Suck D*ck, Cut Cake: A chat with Cameron Alastaire of Untitled & Co.

petit mort productions
Jul 6
11 min read

INTERVIEW by PENELOPE DARIO PORTRAIT of CAMERON courtesy of CAMERON ALASTAIRE NYFW BTS by COBRASNAKE

Untitled & Co may have just had their first NYFW show for their SS 25 collection but this isnt creative director Cameron Alastaire's first rodeo. He's been strutting, bedazzling, and creating for long enough to develop some keen insights on what drives us.

PETIT MORT (Penelope Dario)

Where did the concept for Untitled & Co. come from? Were you working in fashion before starting your own brand?

CAMERON ALASTAIRE

When I was 16, I dropped out of high school and moved to Milan and modeled full time. So that was my first ever anything. I lived in Milan. I got to meet Alexander McQueen before he died—which was really cool and a really interesting experience—is how I'm going to put it. I wouldn't necessarily apply morality to it, because it was both good and bad in its unique ways, but overall, I would say it was an interesting experience. Fashion was at the forefront of my life from that point. I discovered fashion totally by accident when I was 13, me and a bunch of my friends were on a school trip, and me and my boys went to go buy girly magazines from 711 and I accidentally bought a Harper's Bazaar. And I actually just bought it [again] the other day as a Christmas gift to myself. I tracked it down online. It's here.

So sweet, such a full circle moment.

Yeah, it's a June 2003 issue.

With Charlie’s Angels, so iconic.

I remember flipping through it and thinking, if I could pick what life I want, I'm gonna pick this one. This is the one for me. So I modelled full-time for two years, and then when I came back, I just went right to work. I couldn't go back to high school—I don't go to high school. I go to nightclubs.

Totally. I graduated early, I had to get the fuck out of there. I moved to New York right away.

So you get it. I just started working at a restaurant, and I ended up making all the uniforms for that restaurant, and then there's subsequent restaurants, and I had a bunch of money, and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. I was either going to open a nightclub, open a bar, or open a store. And I thought, you know what? It's a store. So I did. I opened a clothing store at 21 and the line blew up at the time. Looking back on the work that we were doing, obviously it no longer fits into our contemporary lens of what is good, but at the time, it was definitely innovative, and we went viral really quick. We got some stuff on Diplo because he was around, and it pushed the brand really high. At 22 years old, all of a sudden we were carried all over the world and all these different stores and stockists, and it was just this crazy game of catch up and trying to make it work and not ruin people's Christmases. We did that for almost 10 years.