought, “we need more of this. Why isn’t there more of this?” He had models standing there for hours, just standing in his clothes. I thought, “why isn’t there more weird shit like this?” And it’s not even weird, like you see this shit online. But when people do it in real life, nobody shows up. Why? We’re in St. Louis complaining there’s nothing to do here. No nigga, there is shit to do here. We do this shit and y’all call it weird or get standoffish and act like there’s only twenty people in the city. There’s millions of people in this area. So we can do it. We need more people. I want people to see this and do their own shit next month.
BH: I was talking to Jake after setting up TVs, saying we need more events like this. This is stuff you see in bigger cities, not something usually in Missouri.
Well, it is now [laughs]. And it's a fucking Wednesday we're doing this. People were texting me like, ‘I got work.’ Quit your fucking job! We're gonna keep doing it on a weekday, yes, because this is STL. We need to create our own legacy and stuff to do during the week. Motherfuckers, get off work.
I had someone walk down from Lee's Famous Chicken yesterday after they heard Nine Volt rehearsing in here. They came inside and just sat in here. That is what we need. I don't know how that person felt when they went home, but I would feel inspired. I would be like, ‘what the fuck?’ I wouldn’t even need to know who did it.
MM: Can you tell us about what we're going to see tomorrow at your show?
I designed this collection, doing a play on school and the concept of university. I call this one “Forward to School” instead of “back to school”. When I started Ghoul Ambrose in 2022, it started as a concept and an idea. When I got my LLC, I didn’t immediately start printing shirts. The first thing I did was figure out what this means to me, what the ethos behind this is. As we keep going, there will be more and more explanations, but I don't think you guys wanna read a book right now. We just need to see graffiti on the walls and see the show.
My confidence rose from the time I started GA. Now I feel like I can do anything I want. When I first started, I had no gauge on anything creative, so “Forward to School” is inspired by the education that I've received in the real world, getting out here and making shit and learning from that. Meeting people that also make cool shit, learning from them, being inspired by them. That whole feedback loop. So this collection features eight different pieces. The first great idea that I ever had for GA was the “excursionist.” I feel like that perfectly describes me. The excursionist is just a couple steps further than the traveler. The traveler wants to go out and experience and explore, but the excursionist has a lifelong impulse to do different. I remember when I first typed it up and was like, “this is the DNA.”
Then we have the GA trucker cap, which is a trucker with a logo and the emblem. It's hand studded and hand coated in an artificial latex paint to give it that worn-in look. I had my friend work on it. I think that piece is one of the centerpieces and most important of the collection.
My friend Austin and I are from the same hometown, Saint Robert. We grew up being the most fashionable people in school. I ain’t talking shit, I’m being real. When we graduated, we both got nominated against each other for best dressed. I mean, we was the only ones wearing Margiela in the school, you know what I’m saying?
I’m so proud of him. I started my individual creative journey first, shooting videos at Materia and doing different stuff in St. Louis. I could see he was inspired by that, so I told him to come with me and meet people together. Like, St. Robert is nothing. St. Louis is everything.
He showed me his trucker I gave him and he studded it. The fact he did was so powerful. Self liberation is everything this brand stands for. I didn’t even tell him to do that. He got up and decided to do that. He’s had an infatuation with leather and studs and his whole closet is full of shit like that. That was an activity for him to start liberating himself from this system. We need to depend on these designers to express ourselves. Fashion is fun and needs to be fun. So for me, it’s a great activity for us, we work together on this. Collaboration. But that's the second piece.
Third piece is the ‘Hard Worker’ tee, which has a front and back sketch. When I was in school, I used to always draw on my assignments.
The next piece is the GA tee. It has a reflective print of ‘GA,’ billboard size, on a recycled organic cotton t-shirt. That one resembles the simplicity of military PT wear. I grew up as a military brat. You know those shirts that say ‘ARMY’ or ‘Marines’? That's why I call it ‘Ghoul Militia’. It's reminiscent and reflective of my childhood growing up as a military brat. We will release them in more colors, but that's our basic tee.
This is collection triple0001. One. So we'll be doing 1000 other collections, which is a whole other story. But this is collection one out of a thousand.
MM: It’s interesting that you have this clear juxtaposition taking both influence from this tactical, utilitarian, almost disciplinary, influence of your military background; yet you speak a lot about liberation and creativity and freeing yourself. Can you talk more about how those things kind of challenge each other, but also work together for this project?
There has to be a balance in life. I have a lot of energy that I use in different ways. I make music, and my performances and my music portray a certain energy. You probably couldn’t just judge me off of that. You have to pop in here and see what’s up.
Some days you wanna wear that uniform, that fit you wear every day. Then some days I wanna wear a tight shirt. The balance between those two is not being afraid to live in your own movie and be the main character. Life is a movie, so your character is gonna change over time. You might get into some spaces where you feel a vibrational energy and you’re like, man, I feel sexy. If you feel sexy, that's all that matters. You just go ahead and go on with that. In life there's a balance between good and bad, between being serious and having fun. You can have fun, but make sure that you're establishing something for yourself and your lineage.
I feel like everything I'm doing now is a product of the work that my ancestors put in. My grandpa was a cab driver in New York and mopped floors at a grocery store. Now I'm just doing this creative shit. My dad joined the military and was an engineer. Now I feel like I’m an engineer on a different level, a creative engineer. I like putting shit together and being involved. This shit inside, it’s dope, but this moment is not gonna come back. I'm not chasing any feeling. I'm just trying to top it. I'm gonna keep topping shit until I die. Life is a balance of energy.
BH: What’s next for you?
Putting this shit on paper, making shit more official. It’s great to do things like this and have my friends come out, but I think St. Louis creatives need to come together and use our talents. In order for St. Louis and for us, the artists and humans, to shine, we need to work with what we got. We need to work around and work laterally before trying to climb that ladder. When you work laterally, the right people will come around. They’ll see it’s real and coming from you.
So next for me is building the team that will allow me to do everything I have the energy for. There are only 24 hours in a day. I make music, I make clothes and do all this shit. But with the team, it’ll be more solid and we can take over the world much faster. Then I can make a collection but also have some people helping me put together a show and a press release.
I did everything for this show. Put it together, coordinated, styled shoots. I worked with Tony on this photoshoot in Chicago [points to posters in the window] with my man Drew who owns this archive, Odyssey Rebuild. I worked with Joa Frey with this shoot over here [points to other posters in the window] and with Ken’s Mind XL on this one.
I think it’s really building a team. Anything successful, whether it looks like it or not, there’s a team behind it. There’s a couple people who hold it down behind the scenes.
When you show love to other people and help them build, one way or another, that same energy and support will come for you in your time of need. So, I'm here to help whoever and show love that I can show. And building that team so that we can do everything at the same time. But I'm also patient, I'm not really trying to rush anything. I'm just living my dream right now.
BH: You speak about everything so well, you really believe in it.
Cause I feel this shit, yo. I hope someone can see this and throw some shit next month so I don’t have to.