More often than not, it’s the phrase that MOTHER’s art director, Jay Steiner, uses to start his conversations. It’s what he leads with before giving a detailed, kaleidoscopic explanation of the next photoshoot idea. Or sometimes it’s the subject line to his emails, which are short, exclamatory, usually misspelled, and usually hilarious. Other times, he uses it as a transition into sharing that vintage find scored over the weekend, or a hot take about a newly discovered shoegaze record, or thoughts on the freakiest new arthouse horror movie. Conversations with Jay span from ideas surrounding the soul and intellect, down to matters of the banal and everyday, but they are always stimulating, always inspiring, and always funny. Indeed, to encounter Jay is to trip out.

On a recent Monday morning before getting to the office, Jay sat down with a close member of his creative team, Dane Vaughn, to catch up and reflect on his experience with MOTHER 13 years in.

JS: Mic check. One. Two. Mic check. One. Two. Test. Test. Test. Alright it’s JJ. My boy Dane-iel [non sensical nick name he’s given me in the past couple weeks]. We're out here relaxing about to talk some shit. I'm going to do the whole thing in my rap voice.

DV: Please don't.

JS: Okay. I won't.

DV: Alright. Hi, Jay. So, you've been with MOTHER since the beginning. And I know we work together every day and all, but I actually don’t know the full backstory. Can you tell me how you initially got involved?

JS: I can. I've been involved with MOTHER since before it was MOTHER. Starting with Tim Kaeding, our co-founder, my boss if I ever had one, my other half. Tim is somebody that is constantly questioning what I'm doing in a way that can be frustrating and creates growth. I don't know what that's called, like fucking son of a bitch, collaborator. Somewhere in between dickhead and genius collaborator. He was also a massive inspiration for a young man.

Anyway, back to the question. We started MOTHER in 2010. This was shortly after Tim and I met at another denim brand. That company was being prepped for sale, and Tim left during the acquisition… Anyway, we stayed buddies. He reached out to me about a year after leaving and said, "Jay, let's do something." And I said. "Fuck yeah. Of course."

But there's a huge financial crisis. Things seem like they're going to go down the drain.

We're going to be living in a barter and trade society. Literally thinking like if I can make a nice woven basket maybe someone will give me some corn or some shit. But let's start a denim brand, because that's what people need right now. What I'm alluding to is it was a dumb fucking idea, but Tim and I were just ignorant enough to be blissfully unaware and I think in that we were able to create freely.

So, we spent a year creating these different “brands.”

We all immediately fell in love with each other. I remember Lela saying, when I showed her this deck that Tim and I had been working on, she said, "That gave me chills." And I was all in. So, that's how MOTHER started.

We really wanted each jean to have a story behind it, so we did things that are just subtle little differences but for us kind of meant the world, and that was...our naming convention is a nod to maybe some of the steamy romance novels that a mother may read. Our fit names were all kind of juvenile-rebellion based, sort of the archetype of the runaway and things like that. So we really wanted to start to paint this nostalgic story, and really push that story through everything that we do now.

I don't think it's really changed. It's evolved. We've gotten better and better at doing this. Our naivety started to give way to experience. And with experience, we got better.

When I first started, I was doing tech packs, technical sketches, all labeling, branding, storytelling, shooting all the lookbooks. Tim and I shot every lookbook alone with no photographer. In the early days, before we had an office per se, I would spend a lot of time being able to use the space at one of our main printers that's famous in the Los Angeles apparel world. And I would spend hours there developing prints on yardage of fabric. They use old techniques like stamping like they do in India or airbrushing like they do in Venice Beach, and some traditional screen printing. But I was just given free rein to experiment and explore there on my own. And I would return the next day and be like, "Here's 15 ideas that are airbrushed, stamped, or done by hand." And then we would develop those into the line, and then we would do production by hand that same way. So in the early days, there was a lot more physical hands-on working in a warehouse.

And we ran that way for a while, maybe three or four years, until we slowly felt like bringing more creatives in. And I personally love to work collaboratively, so that's how... I would say that's the biggest thing that's changed, is being able to work with more people and being able to work with more people in a completely open, honest, creative way where we just throw stuff back and forth and build out. And even though we're just talking about jeans, I mean, when we look at the way we're shooting stuff or sayings on T-shirts, it's like we're always just laughing and vibing off one another. I'm pushing the envelope. We try and push ourselves to do something better or more daring or more unique than what we see elsewhere in our little niche in the world.

Gosh, as a creative, sometimes I think we're manic. We go self-deprecating, we go self-doubt, and then we rise above those challenges that are self-imposed. Some of the moments that I'm most proud of? I think one of the initial things was we had a jean that we wanted to do. Tim was like, "Let's do a Hawaiian print," and I was like, "Yeah, how can we flip that?" So I found an unlicensed photo of Hawaii and blew that up, and we printed it digitally on a jean. So there was this bizarre landscape, and this is in 2012 or '13, but every supermodel had that jean on. It looked surreal. It looked almost trompe-l'oeil, like "Wait, what's going on? There's a landscape below this woman."

But we also had to figure out how to do that, because then digital printing wasn't very commonplace in Los Angeles, and we make everything in Los Angeles. I'm sure you can run that all day in China, but for us, learning how to do that and it being successful and getting the notoriety and press that it got was a really exciting moment for me.

Going back to our first jean, that Drama pant, which we photographed just real quickly. We were all in a van: me, Lela, Tim, a model and a photographer in a rented van, and we're shooting things ad hoc. But we got this image of our model at the time, strutting across just an ivy wall in Santa Monica, and it just became a very iconic image. And it's exciting, and it's rare to have an iconic image like that, so that was a very proud moment.

So another thing that I should probably touch upon is, as the pandemic hit and things seemed to fall apart as a young father, I had a choice: I could continue down the path that I was going on, which was deeply alcohol fueled. I am an alcoholic in an obsessive compulsive way. I do drugs alcoholically, and I was at a fork in the road where life was going to crumble, and I thought that I needed to keep up drugs and alcohol in order to perform as I was for years, only to find sobriety. And I've since been sober three years, and that was a huge pivotal moment for me. Being trapped under, feeling self-conscious or not good enough, or comparing yourself to others. When you get sober, you learn those things are not as critical as you think they are. And it can be the most liberating thing that you do if you're having feelings of being trapped. Addiction can feel like a cycle, and it's easy for me to say life is better sober. There's challenges, but I think as far as creativity goes, the way that I view that, because that was my struggle, was what inhibits you from being creative that alcohol takes away is that self-consciousness. But if you can drop self-consciousness soberly without the aid of alcohol, you can find a whole new freedom, in a way that's beyond your wildest imagination. That doesn't matter what people think anymore, I don't give a fuck if it’s a good idea or a bad idea. It has no reflection on me as a person. You find that helping others is a key to life, and I find that to be one of my proudest moments, and it is what keeps me focused and grounded through the ups and downs. So that's all.

How would you describe your personal style?

So deep down, I want to wear all black and be an all-black creative director type. But for some reason my mind just won't let me do it. And I come out and I'm just drawn to color, I can't help it. I would say my personal style is, I don't know. It's colorful, it's contrasty, it's clashy. I just like to be myself and be expressive like anybody.

Who are your biggest fashion inspirations?

Etsy is my biggest fashion inspiration.

Best thing you've ever bought on Etsy — go!

Oh my goodness. Best thing I've ever bought on Etsy is a 1960s needlepoint. I'll find the artist's name in a minute [Lurcat], but there was an artist popular in France in the 60s that was doing needlepoints. But it was popular at the time for women to reproduce these, so you can find some really wild, beautiful artwork if you know how to look on Etsy.

Going back to your original question… I find a lot of inspiration in Larry Clark’s photography and Juergen Teller. Those guys are shooting real life, which is kind of different from the way we shoot, which is very surreal, but I really respect the way that they capture a moment, an era. Kids came out when I was exactly that person, and it's fun to look back on that as a time and place that is special.

Aside from fashion, where do you find inspiration?

I mean, very clearly, I find it in art. I recently got to see the original prints from William Morris in Chicago, which were just so beautifully done, and a lot of them were hand loom tapestry, prints or just the actual paintings. I thought that was very incredible. I love this artist, Lari Pittman, who's a local painter, but he mixes this clash of iconic brand elements into these bizarre, surreal, beautifully executed paintings. I don't know; they speak to me a lot.

I'm a huge fan of Lari Pittman. I'm a huge fan of Raymond Pettibon, both in just the way he draws, but the stuff that he writes is really beautiful and cool and creative. And being from the Bay Area all of the Mission School people. Also love Mike Kelley. I find Mike Kelley very inspiring. I think the tie back from Mike Kelley, for example, to the Carolyn Murphy capsule we did is where we were taking something like he took stuffed animals and would sew them together to create these really bizarre sculptural pieces. So in a certain light, taking those everyday objects and recontextualizing them is a really fun and interesting way of working.

Those last two artists are really intertwined with music, with Pettibon’s relationship to early punkand then Mike Kelley’s involvement with Sonic Youth... What role does music play in your process?

Well, we listen to music all day in Design. Tim and I are definitely Shoegaze fanatics. I don't know, maybe there's something to the isolation of it. There's something to the droning-ness of it that helps maybe an artist focus or a person work. I would say that we're all kind of 80s and 90s kids. I'm a huge Stereolab fan.

What are you listening to right now?

There's plenty of new bands that are wonderful and we've gotten to be able to work with them in a little capacity, but... I love this new girl, Lael Neale. She's probably my favorite new artist at the moment. I just find her music very beautiful. It has a wonderful storytelling aspect to it. I've been very into her. I've been listening to a lot of Domenique Dumont. I've been listening to a lot of... I really love Liz Harris, which is a girl from my hometown, from Northern California, from Bolinas. I love her sound. It feels like you're on that beach at the end of the world.

Also had like a little revisit of some feel good 90s rap/hip hop/neo soul that was fun… don't underestimate “Feel me Flow” – it's a great song.

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