The singer-songwriter goes deep in his most extensive interview about fashion to date.
By Samuel Hine
John Mayer wants to talk about clothes. We’re at 7B, a prototypical East Village bar, where Mayer’s filming promos for his Bud Light Dive Bar Tour date later this summer. He’s wearing Visvim boots, a white gold Rolex, and rocking what he calls “autumn sunrise” highlights in his hair. Mayer is upbeat and seems extremely happy, on the tail end of a righteous summer tour with Dead & Company, the band he formed with former members of the Grateful Dead. His seventh LP, The Search for Everything, has also been out for a few months, full of cathartic tunes that he gets to play on the second leg of his own tour—and at a dive bar in LA on July 26—when it begins later this month.
Having largely avoided formal interviews for the greater part of the last decade, Mayer’s famously overactive brain is best accessed through his prolific social media use. And along the way he’s dropped hints—among self-deprecating jokes about fame, bored hotel room ruminations, and wide-pan stadium vistas—that his status as a fashion legend has only gotten stronger. He’s active on a group of bootleg Grateful Dead T-shirt Instagram accounts. He takes selfies in Max Pittion shades, a French eyewear company he re-launched after it went out of business. He Snapchats about fashion topics ranging from his love for Kirkland brand sneakers to how he meticulously hand-washes his white tees. The guitar hero’s obsession with cult Japanese brand Visvim is well-documented, but even the most casual John Mayer follower would notice that in the past few years his journey into other rarefied corners of menswear has gotten just as serious.
And now, he’s ready to go in on the world he inhabits when he’s not holding a guitar. In a wide-ranging conversation over a few days, we discussed questions of authenticity, access, culture and more—including the Grateful Dead’s fashion influence, his favorite new brands, and whether he’d like to get into fashion design one day.
GQ Style: Your personal style is always a bit ahead of the wave. What’re you workshopping right now?
John Mayer: Oh that’s funny, that’s a good way to look at it. Well, I’m trying to integrate the Grateful Dead life with all aspects my life. And right now in that world there’s such a burgeoning scene that’s a combination of streetwear and Deadhead wear. A new generation of really great designers—guys who work as professional designers for fashion houses and for retail places—are Deadheads. The world of people making really limited run Dead-esque shirts that have a modern vernacular style-wise… I am so into this world right now.
Like the guy who does your merch, Jeremy Dean.
Jeremy Dean—he’s got the brand We Can Discover the Wonders of Black Flag—his tees are exceptional. Exceptional. And he’s only making 100 of them. This is the underground. This is the new underground of streetwear, and it’s happening in Grateful Dead world, so I’m mixing that in, ’cause I think there’s room for a little bit of Heady tie-dye.
When you get interested in something, whether it’s Visvim, watches, sneakers, whatever, you go in super deep. Where does this obsessive curiosity come from?
Always had it. And I met really cool people when I began to extend beyond music. I met [Fragment designer] Hiroshi [Fujiwara] in Japan. Then Hiroshi would come to New York and I’d lend him an acoustic guitar. Then I’d go to Japan and Hiroshi would take me out. And then Hiroshi introduced me to [Supreme founder] James Jebbia. Eric Clapton was also in the mix, he walked me over to [now-closed streetwear boutique] The Hideout in the UK. And that really turned me on to it—’cause I’ve always had this collector mentality. I got very interested in fashion and how it connects with ambition to just go deeper into a world.
I think one of the reasons your interest in menswear seems exceptional is that it seems unconnected to your musical career—a totally different creative lifestyle.
Well, it’s only different if you look at the genre of music as the definer of what culture you can be involved in. I mean, I was sort of horizontal before anyone else went horizontal in terms of just breaking down the barriers. Because I was always far more interested in stuff other than the scope of music that I made. And so if you take the musical genre partitioning away, then none of it’s all that strange. It’s just that I don’t necessarily connect my interest in fashion to the main event of what I do musically.
The only key to access is curiosity and looking into developing a sense of taste—that goes well beyond fashion taste, right? This is the real thesis of the whole thing: fashion is now available to everybody. You don’t have to wait in line for Supreme. It might actually be easier to get it on eBay, in terms of cost-benefit. Right? That’s no longer the barrier to entry to get the shirt or to get the record or to get the skateboard deck or to get the brick. And it’s the same thing with music, it’s the same thing with filmmaking, it’s the same thing with every aspect of art. The access is now completely uniform. Anybody can make a record, anybody can have a band, anybody can make a film. Anybody can have a website, anybody can start an initiative, whatever they want to start.
Anybody can screenprint T-shirts, come up with a brand name and be a designer.
Anybody. That’s right. But, the new metric is your level of balancing different tastes, creating your own tastes out of them. Literalism is dead. Literalism is gone. Even the literalism of Free & Easy magazine, like, going head-to-toe with it, or Supreme head-to-toe. Literalism is easy now because all you have to do is click follow on an Instagram account and it’s a subscription to a certain amount of cultural influence. So the real question—or the only question I’m interested in—is how do you implement that in a way that’s authentic. And you can even push the boundaries of authentic, right? Even authenticity is up for debate.
Do you think you’ve achieved a sense of authenticity in your life, in your interests and style?
I think so. I think it probably works by way of, like, two steps forward, one step back, repeat. I’m OK with dismantling something that works in order to find something else that works down the line.
This might be a sort of obvious comparison, but your music and style seem to have paralleled, and become more refined and rarified simultaneously.
I think you’re right. There are so many lyrics on Room for Squares it’s ridiculous. If you look at the length of people’s lyrics when they’re younger, it’s clear they just have more thoughts. They produce so many great first takes. But think about an older jazz horn player. They won’t play as many burning lead lines. There are more conservative, efficient ways to say things. When you’re 24, you want to get mainlined ideas, you just want to get mainlined pure, uncut thought.
The greatest thing about music is that you can just keep showing it—you can’t keep showing the same movie in a theater, you can’t keep doing the same standup comedy set. But I play Continuum every night. I play “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” every night. So what I’m looking for as an artist is stuff to supplement that. Think of it like collecting. It’s really easy to collect the first 80% of anything, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to hunt down the rare shit. And what I’m trying to do now is hunt down the really rare-shit music. You know? I’m into the exploration of having your shit down. Because I’ve lived enough of feeling like I was almost gonna get hit by a car for four lifetimes.
I have to say you seem pretty fulfilled going into 40. What’re you doing right?
The reason I’m so happy now is because a lot of expectation that I had for myself was probably a little bit unnecessary. I have a perfect image of ambition and reward for my life right now. I know what to expect, I know how much I should be asking for when I knock on the door, and I get it. I really write down on a piece of paper what I want out of life and what I want out of work and what I want out of “fame”—and I have all the stuff I want. And, yeah, I would probably like another 10, 15, 20%, but that comes with another 85% of headache. [laughs] That’s the truth. It would take another 85% of my happiness to get another 15% to 20% famous and, like, culturally relevant or whatever. You know?
So you’re actually intentionally drawing back from fame.
Yeah, there’s nothing in my life that doesn’t feel good. I’m not being pushed into battle, I’m leading the charge. Because I understand what my vision is—and yes, I believe we can still use the word vision. So I don’t walk around going, like, Man, why is The Search for Everything not… Why is it not here? Why is it not in the Top 10 on iTunes? It’s a relatively introspective record. I don’t expect that people are going to bend the way they think about music just to meet this one record. I’m like, John, you made a record full of ballads and R&B songs that nobody knows how to promote because you’re not an R&B artist. So I think “Still Feel Like Your Man” is an ace level song and recording. I will stand up for that song any day of the week as one of the most pure-sounding, most interesting—it’s an R&B little tiny masterpiece, and I’ve worked long enough and hard enough with incredibly, insanely talented people to be able to say that.
It all comes down to understanding that the truest life of a real artist defies convention and therefore doesn’t necessarily recognize itself by way of accolades, sales, or any burning sort of modern day periodical relevancy. It’s also, again, ’cause of my age. Like, what am I, an idiot? It’s my job as an artist to never complain. Artists should never complain about other art. You just shouldn’t. And I’m only making 12 songs every couple years. That doesn’t take up most of my time. Right now I just DM’d someone on Instagram because they made an incredible Grateful Dead shirt that’s based off of a Digital Underground T-shirt from, like, 1990.
Back to the Dead, why do you think Deadhead culture is having a moment in fashion?
Well, what’s funny is it was always there. If you look at @fromthelot, they’re showing off shirts that were made 30 years ago, and you’re like, I wish I could get one of those. And you can’t, and that’s just what makes it so ephemeral. And in a really honest way, the ethos of the Grateful Dead isn’t necessarily a “hippie thing” anymore, it’s nearing this sort of streetwear culture idea. I’m not sure that I’m ever gonna come down on somebody for wearing a Grateful Dead shirt if they don’t know the music. I’m not sure that I’d ever get upset. I don’t know that anybody has a right to get upset. It’s a testament to the band. Normally, you go get a T-shirt at the merch stand and you take it home and you kind of show people you went to a show. But this is almost an entirely different entity that lives just as large as the band does.
Where normally you would talk about music, now you’re talking about the guys who put these shirts out, and there’s, like, 100 of them. And you know, I’m good to go with money. I’m fine, right? So it’s not about buying something expensive. It’s about engaging with something that interests me and trying to get it. So like I was just saying, I just DM’d this guy on Instagram, and he said he had 20 of these shirts that go up tomorrow at 9:00AM, and I’m excited—if he told me that he didn’t have an extra and that it would be unfair, theoretically, I would set an alarm. I’m into setting alarms, man. I’m into refreshing the site until it goes up and then grabbing the large, shoving it into the cart, and then checking out before someone steals it out of the cart. That excites me more than the idea of going to a Mercedes dealership. I’m into T-shirts now like you have no idea. They’re evidence of people’s creativity that you can wear. And when someone gets it right—when they really nail it—it’s killer.
How many do you think you have at this point?
I must have a couple hundred. And again, in terms of not being too literal, I don’t wear them on the stage with the band, because it’s too on the nose. But where I’m interested in making it click is wearing it where you don’t normally see it. That’s what makes it so interesting. Like, Future wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt. That’s where hip-hop is so smart right now. Hip-hop understands exactly what we were talking about, how to defy literalism. I just saw Big Sean wearing a Rick and Morty T-shirt. That’s great. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Hip-hop’s always been that way. A lot more than rock and roll. And to me, it just represents freethinking. I love freethinking, and the people that I look up to are free thinkers.
I suppose the person to cite would be Kanye, as the figure in hip-hop who grabs everything around him and spits it out into the world as something totally new. The creative vortex that people like Virgil Abloh have come out of.
Yeah, Virgil’s on something really, really, really cool now.
He made that shirt for you and Dave Chappelle. What’s your relationship with Virgil like?
I wouldn’t pretend to know him super well, but all of the communications we have are dialed in. I can feel the spirit of what he does, he’s mainlining creativity. There’s something different when he does it, because his mind is different. I saw a video of him on Instagram [stories] spray-painting pink spray-paint on orange sunglasses.
Yeah, I saw that too.
And he had the glass taped perfectly, and the way he was working the spray can, he did this perfect ombre and he knew when to stop.
There was sort of a holy shit moment in that video.
He knew what he wanted to see, he knew it wasn’t around, and he made it. Now, you can give people all the spray cans and sunglasses in the world. If you don’t have a vision of what you’re going for, then you can’t come up with it. He knew exactly how to lay the ombre down and was like, OK, let’s go back in. We got it. I mean, it’s a gorgeous thing to see.
That’s my point: We all have access to the materials, the variable is what’s in your mind. And interestingly enough, he sent me his take on the shirt, and you know the cliché of being a really bad design client, where you’re like, Can you make it bigger? And I looked at it and I didn’t get it, cause I did not expect a pencil sketch. And I looked at this pencil sketch and I go, Huh. I don’t— and then I thought to myself, OK, you asked this person who you look up to because they have a different download of energy than you do to come up with something based on an idea you gave them based on their vision. You just asked somebody who’s infinitely more creative than you to make something. Look at it. Don’t judge it, look at it. Take it in. Within an hour, I was like, I get it. And then, interestingly enough, once I said it was cool, he sent back the idea with the Off-White branding underneath it and it made the shirt.
Do you have any advice for kids who find themselves on a level creative playing field and are sort of like, OK, now what? Where do you start? Where do you go once an idea hits?
Oh, I just think you have to really particalize your influences. Take a bunch of influences and chop them up so you can’t really tell—basically take all these different pictures and cut them so small that no one piece resembles what it used to look like. That’s the test of someone’s mind—to take a lot of these influences and cut them down small enough so that they create something new. And it’s a weird balance between looking left and right and looking straight ahead. You know? The world’s got enough long sleeve Gildan ultra-cotton shirts with screenprinting down the sleeves to last a lifetime. And that might not go out of style, but what will go out of style is sort of this open-endedness, that everyone can do it. It’s gonna come down to whether it’s cool or not.
Do you have ambition to create things in fashion?
I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d be an asset to it. I know I’m good at it. I do a lot more designing than I admit, in terms of stuff for me or collabs. I have a very set idea and I’m very good at designing stuff with other people. And I’m really good at knowing when I’ve taken an idea as far as my head can take it and giving it to someone else and going like, Just fuck with it. If anybody got engaged with me and even started working with me for a couple of days, they’d be like, Oh, this guy just sent me pulls from influences that I didn’t know he even had. You know? The smallest world for me is the one that has singer-songwriting in it.
Influence-wise?
Yeah, influence-wise, or even just the moving parts inside of it, you know. There’s a much more finite number of singer-songwriters than there are people who contribute to fashion. The language is just so much more varied inside of fashion than it is in music. Which is why you see a lot of people get so deep into fashion that they actually forget to make records. Because music is just not as exciting. If you had a choice to either hang out with the head of a record company or Kim Jones, who would you rather hang out with right now?
Right. Probably Kim.
You know what I mean? You want to hang out with the person right now who’s free-thinking, the money’s flowing, the creativity is flowing, they’re not afraid to take chances. I saw the Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer ’18 show, and I’m looking at it going, like, I don’t get it based on yesterday. That’s the thing. I would much rather sit—no offense to anybody at a record company—I’d rather sit with Kim Jones or sit with James Jebbia or anybody like that before I would want to sit with a guy who works at a label who’s always gonna look at things and figure out, How can we do this for cheaper? How can we do this in a way that’s gonna cost us less? But I would—the longest answer ever to your question—I would love to do it in the future. But I’ve never expected just because I’m interested in something, that that thing should be interested in me. [laughs] I’m good at removing my ego from that. I have no problem being a fan of someone who’s not a fan of me.
Do you want to name drop any cool new designers you’re into? Anyone you’ve recently discovered that you’re feeling right now?
I’m kind of moving around from thing to thing. I had a Louis Vuitton thing for a minute this year. Like, bribing myself onto the road to be happy. Paradise is really cool. I like 917, Bianca Chandon, and Union. Also, probably people who are really into that are, like, Gross, now. Why do you have to mention it? Oh, the Boot Boyz dudes. Their layouts are fucking insanely good.
Interesting… I’m looking at it right now.
What do you think?
You know how everyone was starting to put Japanese characters on T-shirts? This is that, but actually cool.
It’s not a tourist take. I’m also into Nike ACG right now, what [Acronym and Nike ACG designer] Errolson [Hugh] is doing with ACG is very cool. And I actually think I’m gonna mess with NikeiD a little bit. I think NikeiD is a little bit like iTunes University, where there’s this great resource that no one’s thinking to sort of hijack. So I’m planning on hijacking NikeiD and really messing with that to where I’m gonna have my own Nike shoe that Nike doesn’t have to give me. I just bought it on ID. [laughs]
I saw you Instagrammed the zebra Roshe Run the other day.
I just thought that was funny, ’cause it looked like a Yeezy. But—I’ll tell you. I bought basically a full inventory of one style of NikeiD, and I’m just waiting for it to get discontinued on their site. And I’m gonna offer it as my own shoe through my Shopify page. [laughs] Just for fun!
The Air Mayer. Amazing.
The Air Mayer. Like, legitimate Air Mayers. As legitimate as they can be, in that Nike made them. Really think about this. Explore this. What’s missing if Nike made it and it has my name on it? Just a bunch of posturing.
Yeah, a bunch of marketing. You’re taking out the middle man.
I’m interested now in aftermarket things. I want to take away the idea that you’re crowned by the house if they choose to work with you, and be like, no I can buy your stuff, and if my idea is good enough and the work is good enough and the person who paints on it is good enough, then I’ve got a product that’s just as desirable as what the actual manufacturer would have made. So I’m into breaking down those walls now, buying the full kit of Louis Vuitton hard sided cases, and getting them painted, and then showing them to people and having them have to reconcile the fact that it’s not OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer], but it’s just as desirable. That’s where I’m interested in hacking it right now.
I think there’s a barrier to entry for kids in fashion these days, in that a lot of brands are copping youth culture and reprogramming it and selling it for a price point well above what’s accessible for youth. So a lot of people have gotten into bootlegging in their own way—
That’s right, and it’s remixing. That’s the way it should be. I don’t like the feeling of exclusion. And the bootleggy aspect—well Grateful Dead invented that, Grateful Dead invented embracing the bootleg culture, and now they are this iconic idea that no one person can attach themselves to. That’s what Kanye West did when he said, I want to be in fashion. That’s what I can do now as a musician. I don’t have to go to my record label and say, Find me this person. I can just text someone and say, Let’s make music. And everyone else, on whatever level they’re existing on, can do that, too. You can find someone to screenprint T-shirts within 48 hours at a cheaper-than-ever cost. The question is, what do you want to print? That is the question for the next 15 years going forward. You can print whatever you want.
So when you look at what Virgil’s done, everything lines up. The product lines up with the message, lines up with the culture, lines up with the alliances. And you look at it and you want it for two reasons: number one, it looks really great; but number two, it feels like it belongs somewhere. It feels like it belongs to a world that you want to be a part of. This is why we buy Gildan ultra-cotton shirts. Not because we think they’re the highest-quality fit, but because they are tickets to a world. And that’s so much fun and even I, as a guy that usually sells those tickets in one way or another, have just queued up again in the back of the line of someone else’s world. You know, you realize you haven’t heard anybody ask you what your favorite style of music is lately. No one has asked you what’s on your iPod. They used to ask me all the time, What’s on your iPod? The thing holds 100,000 songs. I don’t know. Do you want me to start with the numbers? 10,000 Maniacs. What do you want? That’s the fun of the world now. What do you want to print?