MARKING DISTANCE ®
Marking Distance is a creative company started by Kaye Masse. It encompasses photography, art, fashion, music and more. Marking originally started as public instagram where anonymous images were uploaded "marking the distance" between different countries and locations. The platform was used to showcase photography, art, furniture, music and apparel. Today Marking Distance is a platform to showcase Kaye’s personal work as well as being a ready to wear brand.
Kaye Masse is telling me about his new clothing line. The samples are mostly in Japan, somewhere in the production process, but he has a ballcap with him. It’s greenish brown and kind of oily, and roughly distressed like it got dipped in a wheat thresher. I can’t really place the hat’s slightly unsettling vibe. Masse is happy to explain.
“Dirt, Sex and Chaos was the inspiration,” he says. The hat is the first product he developed for a brand called Marking Distance. The “Crust Hat” retails for $225. It doesn’t just look slightly revolting, but also feels stiff and gross, like it’s been dragged through a cesspool then left out to congeal in the hot sun. If the scatalogical texture is too much for you, a slightly more subtle version — the Spunk Hat — has what looks like dried semen sprayed all over it.
I find the 26 year-old artist and all-around cool guy in the lair of a true fashion rock star: a room at the Bowery Hotel that smells of freshly blasted Marlboros, clothes spilling out of a Rimowa trunk splayed on the floor. Next to a massive bouquet of half-dead red flowers, Masse is lounging in Balenciaga Couture jeans and a distressed leather jacket. His business and design partner is sitting nearby dressed in an all white outfit, looking like the opposite of him. Masse is telling me about Japan, where he escaped after what he called “a very traumatic event on his life” and spent a good part of the year working on the first Marking Distance collection.
Marking Distance is a middle-finger to the fashion world’s obsession with refinement. “Everything in fashion is about looking clean,” he says with clear disdain. Following a brief period where many fashion designers reflected the world’s state of disorder and despair back at their audience, recently beauty has been the order of the day. The signs are everywhere, from the sequins and flowers all over the runways to the sense of formality, structure, and refinement that pervades the streets.
Masse is more into what you might call sartorial edging. He didn’t particularly want to start a brand, having “been around this shit forever” and “seen too many people start brands.” But he saw an opening for a project that was visceral and physical — and kinky. The first Marking Distance collection would feel at home in an haute sex shop. There’s a military-style jacket with a ball gag collar attachment, a slip dress affixed with nipple clamps, and a hoodie complete with nipple weights. They sourced a handful of Tom of Finland-esque Wesco biker boots at an actual fetish shop in Chelsea, and added piercings to the thick leather. All of the fetish objects are removable, just in case. “We want to give people the option to showcase this side of themselves and have that conversation, because not everybody is into that kind of stuff,” says the Designer. Other pieces evoke the gunk of clothes that are muddied and molded, he explains. “So some of this stuff is literally gross, because that is part of fetishism.” The grossness dovetails with Masse’s obsession with grungy vintage garments. “We just like things that feel real, that feel worn,” he says. “It’s the idea of clothing having real life”.
Born to a chef mother and a designer father, fashion was always a part of Kaye’s life since a very young age, but it only started to “make sense” to him in middle school when he fell in love for the late designer Virgil Abloh — who he had opportunity to work with later on — and his then brand Off-White. Before pursuing his fashion career, Kaye Masse went to Law School in Los Angeles, where he was born, dropping out after one semester. Masse then went to Paris to study in the very famous Institut Français de la Mode (IFA) where he graduated. Recently, he went to Japan to study Fashion Accessories and Textiles Department at the Bunka Fashion College.