MOB: A NY Story

I interviewed MOB desginer Leah, whose fall line of tees and hoodies is now available on her site, and did a bio of her for ChicksWithKicks, which is up as of a couple of hours ago.

Here are some of the images I included with the story:


^^Leah running shit in MOB headquarters


^^Check out her Gucci boots, a sleek and needed upgrade on women's rainboots


^^My fave fall 2006 MOB tee, a tribute to one of Leah's fave books "Valley of the Dolls."

And here's an excerpt of the story:

Leah’s 24 so she came of age in New York during the 90s, that period of time when New York still had a lot of wild left in it, but was starting to be viewed as not only a safe place to live in again, but also a desirable place. It was like white flight playing out all over again, only this time in reverse.

She attended the all-girl Convent of the Sacred Heart, which pulled a mix of Catholic kids from New York’s born-and-bred working and middle class families like Leah, but also the intensely-wealthy Uptown girls, (we’re talking Nicky-Hilton-attended-this-school money levels). “Going to school there exposed me to all the top designers because all the girls’ mothers would be carrying designer shopping bags and the Moms bought their kids that clothing, too,” she explained. She knew better than to even ask her parents to buy any of that “high-end shit,” but never one to suffer in silence, during the start of 8th grade she came up with a way to flip them all off daily with a bag that had the words “Fuck Prada!” emblazoned across it.

In writing about Leah and MOB on ChicksWithKicks, I've noticed that posts about her tend to get a lot of comments, and at least a couple are always negative. At this point I'm deleting the all-out attack posts, but I'll admit that I'm really conflicted about doing that because part of me feels like peoples' asshattery should be on display for all the world to see.

Here is an excerpt of one I deleted today:

Get off of MOB's DICK!!! It's a couple skanky chicks printing up some t-shirts. Nothing more. Are they donating proceeds to cancer research? Are they building schools in Africa? That they're NOT doing any of those things is totally theie choice and isn't a big deal, but it seems like they're just some hookers who're busy getting shit-faced and putting up pics of their gay parties on their Blog.

Besides the idiotic "It's just a tee-shirt!!" angle (dude, if a tee-shirt so offends you, why oh why are you reading the site as opposed to a billion other blogs not devoted to streetwear???), many of the comments people write go off on Leah and her crew for being "sluts" and "hos" and I just can't tell you how much that gets under my skin.

It totally brings back memories of when I was in an all-girl punk back in the eighties, and just for the simple fact that we existed, we were nonstop called sluts, lesbians, beer slags, groupies, and it should go without saying that we were also attacked for being talentless hacks, a criticism that we never heard directed at the all-guy bands whose members were no more experienced at playing their instruments than we were. To this day, I don't get why it is we pissed off people so much. But seriously, what sucks to see is that almost NOTHING has changed in 20 years!