My husband Sean Sonderegger is a gifted musician and teacher. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Originally from Los Angeles, he lives with his wife (me) and toddler in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
Sean describes his style as “90s West Coast meets academia,” pairing dress shirts with Dickies pants. He admits that he still dresses the same way that he used to when he was 20 years old in L.A., wearing blue jeans and novelty shirts. But always paramount in his choice of dress, the clothes must fit loose: “I’ve always worn baggy clothes, I like baggy clothes. If I could pull off wearing a caftan or some traditional clothes that were super-flowing, I would probably do it. But then again, I would probably gain, like, a hundred pounds because I just wouldn’t give a fuck.”
Click on link below to listen to some of Sean Sonderegger’s music, and then find out more about this madcapper’s most prized fashion items after the jump.
It’s not the original graphic that’s used on the cover. People that don’t know the record have no idea what it’s about. Somebody came up to me and told me that it reminded them of Anarchistic Cookbookbecause the font looks like the original printing of that book, I guess. I’m not even a huge fan of Peter Brötzmann but I really like the aesthetic of those shirts.
I am a Bill Laswell fan though. He was in Last Exit, a great group with Ronald Shannon Jackson, James Blood Ulmer—it’s really great music. Kind of a free improvised sound that’s still rooted to the earth with Peter Brötzmann going fucking nuts.
Anyway, I get most of my t-shirts online. Also, if I go back to LA, I’ll go to Venice Beach for novelty shirts. I have an Eazy-E shirt that’s kind of a take on an “Andy Warhol repetition” in really super florescent, poppy colors so I like that. I’ve only seen a couple of people wearing it. My friend Ronald Bruner has one but that style was one that they only made for a limited time so it’s pretty hard to find. I really love that shirt so I try to wear it as little as possible because I don’t want to get holes in it. You know, if you wear the same shirt week after week for years, and I mean, I think I’ve had that shirt for five or six years, you get holes in them and they start to look like shit.
Hat
Well, right now my hair is pretty long so I like to put a hat on to keep it from going in my face, which is a huge pain in the ass. The hat that I’m wearing right now, I got at an army surplus store on Santa Monica and Vine in L.A.. One of my friends, who is a hat maker, said it was made out of a straw-like fabric called toyo from Japan. It feels kind of plastic-y but it holds its form really well, and it was only about 20 bucks.
I went to that store initially because I was either playing a rehearsal at the Musicians Union, or I was at Cactus, which is a great taqueria on Vine. This is probably the third hat that I’ve bought there. I also had a green hat that was exactly the same brand, same style as this but I left that one in a recording studio and I forgot to go pick it up. I’m kind of sad about that. But before I got any of these hats, there was another place in L.A., I think it was somewhere in the Fairfax district, where a lot of hassidic men would get hats, that I found a really nice one for $60. But I actually like wearing the toyo one better because I don’t want to fuck the other one up.
House Shoes
I love my house shoes, especially in New York–it gets so cold in the winter. I hate when my feet are cold. My wife doesn’t let me wear shoes indoors, so I wear my house shoes. These are really comfortable, from LL Bean. They’re falling apart a little bit but the soles are still good.
I once had a pair before these shoes that I got online with rubbery soles that cracked. I don’t know what the soles on these shoes are made out of but they seem less cheap, or they have some other component in them so that they stay more malleable and don’t crinkle up. So I like these much better than the original ones. It’s nice to have house shoes.
