Misha Hollenbach of P.A.M. Discusses Time, Australia and Moving to Paris

Misha Hollenbach, co-founder of cult lifestyle brand Perks and Mini, has come to be known as a cryptic stalwart in fashion. Ever since bringing outlandish graphic-driven clothing to the forefront of streetwear, Hollenbach and P.A.M. have freely crossed institutional boundaries, publishing zines and releasing mixtapes while navigating clubs, pop-up shops and gallery spaces. SSENSE followed Hollenbach and label mates on a bike tour through his new hometown of Paris. Read the entire piece here to delve deeper into the vision and consciousness of the unorthodox designer.

Tell me about your job as a teenager at a tie dye factory.

Opening doors. The company was called Blue Meanies. They were selling tie dye t-shirts and acid.

How was New York when you first visited?

Completely mind-blowing. I caught all the feelings. I caught early New York techno vibes, and tail-end 80s graffiti vibes, and Bronx vibes. But still—the thing is still there now, just maybe not in the same place. Ultimately humans are more or less the same over the ages. There were probably rad humans in the Middle Ages, and they were probably artists and upstarts. The same people existed in the 80s. It’s mostly free thinkers, or free ballers.

Does this inform your own image production now? Where do your images come from?

They’re from being in the right place at the right time. With PAM, we don’t want to force anything. When it comes to making graphics, there’s no research, there’s no mood board, there’s no theme. It’s just what happens to be there at hand at the time, and just dealing with those parameters.

What do you think of the remix, in both a musical sense and an aesthetic sense?

It’s cool. It perpetuates. It perpetuates possibly a good thing, or it might make a shit thing good. There shouldn’t be ownership. And there isn’t really ownership over anything. We’re humans and we’re doing it all to communicate with each other. After it’s made and it’s shown, it becomes everyone’s. It’s public domain.

A couple of labels have appeared in the last decade that have broken from the two season cycle.

We’re making stuff every day, so we’re making a lot of stuff in between. We need to think about feeding our kids, and the fashion season thing is a structure that allows that to happen. A lot of people like to do things at the same time as each other, and do the same things as each other… so it’s a good time to catch structure.

We’re about to launch a new website that this Italian company has made, graciously, for us. They work for really big clients normally. They’re excited by PAM. When the boss was explaining to his staff what PAM does, he said these guys are constantly vomiting. Every day they’re vomiting, vomiting, vomiting. And we need to bring them a bucket.