Sam Aprile
Sam is a brand marketing manager and furniture designer who just moved to New York City. We spoke to Sam in his old apartment in Detroit, while he cooked for us. His smoke alarm went off mid-interview, just before we sat down for
dinner.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length, but it is still relatively long. For shorter snippets, screenshottable quotes, and additional content, check out our IG.
For those who like to read, enjoy.
Find Sam on IG here.
Nick: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get here?
Sam: In college I studied engineering. Towards the end I knew I didn’t want to do anything with it. I got involved in a ton of other stuff, one of the biggest being this fashion production organization. Right after college, I traveled in Europe for a month or so and then I worked at a small tech startup in Ohio for a bit. A few months later, I got a job at StockX.
N: Where are you from and what do you miss most about it?
S: I am from Cleveland, Ohio, and what I miss most is the people, my family and friends who all live there still.
N: Do you feel like there's special, definitive qualities about people from Cleveland?
S: Friendship and family are everything. Everyone is really hard working and down to earth and have nice lives surrounded by family and friends. The people are incredible there.
“I eventually asked myself, why am I so into this stuff?”
N: What was the fashion production organization you mentioned earlier about?
S: It was a nonprofit that worked with local talent to put on fashion shows. So I helped produce a few fashion shows and other events. That was when I started exploring my curiosity in clothing and in the fashion world, which then turned into an obsession and an eventual realization that I wanted to do that more than I wanted to have a normal job.
N: How'd you get into clothes and fashion?
S: I think getting really into rap and what might have been considered underground rap, back in the early 2010s, really opened up my mind to the world of clothing and streetwear. Initially it was just the pure aesthetics of it and the style that I thought was cool. The more I consumed it and tried to buy it, and spent time researching it, I just kept enjoying it.
I eventually asked myself, why am I so into this stuff? And then I came to discover and understand the deeper layers of fashion and apparel. I discovered that there's deeper meanings and references to everything. And that led to more research. Just like a lot of our friends, I fell into the rabbit hole and became really obsessed with learning more about it.
N: What clothes are you really into right now? Anything you feel passionate about?
S: I'm increasingly attracted to functional clothing and highly articulated, highly engineered technical wear. Things like South2West8, Kiko Kostadinov, and _J.L - A.L_. I've been really into Japanese outerwear too, like Comfy Outdoor Garment and Mountain Research. I think the shit Crocs has been putting out is amazing too.
N: And what about music?
S: Tons of rap and tons of techno. I’ve been listening to a lot of obscure Soundcloud rap lately. I go through fluctuations, but 90% of what I'm listening to at any time is obscure rap and techno for the most part. Joeyy, Shed Theory, Yeat, as always. Yeat is the future. I also like Bladee a lot.
N: Bladee, oh yeah. Were you a Yung Lean guy?
S: Huge Yung Lean guy. I was an Odd Future kid in high school. Full on. I was that guy at my high school.
N: Has that influenced your music tastes now?
S: Yeah, it was one of the biggest influences on everything I'm into now. Getting into Odd Future opened me up to an entire world of music, culture, art, streetwear, whatever you want to call it. It introduced me to Supreme and streetwear. And this is back in 2011 or 2012, before anyone knew about any of this stuff and you were considered just a weirdo if you were into it.
N: You cooked for us tonight, and you said that was a hobby you picked up during Covid. Did you pick up any other hobbies during Covid?
S: Cooking was the biggest one. DJing. Design. I made a rug.
N: Have you DJed any sets? Wait, you made a rug?
S: Yeah. It's not that good. It's in my room. It's not horrible. Just not that good.
Nick: Have you DJed anywhere?
S: I did this little store opening for a friend of a friend back. I guess I got into DJing right before I did that. I haven't put substantial time and effort into it. It’s just for fun. It's not something I plan to ever take super seriously.
N: What kind of DJing are you doing? Like house music? Or like a hip-hop focus or something else?
S: If got into it more, it would ideally be techno and house. Stuff you would hear in a tiny grungy basement during Movement Weekend or something.
N: What’s your favorite thing you've ever cooked?
S: It's probably my homemade pasta. When you really take the time to make your own pasta, when you really go hard at it, it's better than anything you could get in a restaurant. It's pretty unbelievable. I did that for Christmas last year for some of my family, and they're still talking about it. I'll just say that.
N: What's your favorite thing in the space we're sitting in right now?
S: Probably the chair.
N: Tell us about the chair.
S: Yeah so I made that chair. Furniture design is just something I got really into during Covid. Chairs are just great pieces of design and art and can say so many things. But anyway, I got really into furniture, which then led to getting a bunch of books and getting into it even more. Then I started having some ideas that I wanted to create and started sketching just to get the ideas out. And then the desire kept growing to start making my own stuff.
This chair is a reference to some furniture done by an Italian architect that I really love. It was a case study in seeing how a distortion of materials and forms can completely change the feeling of an object and how the viewer feels about an object.
The original reference is completely made out of wood, but the form of this one follows that one pretty one-to-one. I also made a table, it’s in the office.
“You definitely learn about yourself through the things you create, as you figure out why you’re creating them. ”
N: What inspired the table?
S: Similar to the chair, I wanted to learn how to work with a certain material, in that case aluminum. And also to continue the case study into distorting materials and scales of relatively familiar objects to basically change their whole demeanor.
N: Cool. Did you learn anything about yourself?
S: I'm still very early on and still in the process of learning what my language is, what I'm trying to say, what my unique point of view is. But you definitely learn about yourself through the things you create, as you figure out why you’re creating them. And so I'm still figuring out what attracts me to want to create something and what it is that I'm trying to do. But I'm attracted to these raw materials. They're very honest. I think they invite questions.
N: That was a great answer. Have you found any answers?
S: Not yet. But someday.