Right Now &
Forever With
Jayne Goheen

Has There Ever Been Anyone More Impossibly Cool?

Text: Gaby Wilson
Photography: Justin J. Wee

"In a group of people, I’m probably the one sitting in the back in the shadows," Jayne Goheen, the designer and creative director, says to me on an October afternoon. "I’ve always been the more quiet, observant type."

Though rarely the focal point, shadows transform our understanding of an image—communicating dimension, perspective, and context that no object alone ever could. Attended from afar, they create drama, intrigue. Ensconced beneath one, relief. Goheen herself is similar: enigmatic, unassuming, eternal. She trades in unconventional classics, sanctifying Crocs well before the buzzy Christopher Kane and Balenciaga collabs. Her personal style is situated comfortably where Diane Keaton meets Gleaming the Cube (1989).

Jayne wears Paco Rabanne cardigan and Paco Rabanne dress. Top Image: Jayne wears Dries Van Noten blazer.

Jayne wears Beams Plus blazer and Beams Plus trousers.

I first came across Goheen's work about a decade ago. At the time, she maintained a now-dormant blog called Stop It Right Now, where she wrote voice-driven reactions to collections, coats she was excited by but couldn't wear in Los Angeles weather, assorted observational humor. Occasionally, she'd share stories about visiting her dad in Korea, or growing up in the burgeoning skate culture of Irvine, California.

In 2011, Goheen created a small suite of skateboard decks, printed in homage to three foulard blouses from Celine's Spring/Summer 2011 collection. It was a perfect synecdoche for her double life: skate-apparel designer by day and front-row fixture by night. I lingered on the announcement, overthinking whether I should get one. They sold out before I could even make a decision.

Goheen has lent her eye for instant classics to a long list of similarly grailed pieces, but you’d never know without asking her about specifics directly. In the four years since her blog went quiet, Goheen has become the living embodiment of the "Homer Simpson backs into the bushes" meme. (Her reference, though I agree.) These days, she prefers to let her work do all the talking.

"You looked great, though," Goheen offers reassuringly as I tell her I'm turning my camera off. She joined our Google Hangout as a disembodied voice, leaving nothing but my own dopey mug to stare back at both of us. "I don't do video calls...with anyone!" she adds, laughing. She's calling from her home in L.A., where she, her husband, and their adorable twin 15-month-old daughters (named after Ellen Ripley from the 1979 film Alien and X-Men's Wolverine) have been huddled up for months, the end of Goheen's maternity leave just coinciding with the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we talk, I can faintly hear the girls babbling sweetly in the background.

Gaby Wilson

Jayne Goheen

Like many people, I was first introduced to you in this very front-facing way. Now, it seems you have receded from the spotlight and into your work.

It’s because I felt like I was starting to be known as an internet character. Not that I’m such a huge public figure, but it got to the point where people thought that was my primary profession, when the things that I’m doing now are actually the things that I had been doing the whole time. The internet part of it… It was so, so different than what it is now.

It was still the Wild West of blogging.

Yeah, it was basically a bunch of people who had no place else to say, Have you guys seen this thing? I was living this double life for a while. People at work didn’t know that I was doing internet stuff, and then internet people didn’t know what my actual real job was. It just became too much to handle for me, so I retreated.

Was there a moment that you hit the brakes, or was it more of a creeping feeling?

It was always a creeping feeling. Personality-wise, I don’t like attention, so it felt really foreign. At the same time, you have the buffer of being behind a screen—You could post a pic and walk away and pretend like you never did it. But when the word “influencer” came up, that’s when I was like, mmm...

Eject!

Yeah. Which isn’t to say that I think it’s a bad profession for people to have! I just didn’t want it.

Jayne wears Lemaire shirt and Lemaire skirt.

The relationship between fashion and attention is interesting to me. I find people can be drawn to fashion either because they like attention or because they feel like fashion helps them evade it; the clothes become the shield that starts conversations and absorbs focus. But the internet has a way of flattening everyone into this two-dimensional "influencer" space.

It is such a language! And fashion has its own kind of attention span. I feel like there was an appetite for characters at that time, and I maybe filled one of those. I was very much made out to be the Fashion Skate Girl. Every project I was asked to do was like, Do a skateboard. And I hated that. I was always just inwardly resisting until I started to understand that, no, I have agency. I have the power to control what happens in this, so if I have such a problem with it, then I should just not do it or figure out a way to do it that works for me.

You became Skater Spice.

Yeah! And I also never really felt like I was the person to represent skateboarding either. Like that’s completely wrong to me.

Do you think that it forever exhausted your personal relationship to skateboarding?

I’m certainly not the poster child for skateboarding or anyone central to it, or the community. But if you were a kid in the 90s who grew up with it, especially growing up in Orange County in the skate scene, it was etched into your bones. And now I drive a Volvo and have two kids and live in the suburbs and listen to fuckin’ "Baby Shark" on loop. But it’s always there, you know?

Poot or X-Girl?

Poot. Poot is my number one. It's my dream collab. I don’t even know who with. Like, certainly not just with myself. But yeah, that would just be the ultimate, ultimate career-defining moment for me.

I feel like that’s well within your reach, no?

Possibly. But there’s also a part of me that feels really protective about Poot!

What about just getting little custom Poot bootlegs made for your daughters?

Oh, that was my entire high school. I was too poor to actually buy all the Poot I wanted, so I would just make shirts with all the skate logos and Poot stuff. I got called into the principal’s office for having a "Girls Kick Ass" backpack. My first job was at a girls’ skate shop in Orange County in Newport when I was 15. There’s a really famous—famous if you’re from Orange County—skate shop, and above that, in the 90s, there was a store called Ladies Lounge that was owned by the coolest woman I had ever known. There were FUCT girls' tees, Poot had just started, Foxy shirts, and mixed in would be, like, the "Our Pussys Our Choice" shirt from Mantrap.

Not to say that kids aren’t doing it now, but back then, things just weren’t as available right at your fingertips. Say you identified with being a hip-hop kid in New York, or a grimy skate kid in Orange County, or a Venice surf grom, you couldn't quickly do a one-hour afternoon search of what it means to be a part of this subculture and Amazon Prime all the elements and then tomorrow, you’re that person. It was a slow process of gathering things and researching and observing, and I think that ends up sticking with you even more.

Left Image: Jayne wears Beams Plus blazer and Beams Plus trousers. Middle Image: Jayne wears Lemaire blazer, Lemaire trousers and Lemaire vest. Right Image: Jayne wears Lemaire shirt and Lemaire skirt.

There's a thread of super careful consideration that I think is very apparent in your work. I get the sense you might also be sort of “crunchy,” is that true?

Absolutely. I’ve been in a heavy existential crisis for the last maybe five years. It started with being uncomfortable with how people perceived me and the whole influencer thing, and then it snowballed into consumption and the climate crisis, then into facing my own place in life and my age, and becoming a mother definitely exacerbated it.

Now, it’s my guiding compass when I take on new projects. It always kind of comes back to that, to trying not to contribute more noise to the world. Some things are out of my control, but I try really hard to work within those parameters.

How do you incorporate that into the work? I imagine it's a difficult thing to square.

Oh god, it’s the hardest thing. Every morning, I’m like, Fuck. Here I go again. But it’s what you do from that point. In the work, it’s constantly trying to internally push my company to have better business practices. It’s trying to introduce them to better factories or work with our production people and cut down stuff we’re using supply-chainwise.

How much do you scrutinize your own buying decisions?

Mmm, too much or not enough. I wasn’t ever really in an easy financial situation to be buying what people probably assume is a lot of Celine. It was always a lot of finagling. Okay, I’m gonna sell these three other things, and then I’m gonna get this one good, big thing that I’m gonna use forever.

It’s still my goal to have just one clothing rack because that’s probably all I actually wear in rotation in my daily life anyway.

Are there any grails that you would trade large sections of your archive for?

The ones that I have left are some of the grails that I would never give up, and then everything else is just sweatpants and old band tees and really ratty sweaters. I’m not giving up the Celine color block coat, and nobody wants the sweats, so the trade might not work out. But I do still always, to this day, look for that shirt I used on my Celine skateboard.

Wait, you don't own it?

No, I don’t...

What?!

...and I always feel like that’s my ticket in with somebody, where I can just be like, Dude, if you own this... I deserve this! I do have the orange one, the lesser-known one.

The short-sleeve?

Yeah, but it’s the long-sleeve for me that’s the grail. There’s actually been one up on eBay for $10,000, which is too much.

Would you even wear it?

Oh yeah. I wear the orange one all the time.

I feel like, if I were you… Look, I’m meeting you for the first time, so I’m just gonna project my entire personality onto you.

Love it.

I feel like I’d have a hard time wearing that! It would feel too precious.

I have a thing with fashion in general. I feel like it’s meant to be worn, and I’m generally not a precious person to begin with, so everything I have gets pretty beat up. Even cashmere sweaters, I throw them in my laundry...

[audible gasp]

...and I just wear them and they get holes in them. Like the orange Celine, it’s silk, and usually I wear it to the beach. Which seems really gaudy, but I don't know, it’s just a shirt. I think—I hope that I would approach the other one like that.

There were rumors that Phoebe Philo was going to launch her own sustainable brand. Did you hear about that? How do you manage your consumption then?

Well, everyone has their guilty pleasure. I quit smoking when I had my children, so I could afford to pick up another vice... No, but to that point, I don't think never consuming again is the answer. And anybody who’s concerned with sustainability who works in fashion is already a hypocrite—myself included. It’s more like: how do we change or improve on the existing things that we know are never gonna go away?

I really just want to make things that will last forever. Hopefully I can influence people to buy things that they’ll wear for a long, long, long, long time, rather than just influencing people to buy something right now because it’s the new, hot shit. In that small way, if I can influence from behind the scenes, that would give me some satisfaction in my career.

Gaby Wilson is a writer and journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared on HBO's VICE News Tonight and MTV.