Bottega Veneta's Elements Of Style
by Emmanuel Olunkwa
feat. Aria Dean

Friendship by Design, a FW20 Story

Photography: Emmanuel Olunkwa
Model: Aria Dean

This article is featured in Issue 3 of the SSENSE biannual print publication.

The pace of Emmanuel Olunkwa’s neighborhood is, in his words, “a pocket of itself.” In Stuyvesant Heights, the part of Brooklyn he calls home, the community makes him feel like it’s removed enough from the idea of New York. “I can be anyone I want to be here,” he says, where in his ground floor apartment, he is both returning to familiar forms and experimenting with new modes. As an editor for Pioneer Works, a community space for cultural workers, and the recently launched November, a publication project for interviews covering art, architecture, politics, philosophy, and more, Olunkwa’s work is constantly in conversation with the very nature of collaboration.

Emmanuel wears Bottega Veneta turtleneck, Bottega Veneta sweater, Bottega Veneta trousers and Bottega Veneta boots. Featured In Top Image: Bottega Veneta sweater, Bottega Veneta sweater, Bottega Veneta coat and Bottega Veneta clutch.

Four floors up lives his best friend, Aria Dean, the critic, artist, and editor/curator of Rhizome. On this day, Dean joined Olunkwa downstairs—she stayed for his hospitality and for their collective artistry. Dressed in Bottega Veneta for Fall/Winter 2020, the two acquaint themselves with the surfaces of a familiar space, the camera pointed in full view, picking up on details like a book’s spine, a table’s leg, the color pink.

Olunkwa has recognized descriptions of his style before—in Zadie Smith’s collection of short stories, Grand Union, there is a character named Raphael suspiciously similar to his own. Smith describes this fictional young man as very beautiful and quite stylish, who “dresses with the good taste of someone who until recently was not fired by Frieze for calling a senior editor a ‘zombie collector whore.’” Of course, this is a story, and not real life. But in this succinct description there is the fact of Olunkwa’s ability to call it as he sees it.

“Living in such close quarters with one of my best friends has taught me the importance of honesty and vulnerability,” he says. “I’ve learned what true friendship looks and feels like when you’re doing it right.” As they move between floors and take over each other’s spaces, the way Olunkwa and Dean picture each other changes, deepens. Dean’s work is often about preserving the ephemera of the very recent past—pockets of Internet culture and digital-born artworks—a medium notable for being both resistant to capture and impossible to erase. Influence works in the same way; perhaps it’s no coincidence that that’s how friendship feels, too.