At the New Balance “Made in USA” Event on Wednesday, I had a chance to speak with Theophilus London. Always someone who is unique in his fashion styles with a fresh pair of kicks on his feet, Theophilus took a few minutes to share some thoughts with us and discuss his style, his love of sneakers and even his work with Kanye West on his new album.
LG: Thanks for taking some time to talk with us.
TL: What’s up man?
LG: Obviously you have a really unique style. How important is that Individualism to you? Has that been something you’ve always focused on, even from when you were a kid?
TL: Yeah, it’s something I focus on a lot. Even since my early years, I mean I don’t want to say childhood because I wasn’t really concerned with fashion as a child to be honest, but you know, early teenager life, I knew it would be important, because there’s a lot of people in the world and you know for me and what I’m doing you know, I wanted to be unique about it, but wanted to mostly be myself. I don’t care about being different, I knew what I was doing was going to be different regardless, so I didn’t have to worry about being different. I just had to worry about being myself and it takes a long time to find out your identity. You know you gotta make mistakes, you gotta take yourself out on dates, you gotta go shopping with yourself until you figure it out and once you figure it out, don’t change it.
LG: Now you just mentioned doing things by yourself and I recall reading something from Style that you wrote where you talked about going to the movies by yourself and having places to vibe out and relax on your own. Is that something you try to make sure you always get to do?
TL: Yeah man that’s super, super important. I actually just went to the movies today.
LG: What did you see? How was it?
TL: I saw Ida. It was cool. It was kinda this Polish movie about the old days so I was kind of like shaken up.
LG: Now with your own style in sneakers, I know you’ve said in the past you always loved Jordan’s especially when you were younger.
TL: Yeah, yeah.
LG: Was there any particular shoe that really got you started?
TL: Well definitely New Balance. That was definitely something I knew at a young age was something that made me feel “cozy” per se. That’s the word they use now right? I used to see a lot of my uncles and the elderly crowd adapting to New Balance and I always wanted to be older as a young kid. I was like “I don’t wanna be young, I wanna be old”, so I thought that was important.
LG: Now you just dropped your EP around Valentine’s Day, what’s next? What are you going to be doing now?
TL: Ohh yeah, yeah. Damn I’ve been working on this album for like 9 months, nah actually more than 9 months. I’ve been working on my new album “Vibes”. I’m really happy about it. It’s insane. It’s executive produced by Kanye, creative produced by Leon Ware. So basically I got to work with everyone I wanted to, like there’s some people on the project that I never thought I would get to work with that I wanted to. It’s just a very unique piece of work. The US version is actually only 8 songs sadly but I kinda hid 3 songs inside those 8 songs, so it’s really 11 songs. I’m really looking forward to it. The first single is coming out this summer featuring Kanye.
LG: Any timeframe we can expect the whole album to drop?
TL: Yeah, definitely like the end of August or the beginning of September. I definitely don’t want to hold it up anymore. I’ve been holding it up for mixing purposes to make sure it’s really mixed the right way and stuff like that.
LG: Well I appreciate speaking with you and best of luck with everything.
TL: Thank you man.