Va$htie
Va$htie
Designer, Director & DJ
Vashtie Kola is truly a renaissance woman – New York based Director, Filmmaker, Artist, Designer, Creative Consultant and DJ. She has cultivated the Downtown New York City scene for over a decade as a style icon, but her curatorial outreach and influence spans worldwide.
She moves easily among Fashion, Film and Music; she has emerged as “a role model for young tastemakers,” as the The New York Times titled her when they wrote about her in a Style section feature profile. Black Enterprise coined her “Vashtie Kola: Curator of Cool.” Vashtie is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts where she studied film. She grew up in Albany, New York as a first generation American of Trinidadian heritage.
From an early age Vashtie found ways to create options when she felt like she didn’t fit in or lacked economic means. She worked in an Albany tattoo parlor as a young teenager and dreamed of going to film school. “When you are alienated for being different, you begin to be unafraid of who you want to be. I’m comfortable with being creative. It allowed me say, you guys think I’m weird and I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I was always interested in meeting new people and being different.” Vashtie was attracted to skateboarding, hip hop and punk rock — the hallmarks of a counter culture that would cultivate her path. “It was art and it was creative and it was a way to touch a lot of people all at once. I wanted to make art that would inspire other people.
When she established herself in New York in 1999, she found her way to places like the legendary Supreme skate shop on Lafayette St. in the East Village, where she fell into a vibrant DIY scene. The avante garde press soon declared her “Downtown’s Sweetheart.” Vashtie quickly grew to be a multi-disciplinary force melding art and style with her original and refreshing perspective. “I’m a good representation of the culture in this strange digital era,” says Vashtie.