Velveteen Underground

HIPSTER CHIC MEETS PETTING ZOO AT LIBERTINE

To their surprise, and to that of an industry accustomed to fits of low-level lunacy, Cindy Greene and Johnson Hartig have found an enthusiastic demand for customized clothes adorned with 19th-century images of frogs, bats, ravens, greyhounds, and wolves. Their handiwork, sold under the imprint Libertine, has made its way onto the backs of Sting, Mick Jagger, Michael Stipe, and members of U2. “It’s about the transition from being composed to resplendently disheveled,” says Greene, a singer with the art group Fischerspooner and a self-styled New York superfreak for whom life without performance is a bore. Her documentary, Upside Right, debuted this winter, and Fischerspooner releases its first album in the U.S. this month. What desires Libertine has tapped—for fairy tales, for the innocence of rustic life—is a matter of conjecture, but the surreal creatures of the imagination that populate the clothes are at the crest of fashion’s progressive wave. “There are some things I’m not 100 percent sure of, like a wild boar,” says Greene. “But members of the pig family are flying off the shelves.”

E.H.

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