@miketheruler
Age: 13
Instagram Followers: 5, 271
The first photo of Mike the Ruler that really made clear what was going on along with him appeared on his Instagram page about a year ago. In it, the younger boy is standing in the middle of a sunny road wearing a Rick Owens hoodie, a pair of black Rick Owens pants tucked into Rick Owens stockings, and a white tee by Supreme. You can’t see his face because the hoodie is so big the top hangs down to his upper lip. In the comments, the fellow streetwear enthusiast has written, “All hail the king of the youngsters. ”
Mike’s all-consuming love for high-end fashion has only grown much more intense since that picture was taken. Meanwhile, he has become familiar towards the downtown designers he worships, and when he comes into stores like Supreme as well as Opening Ceremony he gets hugs from staff and sometimes goes home along with hand-me-downs from their own closets. Last summer, he was featured in a video for your website of V-Files, the streetwear boutique, and by the following winter, he was becoming interviewed by The Fader about how to dress and what music to listen to for style inspiration. Today, he is a mascot - not only for the brands he admires, but for a way of being cool and obsessively knowledgeable about culture that kids their age could have never been before the internet.
“I don’t really like big brand names, ” Mike says. “I like little designers who are creating something new. ” His favorites right now are Telfar Clemens (“Their clothes are very masculine however androgynous, with a very athletic feel”), Hood by Air (“I’ve been to a couple of their fashion shows, and I own a good amount of pieces from them”), as well as Eckhaus Latta, which he describes as “conceptual” and “like nothing you have seen before. ”
When he went to the Eckhaus Latta showroom the other day together with his mother, Karen, a lawyer, he examined a shirt from another designer dangling from a rack and complimented the woman who had created it on her Vivienne Westwood reference. “She was like, ‘I can’t believe you caught that, ’” Karen says. But most of Mike’s wardrobe comes from thrift stores and consignment shops, where he digs through garments looking for pieces from his preferred designers’ past collections.
Not so long ago, Mike was into Legos. Everything changed whenever, in 2011, he saw the Alexander McQueen show at the Met. “These clothing were very overwhelming, ” he says. “They were dark. Some had been disturbing and beautiful at the same time. And it felt like they were demanding something. This put this thought into my head that clothes were important found their own personalities and they tell stories when you wear them. ”
At school (eighth grade), Mike has to wear a uniform most of the time - “a blazer as well as khakis and, like, ugly shoes” - and when he gets the opportunity to wear stuff he actually likes, some of the other kids make fun of him. “They state rude crap to me about it, like, ‘What are you wearing? You look homeless, anyone looks gay, you look stupid. ’ But I don’t care what they think, because they don’t have it. ”
At home, he can wear what he wants, explore his mom’s wardrobe, and work on his own designs. There - and on Instagram - “I feel as if I can be the person who I am. ”
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