How Havoc Henry's Chris Heyn Is Reimagining Preppy Style With A Cool Kid Edge

I would say I started paying attention to how I dressed and what looked “cool” to me at a very young age. As early as third and fourth grade I remember wanting to be the first kid in school with Nike Shox and the t-shirt I saw Blink-182 wearing on MTV. My mother is from LA and my dad is from New York, so I grew up spending a lot of time in Newport Beach and Orange County as a kid with my cousins running around on the beach going down to The Wedge to watch the biggest waves, and was fascinated by the surf and skate culture my cousins were in. I grew up in Connecticut (which I didn’t think was cool to say at the time around all these cooler older punk rock surfer kids), so I tried to blend in with them a bit and took some of that style back with me to the “preppy” East Coast. My parents are pretty conservative, but have always fostered creativity in terms of fashion and style, and allowed me to get away with more at a young age in that department.

This later developed in my teen years to taking the train with my friends into Soho to check out what stores and brands I was curious about. Growing up not too far from Manhattan was a blessing, because at 13/14 I was convincing my friends to come with me down to Greene Street to check out Bape, and then bop over to Billionaire Boys Club and Kid Robot and Stussy. We had no idea what we were doing and probably looked like idiots, but I was attracted to the early Japanese streetwear takeover that was beginning to happen in like 2006ish, and the rap culture that went along with it. Nigo, Pharrell, N.E.R.D, and Terry Kennedy were all so inspiring to me, and I got a kick out of saving up my money to buy a pair of Jamaica Bapes I wore on my first day of high school. I loved the duality of things and coming from a prep school wearing something people didn’t really understand or know about yet. I was also a big soccer player all my life and played D1 in college, so that tied into my style a bit as well. Cleats and sneakers were always my first obsession and went hand in hand.

[Photo via @chrisheynjr]