Personal Space: CHI | Oscar Castillo

Editor’s Note: The rise of Modern Notoriety and MN Lab was not a conventional one, what started as a blog for getting sneaker leaks has become a full-fledged media agency for global brands. As a Chicago native, Oscar first gained recognition leaking sneaker news on NikeTalk, blogging for Sneaker Files, and working at a local sneaker store named Subconscious. Since launching Modern Notoriety has collaborated with some of the biggest names in the game including Nike, adidas, New Balance, Reebok, Asics, Puma, Finish Line, and more. Not to mention his local Through The Lens events in Chicago, mostly recently the one last night for ComplexCon. We met up with Oscar at his Chicago headquarters to talk about his inspirations growing up, how his creative career has manifested and what’s next for Modern Notoriety. Read Up. (This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Lizzie Kassab, StockX: Thanks for sitting down with us today. Could you introduce yourself for people that don’t know?

Oscar Castillo, Modern Notoriety: My name is Oscar Castillo and I’m the founder of Modern Notoriety.

Lizzie: Modern Notoriety has obviously grown so much in the past few years, could  you give us a quick rundown of where we are right now?

Oscar: We are currently at the new headquarters.  It’s split up into two parts: one is MN Lab where we create all the content for the brands that we work with, and in the first room is where we create content for Modern Notoriety.

Lizzie: And it’s a new space?

Oscar: Yes.

Lizzie: When did you get this space? What’s the story of how you got here?

Oscar: I’ve been looking for a space for a long time and my friend Chris, who has the music studio two doors down, was like “Yo, we got space open, you should take it” and I just hopped on it because it felt right.

Lizzie: What were you looking for exactly? What’s a necessity for you to be able to create here?

Oscar: Less is more, you know? The less shit you have, the more you tend to appreciate your space.  When I saw this space I looked at the wood and brick, and it was dope. I just wanted it.

Lizzie: Do you feel like your space influences what you create?

Oscar: Oh yeah. I think the sun, the plants, and just being in an open well-lit space. It brings a lot of good energy and I think a lot of people feel that way. If you were in a dark room, it would be like Kurt Cobain all day, you know? You do get gloomy and grey skies here, but we’re so used to it that I’m good with my plants. I fuck with my plants.

Lizzie: Being a photographer and a content creator, you’re not spending most of your time sitting at a desk inside. You’re out, you’re shooting with people, and you’re networking. You are literally on the ground, getting shit done. If the world is your office, what does it mean as far as this being your personal space?

Oscar: When I’m out shooting, I don’t feel like I have a personal space myself. I feel like everything that I see around me is free space for me to make something. A personal space to me is more enclosed. When I’m out in the world it’s like my playground, it’s a free-for-all in a way.

Lizzie: One of the biggest things that we were thinking about is that it seems it is really about creating a space for other people outside of Modern Notoriety. Building a personal space for other people… cultivating community. Has that been a big focus of Modern Notoriety from the beginning?

Oscar: Just to give you a quick background, I started in the stock room and at the same time I was blogging for this site called Sneaker Files. My main purpose was to put Chicago sneaker culture on a global scale.  I had a small Olympus camera, a little recorder, and I was going to stores and interviewing the owner and taking photos of the spaces. At the time there wasn’t any type of content or articles on Chicago sneaker culture. Not even stores.  So I was like, “ You know what? I’m going to be the one to do it.” I was going to every single store and posting my links on Nike Talk so I could get traction, and that’s how I made a name for myself in the city. I was really the only writer or only person that was doing that, so it was really easy for me to be for people to be familiar with me and what I was doing. I left Sneaker Files in 2009 and started freelancing for Nice Kicks for a little bit.

Fast forward to 2011, I just started my own my own shit. I wanted to have control with everything I do. The name Modern Notoriety came from gaining notoriety by something that you do. Although notoriety has a bit of a negative connotation to it, I felt like it was a representation of kicking down doors and making a name for yourself. At the time I was working at this sneaker store called Subconscious. That’s where I was getting all my knowledge on product, understanding price points, and soaking in all the business aspects of this entire culture. I just made a name for myself with people that would come in and they would have a brand and I would be like “Yo, let me write something up on you” and I would post it on Sneaker Files.  That’s how people started to get to know me, from helping put people on in the city. At that time the digital era was just bubbling.

Because I went through a time of wanting to be known, I do these Street Notoriety meet ups so all these creatives can have a platform or environment where they can do cool shit. Where they can create with a video or photo and be out in the world and make our surroundings our space. Just have a good, super cool vibe environment because if you’re comfortable you’re going to be able to do a better job at making cool shit.

Lizzie: Is that something that came about from adidas’ end? Or is that something that you guys really put together?

Oscar: There’s barely any photo meets in the city and whenever there were photo meets, it was just photographers doing landscape stuff.  Because we publish streetwear and sneaker content, and we’ve been doing it for almost a decade, I felt like we needed a streetwear photo meet.  The crazy part about it was you get all ages, all different kinds of people participating and a lot of them said to me like “Man, we’ve been waiting for something like this.”  We see ourselves as leaders in the culture and we want to set that example. Even now we see other people trying to duplicate. The one we did with adidas we gave everyone disposable cameras. We developed their film and made it a part of the adidas event that we had here and then a bunch of other brands started doing the same thing.  The results are good every single time and it makes an impact on people.

Lizzie: There’s obviously so many voices now in the sneaker game. You came up before Facebook and Instagram were really there to amplify your voice. With it being so saturated now, how do you continue to be innovative in that market?

Oscar: I’ve always said this to people, even with brands that I’ve worked with: You have to zig while everyone else zags. At this point, everyone’s a photographer.  Everyone’s doing the same thing because they see it working for others. I think that people tend to get stuck in that motion where they continue to hope that they make it in that lane and that lane may not be for them.  So for me I knew that if I wanted to switch it up, I had to learn how to shoot, then learn how to do video, then learn how to like make graphic shit. I just had to really reinvent the wheel. Even now with Instagram, it’s such an unsafe place to put your work out because you could do some really dope shit but there’s an agency lurking, trying to duplicate what you are doing for another brand. Then they are going to pass it off as “we founded this type of way of doing shit.”  It’s a savage world out there so I don’t know.

I think that reinventing the wheel and just trying to zig while everyone else zags and not stay within the same type of blueprint that you had last year are things to keep in mind. If you’re doing the same shit that you did last year, in terms of the way that you’re creating, and your not stepping it up then you need to reevaluate what it is that you’re doing. If it’s working out for you then do it, if it’s not then maybe you need to find a different way of doing it.

Lizzie: So I just have to ask, does anyone still refer to you as Wrecknkicks?

Oscar: Wow, yeah you know what? I beat all my shoes up, that’s how I got that name. I don’t know if you can see but I broke these out maybe like last week and it’s like I just beat the shit out of my shoes.  That name came from when I was camping out and somebody was roasting me for wearing a beat-up pair of some Grape Air Jordan V’s back in the day when they retroed them for the first time. It was September 29th, 2005.  I remember that it was stuck with me. That was my NikeTalk username.

Lizzie: Being someone who really grew on the forums, how has that changed for you now? Especially the sneaker community online.

Oscar: I think when the forum hype died, the Instagram and Facebook groups and all the other communities started to come up.  What I miss about the forum’s was that it was a specific community that appreciated the culture for what it was. Now, because it’s on Instagram and so public, they’re just different personalities.  NikeTalk was more for the older heads. I was one of the few younger ones that was into it, but when that passed the excitement kind of passed too.

I had a friend who was a lawyer and he was just always buying samples and shit. He was even buying shit that would have me saying “why the fuck did you buy that.”  He would buy some really weird Air Jordan 15 samples, types I would never wear. As a collector, he was just appreciating the fact that these were like samples. Because he was doing that, people were passing his name around and stores got familiar with him.  Stores started approaching him saying “Hey listen, you buy a lot of stuff from us. Here are some salesman samples we’re just going to give them to you.” Then he contacted me saying that he had samples and that I should take some photos of them for my blog, so I started leaking shit. I was leaking shit for like two years.  If you look up Jordan samples and just type in NikeTalk you’ll see all my really shitty pictures, but you’ll see all my leaks there. I would take an insole out of an OG Concord 11 from ‘95 and put it inside a DMP, because the insole said Nike Air, and I would take a photo and say “Yo, these are going to drop,” just to get that traffic.  Then later on they would be scheduled to drop. Faith reached out to me and said, “Bro, you’re good. I know you didn’t have a sample. You put the insole inside. This isn’t a real sample, you’re making up a story”, and then shit ended up actually dropping. The same thing happened with the Thunder 4’s. I took a picture of a Thunder 4 and had a sample tag from 2008, and then they dropped a year or two years later.

I honestly believe that I had some sort of impact on the Jordan brand.  That’s where they would take out all their notes. They would look at all the threads, see what people were in to, and pinpoint what the buzz is. I’d post the samples and do catalog scans.  I think I was also the reason why Jordan brand doesn’t have showroom stuff anymore. Store owners used to get invited to the BU, or the Nike office and would have the samples on the table. People would take photos of it and I would get it from my source, and then I would post it. You could tell by the desk or by somebody’s jacket that it came from the showroom and they would ask me to take it down.  I would have catalog scans, I was a menace out here with that shit. I was doing it because I loved to break news. For the Wolf Grey 5’s, I was basically the first one to leak that photo of that one pair. Even when Last Shots retro released in 2011, it was a bunch of stuff for years that I was leaking until they stopped making samples.

Lizzie: Was this still when you were Wrecknkicks?

Oscar: That was for Modern Notoriety.  That’s how we ended up getting a bunch of traffic because we would post an article on a sample and then we would post it on NikeTalk.  Matt, who is a good homie of mine now, him and I didn’t really mess with each other because I was leaking a bunch of shit. I leaked a Jordan 3 scan because from samples, they went to catalogs, and then they went to these little drawings of what was going to come out, but you can clearly tell what colorway.  I had a scan of that. He said Cement 3’s aren’t coming out in January 2011 and I said “yes they are, yes they are.” Boom, first few photos started coming out and it just backfired on him like “Bro! I told you like they coming out with this shit!” At the time blogs were doing whatever they could to get traffic, but I had the shit to do it. Because they cared so much about their relationships with the brands, they didn’t want to take that risk.  I didn’t really care. It was a very sensitive thing for them to tamper with because obviously it’s confidential information, but you know me. I’m over here running around and shit, doing it.

Lizzie: How would you describe Chicago’s sneaker scene?

Oscar: I think Chicago has one of the most influential sneakers scenes. People wouldn’t be into Jordans if it wasn’t for the city. You know what I mean? Even with the sneaker stores here on the west side where a lot of sneaker stores exists, or used to exist because a lot of Mom and Pop shops have closed.  They closed them down because a lot of Jordan accounts got pulled from those stores. These stores were run by people that were used to just selling shoes and not thinking about the environment, where the product was going to be at, and not thinking about renovating their stores. A lot of the stores that exist now are open because of the United Center on Madison. I think that if it wasn’t for Jordan’s then sneaker culture would not exist, 100%. Without appreciating Jordan’s first, there would not be an appreciation for other things in terms of footwear. It all goes back to Jordan, absolutely. That’s what made other brands like Nike SB or Air Force Ones. They used the same blueprint as an example.

Lizzie: A lot of it is in light of being someone who was in the grassroots movement of sneaker culture from the ground up.  Do you feel a responsibility with Modern Notoriety to create that space for everyone else within the sneaker world?

Oscar: I think that things come and go.  I think that the new leaf has turned already and a lot of the traditional ways of appreciating sneaker culture have come and gone. It’s just a lot more digital now. A lot of people that buy sneakers, especially a lot of the young bucks that buy sneakers now, have never been to a sneaker boutique.  They have never been to a Mom and Pop shop. They hear Mom and Pop and don’t know what the fuck that is.  I think that appreciation is gone, it will never come back. There are new ways to buy sneakers now, more innovative ways to be a consumer now. People aren’t going to go backwards.

Lizzie: Do you feel that Modern Notoriety as a concept is more about opening a space to be in that culture?

Oscar: I’ve always been big on storytelling. Let’s say on our Instagram, when we’re putting a photo of an N64 at a McDonald’s.  There are a lot of people that can relate to that and it’s authentic. You’re putting it out on relevant platform so people can kind of retake that information. I think we do a good job in putting content out traditionally and authentically.

Lizzie: Where do you go to find inspiration? Do you head out into the city? Or do you go to your space and take a moment to refocus yourself?

Oscar: To get inspo, I read a lot. I like looking up things that aren’t really common for one to look up.  For example, if I want to do something creative using the photos that I took I’ll look at like a Pink Floyd album cover or I’ll look at a Metallica cover. I grew up on Metallica. A lot of art that was featured in the booklets inside of the CDs inspires me to do other cool shit. I’ll just spent hours looking at inspo like that.

Lizzie: Did you get influence from the cover with the prism?

Oscar: Yeah, yeah , exactly! That kind of shit, really, I love that stuff.

Lizzie: Is there one album that’s really ideal for you?

Oscar: Man…Pink Floyd? Or just any band?

Lizzie: Any band. I know that’s the worst question to ask. How about Metallica?

Oscar: I love that stuff. That’s how I got into sneakers, it’s so funny. Before I listened to hip-hop or any of that stuff I was listening to metal – my brother put me on.  In Chicago during the late 80s, before rap and hip-hop has played on the radio, a lot of like the gang’s here would wear jean vests with metal band patches.  At that time, metal was at it’s all time high and people would listen to that stuff. My brother was really into Suicidal Tendencies, Metallica, and Iron Maiden.  Shit like that was making the airwaves, especially in the US. I was obsessed with the Metallica album covers and in some of the covers a photo of the entire band would be shown on the back.  Lars Ulrich, the drummer, was wearing Jordan 1’s so then I was like “I love this.” Sneaker culture is seen as a hip hop, urban kind of thing (which it is), but there’s other people that wouldn’t identify with the urban community and sneaker culture who wear the same shoes. Axl Rose got a pair of custom Converse made for him.  You know what I mean? They said AXL on the front! Then I’m looking at the other bands – these guys are wearing British Knights and Puma. There is this photo out there with Slash from Guns N Roses wearing Royal 1’s all beat up. That’s one of the reasons why I got into it.

Lizzie: Whats next? Especially with the development of MN Lab. Could you talk about that a little more about what that is and what the direction is?

Oscar: So my aim with MN Lab is to eventually become an agency, do activations, and just create content for brands.  We first started working with adidas basketball back in 2016 and they loved our looks so much because it was authentic. You hear the word “authenticity” a lot these days, but a lot of people that say it aren’t true to it.  If you’ve never gone to a sneaker store in the city, bought a pair, and went into the city to play ball then you can’t tell me what authenticity is. The consumer is the young, swaggy kid that wants to buy a pair and look cool in it.  The way a lot of brands put shit out nowadays doesn’t look authentic and looks too corporate. When we started doing stuff with Adidas basketball, we switched up their content completely. Then Adidas football, Adidas baseball, Adidas volleyball, even Adidas lacrosse was like “Yo! We want this look, can you please help us?” and then boom, we did it with them.  We also helped Finish Line kick-off their digital content in 2014 and we’ve been rocking with them ever since. That look and authenticity is what we want to help brands give because it’s the consumer that identifies with authenticity. So it only makes sense.

Lizzie: What else is next on your agenda? Is there anything you can tell us about?

Oscar: Damn, okay. We are probably going to be doing something, like a small pop-up for Complexcon, but we are saving all of our energy for All-Star Weekend because it’s here next year.  So we are going to make a crater in the city. We are going to go crazy. All-Star Weekend is our biggest focus.

Lizzie: What are some things that you were involved in this year?

Oscar: For this year we did a bunch of content for Finish Line. That was pretty cool. We also got invited out to the Super Bowl by adidas football to cover that too.  All these experiences and seeing it through a different lens, they fuck with it.

Lizzie: What is something that you really hope to see in the culture moving forward?

Oscar: I think there is a huge lack of storytelling within the sneaker and streetwear industry. I think that a lot of brands just come up with shit and put a price tag on it and boom.  That’s one of the reasons why a lot of YouTubers will have a clickbait as a thumbnail saying “I spent 250 or 25K on a pair of shoes” because people are identifying the shit that we love with money instead of what it means. Are you interested because of how much it’s worth? Or are you interested because you really fuck with this shit?  That’s probably one thing.

Lizzie: And you’re going to tell them?

Oscar: Hopefully. Here’s the thing, people’s attention spans over the years has tanked.  People don’t want to read any more. People are more visual learners now and have a short attention span.  We’ve conditioned ourselves to not take in a lot of information and be happy with little information we get.

Lizzie: Any last words of wisdom?

Oscar: Just keep it fucking going.

Oscar Castillo | Modern Notoriety Inc.