One week it’s holy water in sneakers. The next, it’s a handbag smaller than a grain of salt. For almost a decade, Brooklyn-based art collective Mschf has confounded, provoked and delighted industries from fashion to fine art with a string of unpredictable, culture-hacking interventions. Now, the group is channelling that same irreverent energy into Applied Mschf, a newly launched creative agency designed to help others harness — rather than fall victim to — their brand of cultural mischief.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Gabriel Whaley, with co-chief creative officers Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner, alongside COO Stephen Tetreault, the art collective has become a bona fide business. By 2020 it had raised around $11.5 million in investor funding, and although the company doesn’t disclose financials, it reports annual revenue growth of 100 per cent since 2019, powered largely by its now-signature product “drops”.
Mschf has generated headlines — and cash — with stunts like the Jesus Shoes, aka Nike Air Max 97s filled with water from the River Jordan that sold for over $1,400 a pair and sold out within minutes. Their follow-up, the Satan Shoes, went further: 666 pairs priced at $1,018 each, which sold out instantly and generated close to $700,000 in revenue before sparking a lawsuit from Nike.
The Birkinstocks — sandals handmade from dismantled Hermès Birkin bags — were priced between $34,000 and $76,000. A Damien Hirst spot print was cut apart and sold dot by dot at $480 each, while the remaining blank sheet fetched $261,400. A microscopic handbag with the Louis Vuitton logo (but with no association to the brand) went for over $63,000 at auction, and the malware-infected laptop The Persistence of Chaos sold for $1.3 million, drawing more than a million viewers on Twitch.
Mschf’s Big Red Boots, released at $350 a pair, received more than 100,000 orders on day one and almost immediately sold out. On the resale market, pairs initially peaked near $1,400 before stabilising around the $300 to $400 mark. The boots were quickly spotted on the likes of Lil Wayne, Doja Cat, basketball player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and WWE’s Seth Rollins, cementing them as one of fashion’s most viral products of 2023.
Depending on who you ask, Mschf is a streetwear brand, a performance art collective, a startup or even the new face of luxury. Co-founder Wiesner isn’t interested in correcting them. “Every time that question is posed, ‘What do you think Mschf is?’ people’s response is more a reflection of themselves than of us,” he says.
What Mschf has become is a cultural engine — one that transforms critique into commerce and commerce back into critique. Its products act as storytelling devices, designed to interrogate the very systems that produce them. Each product drop feels like a manifesto made tangible, inviting people not just to consume, but to be in on the statement. In a moment when many consumers are disillusioned with luxury’s hollow spectacle, that sense of participation and cultural resonance has become the new currency — a gold mine many others have failed to tap.
With the launch of Applied Mschf on 18 August, the group has formalised the internal systems that powered its most ambitious projects into a client-facing agency. The aim is to consolidate its creative practices under one umbrella, scale its ambitions and offer brands the same mischievous yet methodical thinking that has made it a cultural touchstone.
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve been pushing our creative ambition into as many formats as possible — fashion, art, collectibles, physical experiences, technology,” says Wiesner. “All of a sudden, we wake up and we’re like, ‘Wow, we actually have a footwear design practice here. We’re a top-performing collectibles maker on the secondary market,’ yet none of us collect anything. We’re not really sneaker people, but we have this crazy presence in sneakers.”
Applied Mschf is, in Wiesner’s words, a natural evolution. “It’s the transition from having an internal group servicing all our ambitious projects,” Wiesner explains. “We want to become a holding company of creative enterprises that allows us to take on more ambitious projects — longer term risks, higher stakes. It’s really just to selfishly fuel our own creative ambitions. That’s the whole point.”
The appetite from brands is already there. “Even with the announcement, we have more [brand requests] hitting our desk than we can realistically take on. So it comes down to what satisfies our diversity of interest,” Wiesner says. “Infrastructure projects are an itch we’ve been wanting to scratch for a while — public transit, buildings, satellites.”
Their dream clients will reflect that scale. “I was saying to a colleague earlier today that I would love to work with SETI, the extraterrestrial research project founded by Carl Sagan. I think there’s another billionaire designing a submarine to go find the Titanic — that would be cool,” he adds.
Codifying mischief into an agency model
Applied Mschf is structured to work both as a white-label studio powering brand projects behind the scenes, and as a collaboration partner for those who want its irreverent touch front and centre. “When a brand approaches us, they’ve usually tried their best to come up with a Mschf idea,” says chief creative office Bentel. “What we want to do is help them think about storytelling in terms of making real things that go out into the world, that people actually interact with.”
Treating brands themselves as cultural raw material is central to Applied’s pitch. “Fortune 500 brands are already part of the cultural fabric,” Wiesner explains. “There’s an alignment where they either need product innovation or a new way to think about creating culture, which inevitably becomes a marketing function. But when we look at it, we’re not helping you invent made-up stories to sell a product. Instead, we can use your role in culture to make new products that end up telling real stories.”
That insistence on realness comes at a moment of upheaval for fashion and luxury. Management consultancy Bain projects the personal luxury goods market could contract by 2 to 5 per cent this year, with losses of up to 9 per cent in a worst-case scenario. The New Guards Group’s once-buzzy portfolio of streetwear labels has splintered, signalling an erosion of the traditional hype machine. Shoppers, meanwhile, are weary of derivative drops and the hollow promise of goods that trade on engineered scarcity rather than genuine cultural or creative value.
At the same time, the very definition of luxury is shifting. Today’s consumers increasingly prize cultural resonance and authenticity over prestige alone. The brands that continue to thrive — like Miu Miu and Loewe — are those fluent in storytelling and cultural context. Loewe, for instance, builds layered worlds through artist collaborations and their leftfield TikTok strategy, while Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales film series and book clubs foster communities that extend far beyond product.
“I think a lot of people aren’t making things that are truly real. They want you to tell a story about something that doesn’t actually exist,” says Wiesner. “It’s important to create a genuine object or a genuine story — not just grab attention with something empty. For so long, brands have tried to hook people with shallow stunts, but this slowdown feels like the bubble finally bursting. Audiences are no longer willing to engage with fake marketing narratives.”
That shift, he argues, exposes both the problem and the opportunity. “The last decade has been a race to the bottom — people using technology [and social media] to build shallow relationships at massive scale,” Wiesner says. “It’s only going to get worse. But that’s exactly why there’s space now to do the opposite: to stop chasing viral attention and start investing in deeper, more meaningful connections.”
That track record is what makes Applied Mschf credible in a landscape where brands crave the unprecedented but hesitate to take risks. “The biggest thing with brands in this space is they want to do the big thing that no one’s ever done, but they don’t want to take a chance on something that hasn’t been proven yet,” Bentel says. Mschf is audacious, sometimes absurd but always real. And as the luxury machine stutters and audiences demand more than empty spectacle, that is precisely the kind of mischief the industry may need most.
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