Rewrite
Covering our Winter 24 issue, Rhuigi Villaseñor sits down with Wonderland’s Editor-in-Chief, Toni-Blaze Ibekwe, to unpack over a decade of his culture-puncturing brand RHUDE, transferring his knack for lifestyle building into the world of football, the power of collective movements and why defying the ordinary is the ultimate mandate for the 2020s.
The dispensing of sage advice from time to time is simply an entry-level requirement of being an older sibling. And for 32-year-old Rhuigi Villaseñor’s younger brother, some 10 years his junior, when it comes to navigating his career, wisdom is something he can comfortably call upon. That’s because, keen to follow in his older brother’s footsteps in the design world, he has, in Rhuigi, one of fashion’s most captivating creative dynamos at the family dinner table.
Well, that’s on the rare occasion professional commitments allow Rhuigi to be at home. The LA resident has, since 2013, been architecting one of fashion’s most decisive breakout brands of recent memory in cult and celebrity-beloved high-end streetwear favourite, RHUDE. Not to mention also establishing accessible high-street offering RHU (Redesigning Human Uniform) under Zara from 2022, and completing an expeditious but transformative stint leading the Swiss craftsmanship of Bally in the same year. Despite this, Rhuigi’s most recent sibling advice on getting a shoo-in in the trade called for diverting attention away from clothes. “I was telling my brother, ‘Don’t be so focused on garments,’” he tells Wonderland Editor-in-Chief, Toni-Blaze Ibekwe, over Zoom.
It’s mid-November and a cold snap of arctic ferocity is underway in London. And it would appear it’s also hit Lake Como, from where Rhuigi dials in. He’s indoors but his boyish visage is peeking out of a three-part blackout ensemble, comprising a beanie, raised hood and oversized technical puffer. “There are many other things in life that are necessary that you can apply design to,” he continues. “The world needs a new Steve Jobs. The world needs many new things. And with seasonalities in fashion, one season you’re good, one season you’re not. But the product is eternal, so I’m like, ‘Yo, focus on the product. Provide something that’s needed and then the rest will take care of itself.’” Such a sentiment might seem counterintuitive for a man whose millions stem from one fateful t-shirt crafted in 2012––a black and white paisley bandana design, picked up and sported by Rap titan Kendrick Lamar for a BET Awards performance, catalysing Rhuigi’s trajectory.
However, in actual fact, Rhuigi’s desire to look beyond the mere clothes themselves is emblematic of a mind that has long created holistically. Crafting a lifestyle rather than simply garments has been in RHUDE’s DNA since before the brand even had a name. The first threads sown, in his early 20s, with no formal design training, were simply Rhuigi’s attempts to create pieces he would aspire to own if he had the means. Having moved to LA from his birthplace of Manila, Philippines as a 10-year-old, his designs have since channelled his fascination with the streetwear culture of the city he adopted, the country’s cultural iconography and a pull towards the finer things in life first fostered by magazines like GQ that he’d flick through as a teen.
He’s created a world that has enveloped culture in a manner few other young brands could lay claim to. Sitting firmly on the intersection of fashion, sport, music, acting and F1, Rhuigi’s work features in the wardrobes of everyone from The Weeknd to JAY-Z, Bella Hadid, Justin Bieber, Michael B Jordan, Colman Domingo and Lewis Hamilton. The world of RHUDE feeds from the culture it encounters as much as it nourishes it. That phenomenon was most recently on display at the brand’s SS25 presentation in Lake Como, a place destined to see a lot more of Rhuigi, not just in the days following his Wonderland interview, but in the coming months, as he settles into his newly-minted title of Chief Brand Officer of the city’s football club, Como 1907. Over a decade since the RHUDE awakening began, this next epoch might just be Rhuigi Villaseñor’s most expansive yet…
Toni-Blaze Ibekwe: Hi Rhuigi, how are you? Congratulations on everything. You’re killing it. It’s definitely giving a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Rhuigi Villaseñor: Right? Or have you ever seen Dawn of the Dead and then zombies come out of the grave? It’s more like that.
TBI: Oh, are you a zombie…? Nah, I’m joking. Anyway, let’s kick it off. I want to take it back to the very beginning. The youth, baby you. In terms of your artistic interest, what reference points were you looking at?
RV: Before fashion, definitely my mom. My mom was a self-taught artist and seamstress, but we were drawing and watching anime together as well as playing video games, so that sparked things up a bit. And then when I moved from Saudi [Arabia] to America, I learned pop culture. Tupac [Shakur] had just been killed and I started to really absorb what the American culture was and the American dream. I can’t even say I was buying [magazines] because we didn’t come from a lot of money, but growing up, we were going to Barnes and Noble, the bookstore in America. I was dating a girl for a very long time and we would go after school and just flick through magazines. It would be Town & Country, old GQ, Esquire, ELLE and then we’d mix it with a tonne of Rizzoli art books. I remember every week I would try to learn new things. I knew I was going to get to some place, so I wanted to be prepared for when I did. And school was very expensive. So, to me, the bookstore was an access to my dreams. It was like a portal. I was like, ‘I can [read cigar magazines] and learn how to cut cigars.’ ‘I can know what whiskey to drink’, more lifestyle things. Growing up, I was scared that I wasn’t going to be fluent in language and culture because we moved around so much and it was very difficult for me to gain the knowledge and hang on to it, so I was like, ‘Damn I’m never going to be good in English and I’m never going to be good in my native language. And I’m never going to know all these things’, so I would just try to absorb as much as I could at a cost that I could afford at that time—and that was free.
TBI: Why do you feel like you had such a strong self-belief at such an early age?
RV: I give it up to my father a lot. My dad was the big captain at the house. We weren’t defeated but we were walking with maybe a few limbs injured financially and he made the point, ‘Look, we’re not in the same position as some of your friends, so you can’t take anything for granted.’ His whole thing was for me to absorb as much as I could, learn as much as I could and be the best person I could be. Be the smartest, be the fastest, all these things. He made us really walk with big confidence in ourselves because in the end that is what is going to carry you. And when I was younger, it was a little difficult when we moved, because I was an immigrant and we were just going through the process of citizenship etc. It was a difficult time, but I had… we can just call it soul. I had soul and that was my thing that I had confidence in because I [knew I had] more culture and understanding on a global scale than most of the kids that I was growing up with.
To read the full interview, pre-order the issue now.
Photography by Daniel Prakopcyk
Styling by Damien Lloyd
Words by Andrew Wright
Interview by Toni-Blaze Ibekwe
Grooming by Nathan Unce
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Covering our Winter 24 issue, Rhuigi Villaseñor sits down with Wonderland’s Editor-in-Chief, Toni-Blaze Ibekwe, to unpack over a decade of his culture-puncturing brand RHUDE, transferring his knack for lifestyle building into the world of football, the power of collective movements and why defying the ordinary is the ultimate mandate for the 2020s.
The dispensing of sage advice from time to time is simply an entry-level requirement of being an older sibling. And for 32-year-old Rhuigi Villaseñor’s younger brother, some 10 years his junior, when it comes to navigating his career, wisdom is something he can comfortably call upon. That’s because, keen to follow in his older brother’s footsteps in the design world, he has, in Rhuigi, one of fashion’s most captivating creative dynamos at the family dinner table.
Well, that’s on the rare occasion professional commitments allow Rhuigi to be at home. The LA resident has, since 2013, been architecting one of fashion’s most decisive breakout brands of recent memory in cult and celebrity-beloved high-end streetwear favourite, RHUDE. Not to mention also establishing accessible high-street offering RHU (Redesigning Human Uniform) under Zara from 2022, and completing an expeditious but transformative stint leading the Swiss craftsmanship of Bally in the same year. Despite this, Rhuigi’s most recent sibling advice on getting a shoo-in in the trade called for diverting attention away from clothes. “I was telling my brother, ‘Don’t be so focused on garments,’” he tells Wonderland Editor-in-Chief, Toni-Blaze Ibekwe, over Zoom.
It’s mid-November and a cold snap of arctic ferocity is underway in London. And it would appear it’s also hit Lake Como, from where Rhuigi dials in. He’s indoors but his boyish visage is peeking out of a three-part blackout ensemble, comprising a beanie, raised hood and oversized technical puffer. “There are many other things in life that are necessary that you can apply design to,” he continues. “The world needs a new Steve Jobs. The world needs many new things. And with seasonalities in fashion, one season you’re good, one season you’re not. But the product is eternal, so I’m like, ‘Yo, focus on the product. Provide something that’s needed and then the rest will take care of itself.’” Such a sentiment might seem counterintuitive for a man whose millions stem from one fateful t-shirt crafted in 2012––a black and white paisley bandana design, picked up and sported by Rap titan Kendrick Lamar for a BET Awards performance, catalysing Rhuigi’s trajectory.
However, in actual fact, Rhuigi’s desire to look beyond the mere clothes themselves is emblematic of a mind that has long created holistically. Crafting a lifestyle rather than simply garments has been in RHUDE’s DNA since before the brand even had a name. The first threads sown, in his early 20s, with no formal design training, were simply Rhuigi’s attempts to create pieces he would aspire to own if he had the means. Having moved to LA from his birthplace of Manila, Philippines as a 10-year-old, his designs have since channelled his fascination with the streetwear culture of the city he adopted, the country’s cultural iconography and a pull towards the finer things in life first fostered by magazines like GQ that he’d flick through as a teen.
He’s created a world that has enveloped culture in a manner few other young brands could lay claim to. Sitting firmly on the intersection of fashion, sport, music, acting and F1, Rhuigi’s work features in the wardrobes of everyone from The Weeknd to JAY-Z, Bella Hadid, Justin Bieber, Michael B Jordan, Colman Domingo and Lewis Hamilton. The world of RHUDE feeds from the culture it encounters as much as it nourishes it. That phenomenon was most recently on display at the brand’s SS25 presentation in Lake Como, a place destined to see a lot more of Rhuigi, not just in the days following his Wonderland interview, but in the coming months, as he settles into his newly-minted title of Chief Brand Officer of the city’s football club, Como 1907. Over a decade since the RHUDE awakening began, this next epoch might just be Rhuigi Villaseñor’s most expansive yet…
Toni-Blaze Ibekwe: Hi Rhuigi, how are you? Congratulations on everything. You’re killing it. It’s definitely giving a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Rhuigi Villaseñor: Right? Or have you ever seen Dawn of the Dead and then zombies come out of the grave? It’s more like that.
TBI: Oh, are you a zombie…? Nah, I’m joking. Anyway, let’s kick it off. I want to take it back to the very beginning. The youth, baby you. In terms of your artistic interest, what reference points were you looking at?
RV: Before fashion, definitely my mom. My mom was a self-taught artist and seamstress, but we were drawing and watching anime together as well as playing video games, so that sparked things up a bit. And then when I moved from Saudi [Arabia] to America, I learned pop culture. Tupac [Shakur] had just been killed and I started to really absorb what the American culture was and the American dream. I can’t even say I was buying [magazines] because we didn’t come from a lot of money, but growing up, we were going to Barnes and Noble, the bookstore in America. I was dating a girl for a very long time and we would go after school and just flick through magazines. It would be Town & Country, old GQ, Esquire, ELLE and then we’d mix it with a tonne of Rizzoli art books. I remember every week I would try to learn new things. I knew I was going to get to some place, so I wanted to be prepared for when I did. And school was very expensive. So, to me, the bookstore was an access to my dreams. It was like a portal. I was like, ‘I can [read cigar magazines] and learn how to cut cigars.’ ‘I can know what whiskey to drink’, more lifestyle things. Growing up, I was scared that I wasn’t going to be fluent in language and culture because we moved around so much and it was very difficult for me to gain the knowledge and hang on to it, so I was like, ‘Damn I’m never going to be good in English and I’m never going to be good in my native language. And I’m never going to know all these things’, so I would just try to absorb as much as I could at a cost that I could afford at that time—and that was free.
TBI: Why do you feel like you had such a strong self-belief at such an early age?
RV: I give it up to my father a lot. My dad was the big captain at the house. We weren’t defeated but we were walking with maybe a few limbs injured financially and he made the point, ‘Look, we’re not in the same position as some of your friends, so you can’t take anything for granted.’ His whole thing was for me to absorb as much as I could, learn as much as I could and be the best person I could be. Be the smartest, be the fastest, all these things. He made us really walk with big confidence in ourselves because in the end that is what is going to carry you. And when I was younger, it was a little difficult when we moved, because I was an immigrant and we were just going through the process of citizenship etc. It was a difficult time, but I had… we can just call it soul. I had soul and that was my thing that I had confidence in because I [knew I had] more culture and understanding on a global scale than most of the kids that I was growing up with.
To read the full interview, pre-order the issue now.
Photography by Daniel Prakopcyk
Styling by Damien Lloyd
Words by Andrew Wright
Interview by Toni-Blaze Ibekwe
Grooming by Nathan Unce
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