Q&A with BOND designers, Arben and Kuj Durollari

by flaunt

Arben and Kuj Durollari are the creative masterminds behind BOND, an LA-based contemporary unisex brand. While they currently live in Los Angeles, they stay true to their New York roots throughout the development process of every collection. Raised in the Brooklyn grit, the brothers found their path to high-fashion through streetwear culture. While this has played a significant role in their work, their family-oriented values prove to be of the highest importance. Surrounded by a family of immigrants, their great-grandparents struggle to escape a communist Albania has left a long-lasting legacy in their lives. Communicating this story has become integral in everything they do; specifically in their current FW18 collection, ‘No Curfew.’ Clothing serves as their canvas to relay autobiographical stories, whether it's family tales, a night out of partying, favorite films and artists, or wandering the perilous boroughs of NYC.

Self-proclaimed “international small businessmen,” the designers are well on their way to redefining high-fashion with stonewashed fabrics, blown up sketches, deconstructed denim, and stitched on items from their everyday use. The Durollari’s innovative approach to contemporary garments has just begun, as they assure us they’re not going anywhere. Throughout the opening of their family’s new Italian restaurant, Nittis, we sat down with the eccentric duo to learn all things BOND and their game of intellectual Ping-Pong:

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Walk us through your design process from conception to creation.

Arben: Conceptually, the idea behind BOND is to use clothing as a canvas. A canvas for autobiographical stories, music, and film that we love, political and social issues that we want to shed light on, and we tie that all into the clothing that we make. From the type of fabric that we use to the kind of stone washing that we do making items feel worn, to using real-life objects on clothes that relate to us, everything is about telling a story and getting that point across. So from conception to creation, Kuj and I are apart of it, fully. From the pattern being made to the printing process to watching how everything is being sewn, we’re overseeing all of it, head to toe. This is our baby, it’s our blood, sweat, and tears, and we watch over every single detail of it until it’s perfectly oriented. 

Kuj: I’ll pretty much lay out how I work, creatively, on the brand. We work in collections, but ideas come sporadically. Creatively, I feel like I work when I’m not working. I’ll be walking down the street, maybe eating a little dinner and something random will pass through my head, so I’ll draft up the idea with a sketch here or there. Most of the table side drawings and doodles that I do will get blown up to bigger scales and then come together at the end. Once you get one idea flowing, more come at you that same way, so I tend to keep them all within the same realm of ideas.

Arben: The collection usually starts from a certain energy that we have. Our newest collection is titled ‘No Curfew,’ and we came up with that collection name two years ago. It started with a name first, and it’s loosely based off of a few things. One of our favorite movies, Escape From New York, highlights the dystopic nature of New York and we took that idea and that energy and brought it into an entire collection. We’re telling our story of growing up in New York and the idea of shedding light on the aspects of New York that aren’t highlighted in media. We’re not talking about Times Square; we’re talking about the actual nitty-gritty where we’re from; Brooklyn, the shit that we’ve seen and been a part of. Real Shit. Raw shit. Like we have a t-shirt with Method Man on it rapping in front of a bodega where we lived in Staten Island. On the back of the shirt, we have the lyrics to Method Man describing torture. So what we’re doing is nothing light, nothing airy, it’s real. It’s the actual motion that you go through growing up in this city. It’s not a nice place; we’re not from a nice place. We’re nice guys, but we got a little attitude behind us, and sometimes people don’t know how to take that. 

Kuj: We’re also depicting how New York used to be. In the drawings that I do, people are dying in the street, there’s hookers, drugs, and all of that is all coming back now. In this neighborhood right here, there’s bum’s dying in the streets. We saw a bum die right on the corner yesterday. 

Arben: Yeah, literally yesterday.

Kuj: The cop was over there acting like it was nothing crazy, but we saw him walk over to check his pulse...

Arben: And he looked away like, fuck, this guy is dead. 

Kuj: And I’m sitting there thinking, my drawings represent what happened here in the 70s and 80s, but it’s still here. 

Arben: Not only that, it’s about telling the story of our family. My dad grew up during that time, and we incorporate everything that he relays to us about that time. We’ll be walking down the street with him, and he’ll say, “You shoulda seen this place in the 80s!” All of those stories are translated into our clothes. It’s not all about us, it’s about our grandfather in New York, our father in New York, and the shit that they went through to have us here. It all comes full circle. 

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How do you work on BOND both individually and in sync?

Arben: I’m kind of selfish when it comes to designing because I design out of desire and what I want to wear. It always strikes me weird that designers don’t wear the clothes they make. The clothes that we make from the sampling process, we wear them, and we wear them until they fall apart. We take those pieces that we wore for months and come up with how we want to make it into the final product. A new shirt that you buy from us won’t feel like a new shirt; it’s going to feel like it’s been worn in and lived in like it has some history behind it. It’s about having everything come together, and shit that we fuck with, in hopes that if we fuck with it, you’ll fuck with it too. And that goes for everything that we do. When we opened up this restaurant, there isn’t anything on this menu that we didn’t try. Either you like what we like, or you’re not getting any. It sounds selfish, but it’s more that we trust our own opinion. 

Kuj: We’ll come together on an idea, and then we’ll both take our time separately. When it comes to drawing up sketches to make all the graphics, I’m pretty much alone on it, and then we come back and decide what’s going on. 

Arben: We’ll usually already have an idea; we’ll know we want a graphic of an all-over print of a Kuj drawing and it’s going to have this concept, this concept, and that concept. So Kuj will go and cook something up, and then we come to the final drawing board and decide the print and what it goes on. 

Kuj: We’re making outfits out of this collection that we didn’t even think would go together. Once you have all the graphics said and done, that’s when it all comes along.

Arben: And the beauty of it all is that I’ve always been a strong believer in collaboration. Out of collaboration comes some of the best work and it just so happens that my brother is my best collaborator. Every idea that I have, he brings it to level 2.0. It’s a crazy thing because we have this intellectual game of Ping-Pong going on. One of us will come up with an idea, and the other makes it better.

Kuj: It’s like Ping-Pong in the Olympics. Two people will be on different teams, but they look so in sync. Even with friends around us, we’ll be chilling, and an idea will come up. It’s that creative grind.

Arben: We never know when it’s going to happen. You literally can’t hang out with us without hearing some kind of crazy idea being cooked up. People think we’re mad because we’ll be sitting in the corner talking about an idea we just came up with. I do not work at a table, I think of my ideas, gather them all together, and then I go lay them down. 

Kuj: We’re not cubical guys. I can’t sit in front of a computer and come up with ideas; it’s real-life inspiration. I need to be walking down the street. I’ll be hanging out with anybody, a stranger even, and an idea will pop in my head because of something they say. It’s taking little pieces and snippets of the world and giving it back. It’s a big regurgitation almost. 

Arben: We consider ourselves well versed in music, film, and anything where we can relate to people without even knowing who they are, or where they come from. My brother and I speak many different languages. We speak Spanish, we speak Portuguese, we speak conversational Italian, and Albanian, where we’re from.

Kuj: A little English here or there.

Arben: We also take inspiration from cultures, because we relate to cultures, not from America. 

Kuj: We grew up in a house full of immigrants.

Arben: We’ll be downtown working at the factory, and we don’t speak English until 7 o’clock when we get home. Those are the people who inspire me, the people working all day on our pieces.

Kuj: It reminds us of our past with our family. It’s the same type of energy. 

Arben: It’s all past and future. We have a jacket in the new collection, it’s called the “Revolution Lining Jacket,” and that tells the story of our family. There’s a picture on the top right corner that has a photo of Enver Hoxha, the communist leader of Albania, his statue being torn down after communism. On the top left side, there’s a metro card, an actual metro card stitched in, and on the back is an Albanian eagle. So it tells the story of our family: communism, escaping Albania, coming to New York, and living and growing here. 

Growing up in NYC and living in LA, how have the two cities inspired your creative drive?

Kuj: Well, here’s the thing, when we get inspired we’re like sponges. It doesn’t matter where we are, and it doesn’t matter who we’re with, it comes from wherever. We get inspired in both places. When we go to Paris for fashion week, we get inspired by things that remind us of back home too. You need to be very observant of the world. 

Arben: Yeah, as long as you keep your eyes open you never know when inspiration is going to hit you. 

Kuj: The most random things will catch my attention. For example, there was a rent reminder on the elevators of our apartment. The landlord would put it up every first of the month, and I’m thinking, this guy is doing this every month… and it had such a nice font on it.

Arben: It was a classic Times New Roman font, but we both thought it would look fire on a shirt. That’s when the whole Ping-Pong notion happens, bouncing ideas.

Kuj: Then there was an eviction notice we got from living at Park LaBrea, from back in the day. So we took the eviction notice and slapped it on the back of a t-shirt.

Arben: And that’s how the rent reminder shirt came to be. It’s always our true story in our clothes, and that’s the only way we work. We’re not afraid to say that we come from nothing. We’re not afraid to say we worked in a restaurant for fourteen years because that’s what made us who we are. That’s what gives us the conversational skills to be able to do this job. 

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From Marlboro packs to MetroCards, you like to incorporate items of your everyday use into your clothing. How did this idea spark and how has it become an iconic part of your brand identity?

Arben: When we create, we don’t like to stray too far from home on the creative process. We always keep it home base. Shit that we’re into, shit that we do every day, things that we see every day. We smoke cigarettes regularly, it’s something we’ve enjoyed for many years of our life. We even have cigarettes tattooed on both of our lungs. 

Kuj: We spend so much of our money on these cigarettes, and we thought it was time to get that back, creatively. It’s about how we incorporate the things in our life. People always have bad things to say about drinking and smoking, but hey, I use this shit.

Arben: Everything comes full circle. 

Kuj: I’m selling these shirts to buy more cigarettes now. It’s paying for that. Once we had the cigarette pack on a shirt idea, we thought, why don’t we slap some of our other things on t-shirts? 

Arben: It all started with a small collection we did called “Hungover,” which was telling the world about our night out. In that collection, we thought how to execute it: cigarette packs, alcohol stains, cigarette burns, rips, shit being destroyed. A night out with us is no joke, and it’s about putting that on clothes. “Hungover,” gave us our identity and structured how we do things. 

Kuj: It gave us our style to run with. It was a new level of cohesiveness. I was sewing just the tops of the cigarette packs at first, it just said Marlboro placed where an embroidered name would be on a jacket. Then we took it to the 2.0 and just put the whole pack on there.

Arben: We had to refine it for everyday use, and we do it all ourselves. Kuj will press and steam every cigarette pack flat, then I take them to get laminated, big sheets of them. I shave down each pack with a razor, peel the back of the lamination off, apply a heat stamp to add the sticker onto the back of the cardboard, then Kuj stamps the carton onto the shirt. Then we steam the shirt. 

Kuj: We heat press the pack on to the t-shirt. 

Arben: You see this shirt, and it looks easy. We like to do market research and hang out in the stores that sell our clothes. I’ll even pretend to be the salesman sometimes, just to see their reactions and understand what the consumer is looking for and what they see in our product. I’ve heard guys come up to it and say “huh, this is crazy, how much is it?” I tell them $350, and some think that’s crazy, but I’m thinking, “I see where you’re coming from, but my man, that took us 5 hours to do!” 

Kuj: I was sitting in the shop one day, hanging out, looking at the other collections they have, and some guy came in, and he was taking a picture of the cigarette pack tee. I asked him if he liked it, and he said it was cool, but all they did was stick a pack of cigs on a t-shirt. I was like, “yeah, lazy guys, anyone could have done that, huh?” and he said, “yeah, I could have done that!” So I asked him how he would’ve done it, and he didn’t know what to say, to which I said, “exactly, cuz you wouldn’t know how to do it.”

Arben: I mean shit, we’ve been there too! I was a kid thinking “I could do this, I could do that,” and here I am 4 years later still trying to figure out how to make jeans. 

Kuj: That’s how people become know-it-alls. I had an art teacher back in high school, and he went to a gallery at the MoMA, and there was a piece called “the knot,” and it was just a piece of string tied into a knot and framed. My teacher thought it was insane, and that anyone could do it. But my thinking was, “yeah, but you didn’t do it. Some guy tied a piece of string and put it in the MoMA. Respect to that guy. That guy finessed! What a move. I wish I thought of that.”

Arben: We put a pack of our cigs on a t-shirt, and now we’re sitting next to Balenciaga. You never know what is going to happen. We had this old pattern maker, William, who kind of introduced us to the fashion world. We came into it thinking it would be easy to design a t-shirt. The first day we walked in there he asked us how long we wanted the process to be and we said around two weeks. He just pointed to his wall, which said: “The goddess of fashion is never on time.”

Kuj: Facts!

Arben: And he told us to remember that line. 

Kuj: Facts!

Arben: Cuz that’s going to stay with you till the day you die in this business. 

Kuj: But at the time, we thought this guy had no clue what he was talking about. I didn’t want to believe this guy, but we knew that we had to. 

Arben: And it took us three months to design that t-shirt. After that, I said, “All hail William, anything you say goes!”

Kuj: Here we are 3 or 4 years later, and that still happens. 

Arben: It’s never on time. We live two split lives that nobody understands or knows about. We wake up in the morning at 8 or 9 o’clock and go down to the factory, and as I said earlier, we’re not speaking English until we leave. We’re hanging out with Arturo, a 65-year-old Mexican guy and his 2-year-old grandchild, little Brandon. That kid’s the man!

Kuj: Incredible kid!

Arben: Incredible kid, incredible family. We went to that baby’s christening. They invite us to that shit.

Kuj: Because we’re there everyday.

Arben: It’s mutual respect. A lot of designers go there and kind of brush people off.

Kuj: Not a lot of designers are down there, it’s mainly production managers, we’re the only owners who are really down there.

Arben: They bring our creations to life, so if we don’t show respect, how are they going to show our clothes respect? If you’re a snotty nose kid coming in saying you want to make a t-shirt, I’d be like, “ah go fuck yourself.” 

Kuj: Cuz at the end of the day we are young in their eyes. 

Arben: We’re still looked at as kids in the game. 

Kuj: I think I’m getting older, I’m 22 now, but other people see me in this industry and think, “who the fuck is this kid?” But I own a real corporation now, in a sense. 

Arben: Internationally, we’re small businessmen. 

Kuj: Yeah that’s what we like to call ourselves now… International small businessmen. 

Arben: Now we get to travel the world. We never got to do that before, so being able to go to Paris and Italy, it’s been a dream for us. 

Kuj: The first time I ever left the country was for work, and it’s traveling for a purpose. 

Arben: We don’t take vacations; the only time we travel is for a purpose. We would have never of been able to accomplish what we’ve accomplished by staying in New York. And I hold true to that every day. LA is a city that listens; they don’t judge out there. In New York, we were kind of cast aside…

Kuj: It’s taboo.

Arben: So we thought we’d prove ourselves in LA and then come back into the city. 

While you’ve dressed a notable list of celebs and musicians, who would you like to see in BOND?

Arben: I would love to dress the entire Wu-Tang Clan in our clothes. All of Wu-Tang in full BOND would be a dream for me.

Kuj: They’re pretty much all alive except Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Ol’ DB, I dropped a piece on his tombstone. We grew up listening to their music; we‘d love to work with them. We’re already putting them on our clothing, which they don’t know about.

Arben: Yeah, sorry guys if you ever see this!

Kuj: I’d want to do Iggy Pop. He doesn’t even wear clothes because he’s half naked all the time, but if I could put a pair of jeans on that guy, it’d be sick. I put that motherfucker on my clothes, and he doesn’t know about it. He’s like the Godfather. Him and Jim Morrison, I’d make a full custom fit for those guys. 

Arben: This list could go on forever…we won’t stop with this list. We also admire a lot of different people who never really “popped” too; people who started trends, but the trends got stolen from them. 

Kuj: Like the Dead Boys. They didn’t peak to their full potential. 

Arben: Yeah, we like to tell their story because their story hasn’t been told. You always hear about the bands who made it, but what about the guys who paved the way?

Kuj: We made a red velour sweater this season and if we could have put that on Biggie one time, and made a quadruple-triple XL for him…

Arben: That sweater was both inspired by Biggie and The Sopranos. You’re supposed to wear that with your gold chain hanging out, not giving a fuck.

Kuj: Like the movie Goodfellas, that’s our life in a sense, our whole family is like that. Not really killing people, well, maybe a few, but we don't know them.

Arben: We don’t come from a nice place. We don’t come from a place where people got to do what they were destined to do; it’s more people put in situations and have to make it out alive. The people before us paved the way for us. Our older generations, I’m talking great-grandfathers, grandmothers and such.

Kuj: People kind of lost sight as to why they came here, and just slipped into the routine. 

Arben: But our ancestors came here so that we could do something really special with our lives. Our great-grandmother escaped communism with 10 of her family members that were no older than the age of 15. I mean… I could tell you the story. I’ll tell you the story. It needs to be said somewhere. We’re from Albania. Our great-grandmother was the matriarch of the family. She had three children, but she also took care of 7 other children who weren’t her’s because everyone else in the family had been killed off during communist reign. So she took everyone in as her own. She was very educated and overheard two communist soldiers from Serbia speaking about burning down her entire village that night. They didn’t know that my great grandmother was highly educated and could understand them. So she went outside and asked the soldiers if she could get seaweed from the lake to patch up her roof because it was supposed to rain. She got whatever gold she could find, went down to the lake and got some seaweed, bought a little row boat with the gold, and hid it. She came back, patched up the roof, gathered the kids, and at 10 o’clock they took whatever they had on them, and got out of there. They all escaped, got into the rowboat and went to what was then Yugoslavia. She lost a baby on the way, but they made it to Yugoslavia, lived there and then went to Italy, which is why we have these Italian Restaurants. Then they came to New York, to Brooklyn. Without my great-grandmother's sacrifice, we wouldn’t be here right now. So we have to tell her story. Without telling her story, who are we? 

Kuj: And believe it or not, many Albanians took a similar path out of the country, and they own half of the Italian restaurants you see in New York especially in Staten Island or Brooklyn. 

How would you describe your overall aesthetic?

Kuj: Dirty, but clean.

Arben: Hip rock. It’s blending the two things we love most: Hip Hop and Rock and Roll.

How do the function and quality of your garments compare and contrast to the artwork painted on them?

Arben: It relates back to dirty, but clean. Our pieces have so much detail to them, and it gets overlooked. 

Kuj: Like the all-over print shirt, it’s got so much shit in it that I did. It’s just a big pen drawing. 

Arben: But this t-shirt also goes through such a process; this isn’t just a regular tee, this is custom fabric, so it first comes out feeling vintage. We sit there and inspect the gauges, inspect the weights. This is an hour and a half stonewashed shirt. You gotta deal with shrinkage and the color being right. It feels like a shirt that’s 20 years old, and that’s the idea, to make pieces feel lived in and worn in. We never had new clothes growing up, we had hand-me-down pieces, or we went vintage shopping. We want you to buy a piece that feels lived in and worn in for years.

From your current to archival work, what’s one of your all-time favorite pieces? 

Kuj: From our last collection, ‘Down in Flames,’ the “Like a Brick Wall On Fire” shirt because it has the most meaning to me. It was a picture of Iggy Pop standing on the crowd. “Like A Brick Wall On Fire” was written around the picture, and that comes from a text message I received from my ex-girlfriend. I had a full gang sit down showed them the screenshot of that sentence, and I'm like, “what is this?” It hit me so hard; I really am a brick wall on fire. I paired it with that Iggy Pop picture because I felt that it embodied what it meant. 

Arben: We’re the same person, so shit like that always comes up for both of us. Some people think that we’re unstable, but in the path of doing what you dream, there’s no room for stability. A brick wall is very stable, but when it’s on fire, what do you do with it? 

Kuj: So like I said, we share our experiences. She meant something mean from that text, but I twisted it, made it something positive, and made money off that. You got a negative situation? We’ll turn it to a positive. 

Tell us about your side project, Nothing Crazy.

Arben: It’s a collaborative effort between myself, Kuj, Diego, and Andrew Andrade. So it’s a group of brothers coming together just wanting to have some fucking fun.

Kuj: Me and Diego are the same age, Arb and Andrew are the same age, it’s like we found us in a mirrored image. We all became best friends.

Arben: Those guys are our family. We got similar birthdays, three days apart. We’re the same zodiac signs; me and Drew are pieces, Kuj and Diego are Gemini’s. So it’s about us coming together, but it’s also about something that everyone can get, inclusivity not exclusivity. BOND is a brand focused on exclusivity. We know not everyone can buy a 1,900 dollar jacket, it’s hand done, it takes time, it’s hand-crafted. We come from a streetwear background, and that’s what got us into high fashion. Supreme, Stüssy, brands like that led us to high fashion. And we were there during the very beginning of it. So this is us coming back to our roots and doing something for the kids. What could we do for the kids like us, that couldn’t get into a party? If we see you in a Nothing Crazy hoodie, you’re walking into the party with us. We did a Nothing Crazy party in Italy and had one of our homies, Jay IDK, perform, and the next day we did a pop-up. And it was the biggest party they had ever had at the store.

Kuj: It was incredible.

Arben: 400 something people showed up to the pop-up and they all knew Nothing Crazy, and all knew our gang shake because we have a special handshake that we do. 

Kuj: A lot of them knew BOND too. They all came in with their Raf fits on. They knew what the fuck was going on and they were like 12 years old. 

Arben: At the pop-up, I asked a group of kids what they were doing the next day to model the lookbook. We bought them pizza, cracked some Coca-Cola, had them fitted at the store, and hit the streets. They were so gassed to be a part of it. I literally gave one kid my shoes, and I was walking around the streets in my socks.  

Kuj: We still talk to all these kids to this day. It’s like we went in a time machine and went to see us as kids and gave us the clothes we made in the future. 

Arben: And that’s the kind of relationship we want to build with people buying our clothes. We’re not trying to be some hot shot designers, that’s not the point of this. The point is to connect with people, and that’s why we tell our stories. At the end of the day, there are people out there that can relate to what you’re going through. That’s why we watch movies, listen to music, read books. 

Kuj: Next is Japan. So we’ll see what will happen out there. 

What can we expect from you in the near future?

Arben: We just dropped our latest collection, ‘No Curfew,’ in stores last week. It’s our story, from our relatives to ourselves in New York. It all comes full circle as were here right now opening this restaurant in the garment district. This collection will tell you a little bit about our history, but it also highlights the poverty, crime-struck rawness of New York that’s not shown in everyday media. What you can expect from us is that we’re gonna keep making fresh shit. We’re going to keep making things that we fuck with.

Kuj: Not gonna stop till we eatin’ good every day. 

Arben: We’re not here for some in-and-out shit, we’re here for the long run. 

Kuj: Creating shit, traveling the world, we gotta keep on going to continue BOND. 

Arben: We have to keep creating instances where we’re making real life happen. 

Kuj: We’re not fucking leaving.

Arben: We’re not fucking leaving!

To see more about BOND click here.

The Durollari family restaurant, Nittis, is set to open at the end of October in the Garment District of NYC.


Interview conducted and written by: Morgan Vickery

Photography by: Phoenix Johnson