Rarely, if ever, has a story come across my desk that’s stopped me so utterly stone cold dead in my tracks like this one. This thing has cracked my brain clean in two. I’m a different and changed person because of this. I’m boxing up all my accumulated knowledge and putting it on the curb. LeBron James is about to release a shoe collab with a streetwear designer. And that streetwear designer looks like Tony Abbott somehow Benjamin Button’d himself and got shot out of a cannon into a Culture Kings.
[jwplayer hC1miVum]
The collab’s been known about for a while but the comparison to Toney has only come about in the past handful of weeks.
Last month, on ye olde Twitter, a photo of the designer popped up with the frankly cursed comparison. It’s honestly undeniable.
https://twitter.com/JamColley/status/1172299718119972864
Look at that cursed visage. That’s the former Member for Warringah after he got tossed into the machine from The Fly with a Golf Wang camp cap and the entire Anderson .Paak discography. No doubt about it whatsoever.
That post resurfaced again this morning and almost immediately sent the entire PEDESTRIAN.TV editorial team into full-on conniptions.
It has to be a fluke, right? A trick of the lens. An uncanny angle. One of those rare snapshots capturing your face in transition where it looks 100% unrecognisable. A grotesque contortion of facial extremities.
Turns out: Nope.
After digging for several minutes, we found the source: Streetwear designer John Elliott, a man with an impeccable sense of current fashion, an unquenchable business drive, a booming following, and a face like the 28th Prime Minister of Australia got his scone jammed in an industrial dehydrator.
I’m losing my god-given mind over this. This is a man grown from a fleck of skin that peeled off Abbott’s clammy neck around the time he was punching walls at Sydney University.
There exists a man – real, by all accounts – who is swanning about fashion circles in the United States looking like Anthony John Abbott took a header off a balcony and suddenly got heaps into dolewave and moisturisers. It is consuming my world and I cannot cope.
I am not dealing with this very well at all. My entire world is spiralling out of control. Do you think if we put this guy and the quote-unquote “real” Tony Abbott in the same room, one of them would explode into dust like a climate-denying Picture of Dorian Gray? You’d have to assume they would.
Gonna spend the next Entire Rest Of My Life thinking about this one. An utterly bananas development.
