Meet Kevin Van Delsen.

BDMOTP is in Holland, the home of G-Star Raw, and we are doing an interview with Kevin Van Delsen, male model extraordinaire, in Amsterdam opposite the ‘Bloemenmarkt’ on the Singel, the most inner concentric canal, meeting at a small and hip health food restaurant, called Homemade. The meeting is at noon and Kevin is waiting outside and despite the cold and the North Sea wind after it has rained all night, we decide to have a coffee outside on the terrace. A faint sun shows behind the rain-soaked clouds, and it is the very same day that the Euro MTV awards are being held in town, and all hotels downtown are overbooked with anyone who has a name in music – a fashion interview when all of the global music industry is in town.

But the very reason why exactly we had to drive 550 kilometers by car for a single fashion interview becomes evident almost immediately when Kevin shows us his first tattoos: Because Kevin is a tattoo model in Holland. He is hair model (L’Oreal, Wella, Sebastian) on the runway. He is a commercial fashion film model (Cosmopolitan). And he is a creative fashion photo & film promotions director. But most impressive of all, — and when I notice his first tattoo I know the reason why I drove so far for one man for one interview-he started out as a designer! A designer with the tattoos on his arm to prove it and his first creative productions form the beginning of a veritable TATTOO – TIMELINE with which his body is decorated. Decorations like the life-story of a Maori warrior. We ask him if he is a Maori and Kevin pleads no contest.

The tattoos start on his arm when he is 16 when he has his first T-shirt line. It’s impressive! He produced and sold his own T-shirt line of 500 pieces put & sown together by following his own ways, whims, and inventions while in high school. There everyone calls him KINK – because of his creative whims – and this is where he has to focus on visual and creative things, and not on words and books, because he has dyslexia. So he tattoos his first brand name of his first clothing line on his arm at that time; it’s aptly called KINK-LESS, KINK for Kevin the Creative in high school, and Less for Les, his buddy with whom together he makes the first line of merchandise. He still dreads the many dire hours spent working up in the attic in Rotterdam and swears never to go back there. And he shakes his head and affirms when we ask him, “so you are no Coco Chanel?”

But there is still a following and second tattoo on his arm, only the second part of his body-timeline; and it is the second line in self-designed clothes, this time a type of jeans, done no more than two years later. Miraculously the tattoo shows a pair of jeans visibly stuck under a grey sewing machine testimony, witness and evidence to his second line of merchandise and clothing design, just two years later when he turns 18. We would like to know more about his forays in design, but for now the designer tattoos body time-line ends in the here and the now, at least for the time being.

Kevin clearly has so many talents that he does not want to work and sweat away in attics and become the next Dutch Viktor as in Rolf, as would be Kink & Less, but before leaving the topic of design behind in the interview, BDMOTP finds out that unlike in American high school where dress and fashion are usually part of a code to which group you belong and with which you can distinguish yourself, that in Holland fashion trends are actually set & made in high school by creative students and teenage fashionistas. Thus, in the same way as the latest in pop and music style often finds its creative roots in American high schools, we find out that in Holland creative ideas and fashion trends are made in Dutch high schools, maybe if not in concept, then definitely in trend, style, and even in design as evidenced by Kevin’s first creations as a teenager

BDMOTP asks Kevin about how such a well-branded commercial city & multi-verse as Amsterdam (in the small walk from the hotel to the meeting place with Kevin there are so many high-end brand name concept stores that one has the idea one is in Amsterdam for the reason only of shopping in a luxury factory outlet village) can still produce new ideas and new concepts or designs and new trends. “Holland is small,” he says and, “very American” in its consumer culture so that nothing original remains, so for us to find original styles and trend setters we will have to visit Scandinavia, because a real trend in fashion is “so very Stockholm”. Holland has become a mall, a destiny of sorts for tourists who have come to expect all major brands, a large mall in fact, a gentrified and sanitized place surrounded by beautiful canals and old merchant houses, indeed resembling a factory outlet of sorts. This is what people visiting have come to expect and no original style or trend survives – except in high school apparently.

But then where does Kevin’s creativity & style come from in that case!? The summarized answer is intriguing: Because of the Raggedy Ann patchwork of commercialism in Holland new creative works and ideas flow from the kaleidoscopic mosaic of crass branding commercialism of concept and design stores. While old merchant houses from the 17th century lining the canals inspire tourists to come, at the same time, all the new concept stores & high-end brand “houses” lining the canals of the old commercial city, today inspire creativity in the way primary colors and black or grey straight lines used to inspire Mondrian to come up with new creative patchworks of art, of design, of fashion!? New ideas flow from the variety of forms and colors of the grand commercial patchwork. Is not Holland after all the venue of the world’s the first stock market, the world’s first myriad of companies? Crass commercialism comes to mean creativity and thus Kevin finds inspiration in marketing and selling himself: ‘I am a little marketing thing’, he says.

And then, right in the middle of our search for where lies the source for creativity in fashion and in style in contemporary Holland, the conversation takes an unexpected and enlightening turn: Because Kevin says that it is the love–connection, oops, no, sorry, the love attraction, that really matters to him as the most important source for creative inspiration. After all we are in Amsterdam and it is all about good vibes as we are having lunch in front of the flower market –the “bloemen markt”. The conversation is open now, and yes, the notorious Amsterdam tolerance toward drugs can be an inspiration for creative design & concepts, but what leaves the lasting and important impression to BDMOTP for this article, is Kevin’s full embrace of what he calls the love attaction, the good vibe, also called the love frequency, which, Kevin says we can even find and listen to on the radio at 52HZ (I suppose that is AM as there must be cracks in the line!?). Trying to follow his “vibe’”in my mind’s ear I now hear the Mamas & the Papas singing the California Dreamin: Creativity, love, fashion, concept, design, style, commercialism, patchworks, aye, colors – it’s all coming together all of a sudden during this “experience” on the innermost of the old Amsterdam canals – I kid you not, while eating health food and sipping homemade lemon ice tea.

Kevin is now on a roll and continues about how important it is in his profession to “radiate, open up and expose yourself”. And his latest endeavor, a grand “exposé” – a new exposure – will be the next part of Kevin’s timeline, a tattoo which will cover his entire back. And so today BDMOTP can reveal – you heard it here first – the next grand tattoo of Kevin van Delsen, Dutch fashion model extraordinaire: On his back will feature a back-size tattoo of a spine, cartledge, and bones, opened up by a zipper from the bottom to the top so that intestines will show: A horrifying open back, a powerful symbol indeed. It is Kevin’s new product, his new concept, his new design: Show yourself, open yourself up, expose yourself until your insides are coming out, go naked, be filmed, be shown, be photographed, don’t be afraid and most of all follow the love attraction. You are beautiful, you have style, give yourself up and your inside will reveal your guts and your beauty, and you will radiate & shine! Do it on the runway, with your hairstyle, on your body as a tattoo, and of course do it in the way you dress, the way you smile, the way you walk, the way you talk. Kevin indeed is an inspiration to all men in this way, as probably these are the things that traditionally are easier for women than for men, but maybe I am wrong.

We close the interview and pay for the tab, and of course ask Kevin the signature question: who he thinks is the best dressed man on the planet. Rather matter-of-factly but unassumingly he answers quite naturally that he is the best dressed man on the planet, and he leaves us with a memorable quote:
“If you are the best dressed man on the planet you cannot just BUY (style, brands, clothes, etc.)”.
“You must DARE …”

Ladies & gentlemen, BDMOTP has the honor to present to you Kevin Van Delsen, fashion model extraordinaire from Amsterdam, who DARES to expose himself as the Best Dressed Man on the Planet (or at least one of them!). 

Interview by Sandro Joo.