R.I.P to the infamous Gary "Gwarizm" Warnett - a proper kindred spirit. Ageing British blokes who truly GET rap music in toto are few and far between, so it was a pleasure to come across someone like Gary who also knew a thing or thousand about movies and clobber, and who shared a similar sense of humour.
It's fitting that the last post Gary wrote on his blog was about a movie memorabilia auction featuring Jack Nicholson's cardigan from The Shining and Jonathan Ke Quan's trenchcoat from The Goonies because Gary was a true fountain of knowledge on garms without being a ponce about it like practically every other #menswear blogger on the planet. It does him a great disservice to paint Gary as merely the internet's foremost expert on shoes/streetwear because he could pontificate about everything from James Spader's 80's yuppie movie outfits to Chopper's zoot suit to EPMD's Hobie Alpine jackets to Kirkland basic white tees to Donkey Jackets as an unfortunate symbol of British culture to the Real McCoys reproductions of Travis Bickle's wardrobe to Shirt Kings TV footage to online auctions of Deadwood's costume department to the fur-lined leather jackets Max B & Jim Jones wore to 80's Heshers like the human pretzel James Vance.
Nobody connected the dots between music, movies and #menswear with such an eye for detail as Gary and that's why he's utterly irreplaceable. I hope Heaven got a Harajuku where he can cop Champion reverse-weaves and Visvim M-65's in western sizes on the cheap. This one's for you, lad.
(From Doomsday mixtape; 2004)
8 comments:
This one hurts. Gwar was a legend. Rest in power.
Need that Empire Strikes Back parka in my life.
Oddly enough, this hit my Twitter feed at the same time as those snide "Young Dolph RIP" tweets, and I was more bothered about one of these things than the other. So, as another ageing British bloke who likes to believe he gets rap, if not in toto, then toto-er than most of my vintage, let me thank you for (amongst other things) putting Gwar on my radar. So many key areas of interest embodied in one place - he was the kind of writer we need more, rather than less of.
3 people from my blogroll are now dead: Matthew Africa, Yams, and Gary.
😢😱
LEGENDS NEVER DIE
Just shy of 40 - so, so sad. Growing up in a crap area on the outskirts of London, but absorbing any youth culture media you could get your hands on during trips into town and committing it to memory - something a lot of us could relate to. But he consolidated all of that to his 'blog and made it a time capsule for people like us.
Remember those Fila trainers? Four Star General? Or those old Nike swing tags? Or that catalog from Bond International in the 80s with all the Regret tags? Well, he probably has a scan of it on his 'blog accompanied by 500 words.
Legend.
The return of multicultural London's finest Y@k Bollox.
G.O.A.T Gwarizm scan post right here, imho.
Wise words - he was a truly dope writer. I hope to escape the blog roll curse though
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