HAPPY99
Words by Rian Phin, Photography by John Yuji
Lighting Tech: Jimi Franklin, Camera Assistant: Dylan Pearce, BTS: Gia Seo, Production Designer: Fletcher Chancey, Art Assistant: Colin Phelan, Art Assistant: Nick Kozmin, Make-Up: Mollie Gloss, Stylists: Nathalie Nguyen + Dominic Lopez, Models: Nathalie, Dom, Lauren, Violet, Smiley
Few independent fashion brands have the resonance to capture and retain audience attention the way cover stars Happy99 have. Designed by Dom Lopez and Nathalie Nguyen, the mysterious, futuristic brand reached a massive scope during the 2020 lockdown through its artistic vision and ability to establish an authentic community. They’ve garnered global interest and celebrity pull requests after sharing their cutting-edge digital footwear designs on Instagram; the experimental designs were initially mistaken for real samples, but were instead works of art to be experienced onscreen. With their nostalgic riffing and visionary perspective on fashion, the design pair has worked to craft a digital and real life tribe. Both experienced multidisciplinary artists, Lopez and Nguyen collaborate in perfect synergy to propel the culture’s vision of art and design into uncharted territory. With equal parts rigor, structure, and creativity that manifests in their unique expressions, the duo creates harmony in all they share.
Both artists are modest about their creative prowess and cultural impact. Nguyen’s background in digital design and garment construction and Lopez’s background in technology and music as a purveyor of cutting-edge and nostalgic culture blend harmoniously to establish the brand’s foundation of masterfully designed clothes with cultural resonance.
Rian: Could you share more about your individual backgrounds and how they overlap creatively?
Nathalie: I went to art school, but I went for 3D animation for the first year and a half, at Academy of Arts in San Francisco. They actually teach you discipline, but I didn't have discipline as an 18-year-old, so I actually dropped out of that major and switched to something called visual development, which is creative storyboarding for video games, comics, and animation. So that's kind of where I was going, like I just decided to be more of a puppet designer than a puppeteer, which is about moving things, not drawing things, very different things. And then I graduated in 2015-ish. I think I met Dom in late 2017. We started working together in 2018.
Dom: I was making beats in high school. I had motion on MySpace. [Laughs] I was just making beats in early SoundCloud days, like 2010, 2011, 2012 I was working at a flea market and just making beats.
Dom modestly shares about being recognized by Matthew Williams (of ALYX, Givenchy), becoming a signed producer, working on the Yeezus album and then spending time gaming. During this period of gaming, he continued to grow and explore his appreciation for the beauty of game design as an art form and his nostalgia for vintage consoles like the PlayStation 1 and Sega Dreamcast.
Dom: When it comes to computers, growing up, I knew how to use Photoshop, I knew how to use all the movie programs, so I was already familiar with music programs. I just looked at a laptop as a tool to do stuff on, until that moment. I didn't like, ever think of it as a tool to make video games on, you know. But at the time, I just searched on YouTube on how to make a video game on a MacBook, and I searched for that, probably 2013, and then I was like, “Oh shit I could do this.” I could watch these tutorials for hours and learn a bunch about coding and animating whatever, so I started just doing that a lot instead of playing video games. I was just like making beats and trying to figure out how to make games. I wasn't good at it, but I made stuff that entertained me. If I showed my friends I was working on a video game, they thought I was a magician or something.
The pair explains that they were first drawn to each other at a burger spot and joined forces creatively and romantically.
On how they got started:
Nathalie: We eloped into a relationship. Obviously people told us, “If you guys get together and just end up in the Midwest somewhere as a married couple that just has four kids and only Netflix and chills, we would be really sad.” We didn't have anything that we could confidently say, “This is our thing, this makes us money, and it makes us happy.” We started Happy99 almost to prove the point.
Dom: Before 3D modeling shoes, our homie said he had a plug on making shoes. And we got hyped to hear that because we're like, “Oh, we can make a shoe! Let's just try to go all out and make some crazy stuff!” We were like literally cutting shoes apart, trying to understand how they worked. We were trying to make a physical shoe, and then when it came down to it, we realized it was just so much money. So then we just made 3D shoes, which was Nat’s idea.
Nathalie: I was like, I need stimulation, and we were 3,000 miles apart. We're not making shoes; it's too expensive, and we suck at it, so we were just like, “Okay, I guess we'll do this.” We were sending the file back and forth, and then we started 3D photoshopping them on our friends' feet to just troll the internet. But then what happened? A stylist for Lady Gaga reached out, and then a stylist for Grimes hit us up and wanted a size 8. And we were just like, “They're not real! I can't believe we're pulling it off!” That's how early-3D it was.
Dom: That's how early people really didn't understand—people really didn't know it was fake. If you look at it right now, it's obvious because we have AI. We have eyeball training for AI now, but it was like the collective consciousness was just so dumb that even we had that blindness—like we looked at it, and we were like, “Oh yeah this is so real, we're gonna fool everybody.”
The meaning of “streetwear” has been abstracted over time into a simple reference point for luxury fashion and logo tees designed as cash grabs. The designers of Happy99 are visionaries, restoring the core values of streetwear by cultivating true community around their work, connecting with their audience beyond aesthetics.
Rian: From global love and highly anticipated drops to the cult following of your store in Manhattan, the origins of Happy99 feel collective and authentic. A lot of “streetwear” brands now are printing logos on shirts, without the fundamental principles of using design as a vehicle to spread their community’s values.
Can you tell me about Happy99’s ability to exist beyond branded clothes and cultivate community so effectively?
Nathalie: I think our brand speaks out to people because they feel like we’re interested in the same hobbies as them, like anime, video games, and music. Especially when it started…
Dom: When I'm at the store, a lot of kids come in and ask a lot of questions like, “How did you guys get to this point”? And the most honest way that I could think about it is just the community—the online community that me and Nat had prior to the brand.
[Nathalie agrees]
Dom: We knew a lot of weirdos. We never belonged to a scene. We were always floaters. We got these homies that skate over here, we got homies that are more in the queer club scene—we got homies that are just like on some normal shit. Through that network of people and what was going on at the time, it spread through these different subcultures. At the time we didn't think anything of it. Obviously now looking back, I feel like we had like the most ideal PR list one could have ever wished for. In terms of seeding and people being interested in the brand…
Nathalie: It was like a handful, like two people per niche or groups of friends we had, and there were like twenty groups!
Although they’ve established a broad, interconnected audience and brand, they remain mysterious and humble, rooted in their community. They seem to extend that shared personal ethos to their brand’s practice.
Dom: People are so drawn to the characters, but they don't even know that much about them. They just know what they stand for. And I think that was interesting, when they slowly started to just represent us as people.
When I'm at the store, a lot of kids come in and ask a lot of questions like, “How did you guys get to this point”? And the most honest way that I could think about it is just the community—the online community that me and Nat had prior to the brand.
The duo explains that they haven’t had to use traditional influencer marketing or billboard ads because of their strong relationship with their global network.
Dom: To this day, we haven't done any of it; we're mostly word of mouth. People who come visit the store, sometimes I ask them, “How'd you hear about it?” They're like, “A friend.” Always a friend, always!
I think like, the community kind of made itself, you know, like created itself for sure.
Rian: You’re creative visionaries and your business operates so differently than the rest of the industry. Do you care if the industry catches up to your innovative perspectives on community and carefully cultivating identity online? Do you value your brand’s uniqueness?
Dom: We could do better in a lot of ways; we're learning. Historically, we used to market a lot with 3D. We used to market with dolls; we've maybe marketed with photos of humans twice, in terms of selling clothes. But I just can't see myself doing it as often as other brands do. [To] push a visual image of somebody onto the consumer, and this person might look like a very unique person or something, or a person that belongs to the subculture, whatever. But in my head, I just know how random the Happy99 fan is, and how different that is. I don't even feel like I want to enforce how that person should look. Even though it is my business to enforce that, I feel like at the same time, I don't have a business telling y'all how to rock this stuff. You can figure it out.
Even when it says our product sells out, it doesn't mean we're selling out like a thousand shirts at a time or something. You know, it's very intimate. But the optics online just make it look like we are potentially a big corporation.
Me and Nat do everything for the brand. We have really awesome friends who work the store, because we used to work the store, and then we realized we weren't designing anything.
I think it's funny because I always think like, damn, one day, we could really benefit from someone designing or someone taking better product shots. We take the product shots on the iPhone.
Rian: I feel like that's why it resonates with people. You guys have your authorship in it, that's what I mean.
Dom: I think that's the thing about it. Whether you know it or not, how ingrained in the brand me and Nat are, I think somehow it reaches people—whether you know it or not.
Rian: Why do you think your work has the cultural resonance it does?
Dom: It's just like feeling like it's a home-cooked meal; there's something that just feels different about it, other than a shirt you would buy at Zumies. I think a lot of it is really just giving people space to just imagine things for themselves. I think growing up, that's something [that was] important to me—figuring out what you like for yourself, because those are kind of the things that you're more excited about generally, the things you found on your own. Like ever since like second or third grade, I feel like that's been a feeling that I just chase all the time. It's just like, I like this thing more because I found it, because nobody showed me. I think a lot of people have that kind of connection to it.
"It's just like feeling like it's a home-cooked meal; there's something that just feels different about it, other than a shirt you would buy at Zumies. I think a lot of it is really just giving people space to just imagine things for themselves."
The pair describe their experience shooting with Cult Classic, learning to release control, and collaborating with their closest friends.
Nathalie: I know Azha and Apryl from like, 2014–15 Bay Area, like, when they used to do Shade Zine. And I knew Justin because we worked with him a few years back, and you know, they worked with a lot of people who collaborated with us.
Doing the shoot was really cool because we are really scared of shoots, because we're scared of using real models because of the association, [as] we discussed earlier, and the lack of control. It just becomes other people collaborating, and we don't want to be, like, dictators in the shoot. But we have very particular things. And even setting it up, we were very stingy. We were just like, “Um, can we use our friend? Can we get our friend to shoot it?” And then, “Can we just shoot our friends, please?” Like, we just needed to be, like, as close to home as possible, because any variable, any model that we don't know—and then we don't know how to communicate with the model to get what we want, because we don't even know them.
We are kind of control freaks; that is kind of a problem. But we're really happy that this is our biggest shoot, and most professional shoot, and we got to do a Cult Classic, because they kind of already knew us from years back, and they gave us creative control—like, they were very open to it. Anything we asked, they were like, “eah.”- It changed us and helped us understand that maybe doing a photo shoot isn't the worst thing ever—it doesn't have to be a nightmare.
So we originally were like, “Let's just do this on dolls,” like, no physical people, no models. We were really scared, but we're glad we opened up and let people in and did it the more traditional way because we got to use, you know, our family. Like the three people who work in the store, and we see every day, like, these are our closest friends. And people who just kind of know the day-by-day operations of Happy99—there's nothing more like Happy99 than them.