A multi-talented skater, model, and musician, Lil Dre represents the new generation of adidas Skateboarding. Reflecting on his latest video parts, he shared his thoughts on the appeal of the Superstar.
──LIL DRE (ENGLISH)
[ JAPANESE / ENGLISH ]
Photo_Takuya Izumi
Special thanks_adidas Skateboarding
VHSMAG (V)： Welcome to Tokyo. Is this your first time here?
Lil Dre (D)： Yeah, it's my first time in Japan. It's so fire to me. I already had all these ideas because all my homies have told me Japan is their favorite place they've ever been to in their whole life. Karl Watson said so many times to me, like, “You're gonna love Japan.” Everything is beautiful.
V： How has the trip been so far?
D： We've been going around street skating, just having fun. It's really hard to skate though. When you skate at a spot, you only got a few tries to land your trick before the cops come. But last night I got lucky with this trick. I did a front three into a bank. But that's the spot Marcos got bodied on. It was because there was a big rock in front of the roll up, like a giant rock. He didn't see it because it was dark. He didn't know it was there. I felt like I had to do a trick since he got hurt. I felt like I had to redeem it.
V： You had the Beautiful Thoughts part last year. Can you talk about the music?
D： Me and my homie made the music for that. He produced a beat and his ex-girlfriend sang over the whole track. We were in the studio editing the video to the song to make everything perfect.
V： What sparked you to make music?
D： I was always influenced by music growing up. I feel like I always knew that I wanted to make music, not to be something in music but just for fun. I started getting all the equipment and I just started making songs with my homies. I'm really starting to enjoy it. Like skateboarding, every time I make a song, I just wanna make another one. I don't really care where it takes me.
V： I like how you have a lot of things going on outside of skating.
D： I feel like you gotta do that. Some people are scared to do what they actually love because they think what somebody else is gonna think about them. But you gotta have fun at the end of the day and that's how you're gonna get to where you want to go. I don't know, it's just fun. We'll go in the van and if we can't skate a spot, we’ll bring our laptop and be messing around making songs and shit.
V： What about the Lil Dre in Los Angeles part that you dropped in April?
D： That was like a montage. It was a little edit for my colorway and we filmed that in like one week. We had no footage and the shoe was dropping. So they needed something to come out. So Marcos and my homie Rico flew to LA and we skated the spots in LA for one week, trying to make it happen.
V： One week is a pretty insane schedule.
D： It was kind of a crazy timeline but I like that video because it was something different. I incorporated music in it. We rented out this studio and we were filming us making the beat for the actual video. I was hyped that we got to be able to do something different in a skating approach.
V： You and Marcos are super close. You guys ride for the same companies and you're dating his sister?
D： Yeah, we're a real family. That's my real brother now, for real. I mean, we've been brothers even before that, but we grew a special bond.
V： And you guys are both models. What are some of the most memorable campaigns or shows that you’ve worked on?
D： My favorite ones I did was a Saint Laurent campaign. That means a lot to me because I slowly started building a relationship with the company. They started sending me to their fashion shows and sitting in the front row, that's something that never happened for me. That's a company that's so big that not everybody gets the opportunity to do anything with them. So that Saint Laurent one is crazy to me. And a crazy one I did was a Calvin Klein because I always never felt like I was a real model. So when I did that, I was like, “Damn, I'm a real model now.”
V： How did your modeling career start?
D： My homie, Elan Watson, he’s Karl Watson's son. Growing up when we were little kids and when we would go skate, he's a photographer so he would always take pictures of me. Just because he loved taking photos, we would always take photos everywhere we went. So I was always used to being in front of the camera because of him and we started doing little photo shoots for small up and coming companies. Then I started making skate edits on Instagram and bigger brands and companies would send me clothes. I would do edits wearing designer clothes and that's how it kind of started.
V： So pretty much both your career in skating and modeling started from Instagram.
D： Me and my homie Kevin Perez would film these edits, we would be doing it like every week. The numbers it was actually doing were ridiculous. I wasn't really doing hard tricks. I feel like it was just the fact that it was an Instagram edit and it was trendy for somebody to watch. So we took advantage of that and we just kept doing it and it worked.
V： That sounds like a whole new generation.
D： That was a perk but in the beginning I felt like people didn't really look at me as a real skater. So I had to prove myself by dropping street parts. People knew me from my skate edits. So it was kind of unfair, you know? I already got sponsored with no real footage. So in my heart I felt like I had to prove myself to everybody.
V： And look at where you are now. So you’re here in Tokyo for the Superstar tour. What do you like about them?
D： Superstars is just one of my favorite shoes in general. It just skates good. I like the high top one and I like the low one. It just feels good. I jumped down stairs a lot and this is probably the best shoe that doesn't hurt my feet for real.
V： Are there any upcoming projects with adidas?
D： I'm working on an adidas part. Hopefully more shit on the way.
V： If you could design your own adidas signature shoe or apparel collection, what would it look like?
D： They just gonna have to see when it comes out. That's a hard question to answer. That's something you really gotta think about. But I feel like it's a dream to design a whole collection or something like that. It's gonna be everything in one, a lot of black (laughs).
Lil Dre
@lil.dre._
His strengths lie in flip tricks on stairs and technical tricks on blocks. He’s also active as a rapper and fashion model.
