What is Surface to Air?

This is a crop circle we made for Sanrio to celebrate Hello Kitty's 30th birthday. It was half a football field in size.

When we set about assembling this issue, and determining what it is about hipster style that is so troubling and annoying, we came to some basic conclusions: It’s always derivative and rarely inventive. But from whence does it come? Gordon Hull (pictured throughout), one third of the original Surface to Air team—formed by three NYU students in the ’90s—doesn’t look like a hipster (he wears a uniform of Ralph Lauren button-downs, proper shoes and a Yankees hat), but the company he helped build is a shrine at which many a hipster worships. Hull is a bit of a mad genius—someone who seems to think and create in a vacuum. This is all reflected in Surface to Air, which is part fashion label, part art collective, part creative think tank. Members of the team have directed MTV Europe Music Award–winning music videos, produced ad campaigns for Tsumori Chisato, opened boutiques in Tokyo, São Paolo and Stockholm, and built a Hello Kitty crop circle outside of Stonehenge. The pages that follow may or may not strike you as cool—but they are what happens when someone who a lot of people think is cool is given free rein. To paraphrase the motto of one of the most uncool networks around: We just report—you decide. —Elise Loehnen

Read what Gordon has to say in all of this week's Seek sections:

• Shopping
• Mind & body
• Dating
• Travel
• House & home