Trickster Magazine

[ TEX ] I grew up in a small Texas town, surrounded by familiar rhythms, but I was also deeply into skateboarding and playing in bands. I started drums around nine, and that quickly became my main creative outlet. Early on, I also felt a strong need to leave and experience something beyond that environment. Doing well in school felt like the most realistic way out, a path toward a bigger university and a different life.

Long-distance running became another strength, and because athletics are such a big part of the U.S. system, it helped me earn a scholarship to a large university. Where I’m from, most people didn’t go to college, so that opportunity felt like a turning point, something that made leaving possible.

[ TEX ] I went to Texas A&M University, known for agriculture and science, where I studied to become a national park ranger. At the time, it had one of the strongest programs in the U.S. It was still in Texas, about five or six hours from where I grew up, so not a huge geographic leap, but enough to feel like a real shift. The town was still relatively small, but to me it felt expansive.

That’s when I realized how much I liked being away from home. I expected to feel homesick, but that never really happened. If anything, the farther I got, the more at ease I felt.

[ TEX ] Yes, briefly after graduating. But I didn’t enjoy it much, you’re not around many people, and when I came back, I felt like I’d forgotten how to read social cues. There were other detours too, including time in South America working as a cowboy before eventually moving back to Austin.

[ TEX ] While I was at uni, I played in several bands. After graduating, I was asked to join Balmorhea, an experimental post-rock band. We signed to a label, toured, and it was the first time I was doing something creative and getting paid for it. I loved that.

[ TEX ] After my short stint as a park ranger, I moved to Austin and started welding for an architect who was also an artist. Welding felt natural, five of my mom’s seven brothers are welders, so I’d grown up around it. His company, Design Build Adventure, was a great place to work.

Not long after, a friend who’d been working for a brand opening a store in Austin told me they needed someone to help build it and shape the space. She was leaving but said, “I think you’d like this – I know you’re into clothes.” I remember telling her I thought fashion was kind of toxic, but she said, “Just meet the guy.”

So I did. His name was Billy Reid, and he’d just won GQ Menswear Designer of the Year and the Vogue Fashion Fund Award. I ended up working with him for a while, doing everything from fabrication to visual merchandising and direction.

Looking back, there’s a thread through everything I’ve done. I get restless and want to expand into new things, it’s both a blessing and a curse. I was always trying to bring my interests under one umbrella, and seeing what Billy was building made something click. He was combining music, food, and clothing, hosting concerts, dinners, and collections. It made me realize fashion could be more than clothes; it could be a way to build a universe.

[ TEX ] Yes. After being in that setting I started learning how to make clothes on an industrial sewing machine, and eventually I started my own brand. American-made workwear, kind of western-inspired, but expensive because production in the U.S. is costly. Most of our customers were in Japan, they really connected with it.

Things were going well until the pandemic hit, which, in hindsight, was a blessing in disguise. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. We did our last collection there and sent it to Japan. Luckily, I’d also been consulting for a skincare line, and U.S. unemployment support really carried me through, no one was buying luxury western wear during the pandemic.

[ TEX ] I started questioning everything, whether I wanted to continue in fashion, stay in the U.S., or finally study something creative, since I never had. I thought maybe I should study fashion design.

While applying for master’s programs, I randomly checked if Estonia had one. I found the Estonian Academy of Arts and thought, fuck it, I’ll apply there too. I’d never been, didn’t know anyone, but I applied.

[ TEX ] It’s kind of funny. Back when I was playing in a post-rock band, we were really into Arvo Pärt. On tour, someone said he was from Finland or Sweden, then we googled him and realized he was from Estonia. We were like, where the fuck is Estonia? This was around 2008.

After that, Estonia kept popping up – someone mentioning Tommy Cash, reading about Kalamaja, hearing public transport in Tallinn was free. It started to feel almost mythical, like a place that kept reappearing.

During applications, I asked every school the same thing: can I take classes across departments, graphic design, textiles, sound? Most traditional programs said no, you focus on your collection for two years. But that’s not what I wanted. I’d already done collections. I wanted to rethink how I design, or even whether I wanted to do fashion at all.

EAA was the only place that said yes. I remember thinking: that’s it, I’m going there.

[ TEX ] After my first year, I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue in the fashion department. Around the same time, a few other opportunities came up: I had been accepted into FAMU in Prague to study directing, I had a six-month stage at Louis Vuitton that could potentially turn into a full-time role, and I had also been accepted into the graphic design MA at EAA.

It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, because those three paths led to completely different futures. I thought maybe filmmaking wasn’t the route because I’m too impatient to make a movie, at least right now, and it was a bigger gamble because I’d never done it before. But the Louis Vuitton thing and the graphic design, I really wanted both.

Louis Vuitton tempted me because it was the biggest brand in the world, and I was curious to see behind the curtain. But I was also afraid it would intensify the very parts of fashion I was already frustrated by.

So I spoke with Sean Yendrys, the head of the EAA Graphic Design MA. I even asked if it would be possible to delay my start and join in the spring after the stage, but he told me it was a hard September start. He then asked me something that really stayed with me: what scale do you want to work on? Do you want to operate globally, at a huge scale, or do you want to work more directly and intimately with artists and clients? He told me he personally preferred the smaller scale, and that immediately resonated with me. I realised that’s much more the kind of person I am.

After that realisation I emailed Louis Vuitton and asked if I could do three months instead of six, probably the first person to ask such a thing. They said yes. I did it for three months, and it was a fantastic experience. Then I started the Graphic Design MA, and I wouldn’t change that decision for anything. It was absolutely the right one.

I know it sounds cliché, but you really do have to follow your gut.

[ TEX ] Those fields, architecture and fashion, move at a pace that doesn’t suit me. I’m impatient. I don’t want to wait years to see something realized. Even now in fashion, the stuff I’m working on won’t come out for a year and a half, and by the time it does, I’m already tired of it. Graphic design felt completely different. The turnaround was faster, the entry point was easier, and you could move between all these different interests. If you love architecture, you can work with architects. If you love art, you can work with artists. You don’t need a lot of resources to be able to start compared to fashion, for example.

[ TEX ] So naturally, I drifted back toward my upbringing in Texas and started thinking about country and western culture. When you say you’re from Texas, people tend to react in extremes. They either romanticize it, asking if you rode your horse to school (which, to be fair, you actually could at my high school, there was a stable where you could leave it during the day) or they immediately recoil. The same goes for the cowboy as this kind of American mythological figure. We don’t really have knights in shining armor, we have the cowboy, but he’s also deeply misunderstood. Both of these reactions flatten the reality, and there’s so much nuance in between that people don’t really see.

Country and western is a culture, but it also contains its own subcultures: cowpunk music, strange regional variations of cowboy boots, queer rodeos in Nevada, Reno, and Arizona since the 70s, queer country music. There are all these nuanced, fascinating offshoots. Even something like chaps, originally a practical western garment worn over jeans so you don’t shred them riding through cactus, gets reappropriated in queer club culture in New York as something else entirely. That kind of recontextualization is super interesting to me.

So I started making this publication. It became a way of researching, but also a way of producing. Each issue is one A3 sheet folded in a specific way, plus a thicker cover stock folder so you can collect them over time. The format is simple, but it lets me go deep into one subject per issue. Eventually, it becomes a body of research around the country and western culture, or at least around all the things orbiting under that umbrella.

I think the zines also became a way of reconnecting with home while being far away from it. When you’re homesick, you bring home to you. In Estonia, Zody Burke and I used to do these Cold Blooded Country Nights where we’d teach people how to line dance and two-step and then play country music.

[ TEX ] Yeah, exactly. That’s a really nice way of putting it.

Usually it starts with one specific thing I don’t fully understand but am curious about. The first issue was about this very particular type of cowboy boot, really long, with the toe curving up. I’d seen them in South Texas and wanted to know where they came from. Once you find that specific point of entry, it becomes easier to search, to build an image archive, to find the narrative.

What often happens is I begin researching one thing and then discover some even stranger story inside it. I did one issue about rhinestone cowboy suits, those glittering stage suits that became a whole thing in Nashville through people like Nudie Cohn, who made them for Dolly Parton, Elvis, and so on. But in the middle of researching that, I found this incredible outsider artist in Mississippi. He’d been a mechanic, his wife left him, his garage went bankrupt, and while he was praying for God to give him a reason to live, the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” came on the radio. He became obsessed and started rhinestoning everything: his house, his Cadillac, even his dentures. So the issue became not just about the rhinestone suit, but about this completely singular man. After he died, they moved the entire house into a museum in Mississippi. It’s incredible.

The rodeo clown issue worked like that too. People think rodeo clowns are there for comic relief, but they’re actually some of the bravest people in the ring. Most are former bull riders. They wear bright colors and paint their faces so the bull will follow them instead of the rider who’s just been thrown. I’d always loved rodeo clowns, and I knew I wanted to write about Leon Coffee, this legendary Black rodeo clown from Texas.

But then I found this haunting portrait of a young rodeo clown in an archival book and wanted to use it as the cover. At first it didn’t seem connected to Leon. Then I kept reading and learned that the boy in the photograph had died in the ring at 21, and Leon Coffee was the first person who ran to him and tried to save him. Suddenly the image made perfect sense. That kind of unexpected narrative turn seems to happen in every issue.

[ TEX ] For me, the imagery has to do two things: it has to be visually strong, and it has to gesture toward some less obvious or fringe part of the culture. The risograph process also shapes things, I always print in two colors. That limitation becomes part of the challenge. The most recent issue was about acid westerns, psychedelic western films, and the question became how to make something feel psychedelic with only two riso colors. That kind of formal limitation is actually really generative.

[ TEX ] When I moved to Paris, I eventually reached out to my friend Tony Farfalla, an amazing photographer from Colorado who also shares a love for country music, and asked if he’d be up for doing country nights together alongside the zine launches. He said yes.

Part of it was about keeping myself motivated. Having an event meant I had a reason to keep producing new issues, and the nights became a natural place to share and sell the zines. In Estonia, I had already been surprised by how people responded to it, but in Paris the reaction was immediate and much bigger than I expected. We’ve outgrown every bar we’ve hosted in so far, been invited to do one for a major music festival, and even for fashion week events. It still feels kind of surreal.

What I love most about these nights is how they completely cut through pretension. Fashion can be incredibly self-serious, but the moment you’re learning how to line dance to a genre you’re not familiar with, there’s no way to be cool. You just can’t. You look awkward, and that’s exactly the point. It forces people to let go. Seeing people dressed head-to-toe in Balenciaga trying to line dance is honestly one of the greatest joys of my life.

[ TEX ] Yeah, it grew organically. A lot of people from the fashion world began coming to the events, partly because Tony and I are connected to that scene, and then people started posting the zines on Instagram. At some point, Kelly Bonneville, who owns 1909 Bookstore in Paris and also curates publications for Dover Street Market, came across one and reached out. She ordered some, and from there it snowballed. Now other bookstores in Paris carry it too.

[ TEX ] I wanted it to be collectible, that’s why I made the folder. Once you have a few, you want the whole set. As the colors build up, the object gets richer.

But print and web should do different things. I don’t want the site to just replicate the zine. Print has limits – an A3 sheet is always a page. The web can get much weirder.

I want the website to feel like another dimension of the same world, not a copy of it. But if the form can be much weirder or more expansive, why not push that?

[ TEX ] One thing I’ve learned is that when you make work for clients, it tends to pass through a lot of filters and becomes more of a collective vision. But when you make something out of genuine, personal interest, without anyone telling you what it should or shouldn’t be, it often resonates more deeply with people, even if they’re not particularly interested in the subject itself.

[ TEX ] I guess it’s like that saying: a high tide raises all ships. If more people are exposed to it because Beyoncé or Post Malone, both from Texas, do an album in that direction, then more people get introduced to the genre, and that’s cool.

But I also think it’s important to remember that white people weren’t the first cowboys. Vaqueros, chaps, so much of western wear, a lot of it comes from Spanish and Mexican traditions. White America just appropriated it really effectively. So I can’t exactly be precious about people borrowing it, because it was already borrowed long ago.

What I find weirder is when people mock it and then wear it anyway. When someone talks shit about cowboys and then wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat at their wedding, that feels a little hypocritical. I’m more bothered when the culture is mocked, when people wear it ironically, like “these cowboys are idiots,” because some of the smartest, most open-minded people I know are cowboys. When I see the stereotype being pushed, that’s a bummer. So when the stereotype is the whole point, that’s where I lose interest.

But there are also plenty of people who are sincerely into it, and I love that. Here in France there are people who know obscure country songs better than I do. They know the dances, the clothes, the whole thing. That’s rad.

[ TEX ] I get that in Paris too. But western wear has always been really powerful visually. And so many designers have pulled from it, Raf Simons, Pharrell, Tom Ford. It goes back to that mythology again. The cowboy hat is just especially loaded because it’s such a strong silhouette. It’s not subtle.

Maybe that’s part of what I like about it. When you wear one, you’re making a statement. But the nuance is important too. For example Willie Nelson hasn’t worn cowboy boots in decades, he wears New Balance because his feet hurt, and he’s one of the most country people alive. Then you’ve got the Compton Cowboys riding through Los Angeles to Kendrick Lamar. The whole thing contains multitudes. There’s absolutely room for an Estonian cowgirl in a puffer jacket and sneakers.

And honestly, the more people see it, the less weird it becomes. Familiarity changes the reaction.

[ TEX ] Exactly. But honestly, Texans are pretty quick to embrace people, especially foreigners. A two-stepping dance floor is one of the most non-judgmental places on earth. If you want to learn, people will grab you and spin you around like you’ve lived there for a hundred years. There’s pride in the culture, but it’s not always exclusionary.