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A StyleLikeU interview with Olu & Ed.

"We're in a rebellion against the whole concept of how a man should dress," declares Olu, who, along with his best friend Ed, shatter black male style stereotypes with their biker jackets, drop-crotch jeans, treasured vintage coats, and attention to nuances like grey socks and cuffed trousers. Prior to meeting at Brooklyn's Berkeley College, the two each grew up in rough, urban neighborhoods (Ed in Boston, Olu in the Bronx) where any sartorial expression outside of the norm of luxury designer and the baggiest of pants is considered "gay." The best friends are committed to using clothes as a means to attaining personal freedom instead of something that creates a kind of social ghetto and the latest inert rebellion. "It was never looking in Vogue or Fantastic Man or whatever," says Olu, about his early influences, "it was Dipset on BET, it was G-Unit on 106 & Park — these rappers showed us culture, and that's what we try to bring to the awareness of what style really is." Being bred in Boston with his mom, Ed, in his sharp windowpane blazers, was stripped of a father and modeled himself after the older kids on the block only to realize that "those dudes were losers." And with hair as wildly expressive as his emotions, Olu, a regular church-goer with his mother, reached an identical conclusion: "Me being in the hood cannot be life."

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