Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox on the Magic of Marfa and His Vintage Ralph Lauren Uniform
When Welsh experimental singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon invited Deerhunter’s frontman, Bradford Cox, to join her in residency at the fifth annual Marfa Myths
festival this past weekend, there was no deliberation on Cox’s end. “It
was just a zero thinking kind of thing,” he says. “It was just,
‘Absolutely.’ ” Their collaboration, which will result in an EP, also
made Cox rethink the recording process of the forthcoming Deerhunter
album. “The rest of the band will arrive on Sunday, and Cate is going to
produce the next Deerhunter record here, which will be very informed by
the environment.”
Cox says that the working title of Deerhunter’s upcoming studio album is Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?,
which is appropriate given both Marfa, Texas’s mystique and its high
desert locale. “I think it’s a title that is definitely at home right
here. There is a feeling of disappearance here,” he says, referring to
both the long-standing local culture and the art world culture that has
redefined the tiny West Texas town in recent decades. “The desert just
has a lot of disappeared things in it. It’s where things have
disappeared to.”
While Marfa’s ghost town–like sensation might
have inspired Cox to purchase a spectral book of images, automatic
writing, and other occult-like fragments from the archives of artist Tony Oursler
(visible in the bottom right corner of the portrait of Cox, above), it
didn’t really have a similar influence on his wardrobe. Cox has been
wearing this earth-tone uniform for about 10 years now, he says,
composed of a hand-dyed linen shirt from Kyoto, Japan, and Ralph Lauren
canvas painter’s pants. Cox says that he loves bright colors like
chrome yellow, but when he starts incorporating those types of garments
into his own closet, it doesn’t feel right. “I’m both really
aesthetically concerned with things and also really inclined to allow
kind of a wabi-sabi thing,” he says. “I think this is a color where I
can both blend into the environment, and if I need to stick out, I can. I
also don’t have to worry about being attacked by coyotes or large
animals of prey.”
Cox says that he’s picked up more books in his brief time in Marfa than he has on a typical trip to Paris,
New York, or Kyoto, but he’s not about to take advantage of the
isolated town’s thrift stores in the same manner. “I figured there’d be a
lot of people in town [for the festival], and I just hate competition.
That’s why I refuse to move from Georgia, because where would I thrift?”
Cox is particularly keen on vintage Ralph Lauren, which he claims he
wouldn’t be able to find as easily in the highly curated thrift stores
in New York or New Jersey. “There’s no better place to find it than a
thrift store in Atlanta where there’s a bunch of old preppy people who give up their clothes,” he says.
The finishing touches to his Ralph Lauren uniform are an old pair of Frye
boots—ones that he and his father have consistently worn throughout the
years—and a green felt hat found on a trip with his dad that he wears
constantly. “It’s the only hat that fits us right because we have really
large heads. I feel bad because everywhere I look there’re Brooklynites
in cowboy hats and it’s like, oh God, this means I’m one of them, but I
wear this at home and I’ve worn it on tours,” he says. “I wear this hat
to protect my balding head from the blazing West Texas sun and the
dust.”
Friday, 20 April 2018