Visits: 20
Evan Mock lives in a spacious apartment in the East Village, with large windows that face an extraordinarily verdant public garden. On a high floor, the place feels like it’s suspended in the trees, offering a rare slice of privacy and quiet in his otherwise chaotic and very public life. If you were young and famous, it’s exactly where you’d want to live. Naturally, Mock spends as little time there as possible. “Frank calls me a professional extrovert,” Mock says on a recent Saturday morning over scrambled eggs at a brunch spot in his neighborhood.
He means his buddy Frank Ocean, who apparently gives him shit for being outside pretty much constantly. One can imagine why: Ocean is borderline reclusive, whereas Mock’s social and commercial popularity is practically unmatched these days in New York. With a creative output that is essentially an extended dissertation on the art of being incredibly cool, Mock has charted an incredibly modern path to success. In the last year or so, his vertiginous cheekbones and shock of pink hair have towered over the city courtesy of several Calvin Klein billboards, and he’s seized an increasingly prime slice of cultural consciousness by playing a sexually confused skater teen in HBO’s reboot of “Gossip Girl.”
His corporeal form has been just as ubiquitous. Stuck in NYC thanks to his filming schedule, he’s become nothing less than a citywide nightlife fixture: his 25th birthday party made the New York Times, and his vibrant social life is assiduously documented by modern day Gossip Girl surveillance outlet Deux Moi. In May, he made his second Met Gala appearance in nine months—a rare repeat invite for someone not named Rihanna. “I think one reason why I’m so successful,” he says, “is because I’m always willing to do shit.” And now, with a new clothing line and a Hollywood film on the horizon, he’s trying to push the booming business of being a professional extrovert in ambitious new directions.
I caught Mock on a rare day off from filming, which meant his day was already stuffed with plans; thanks to his relentlessly social nature, Mock is rarely alone. “And honestly, even then, I don’t like it,” he says. True to form, as soon as we order coffee, Mock starts texting some friends in town from L.A. The plan is to assemble the troops for a skate mission in the neighborhood, and by the time our eggs arrive a few bleary-eyed Supreme affiliates have answered the call, rolling up to order mimosas.
But Mock didn’t get where he is by sticking rigidly to plans. As another round lands on our table, Evan’s phone pings: “Justin and Haley just got to the Hamptons and they say to pull up,” he says, reacting to the impromptu invite from Justin Bieber like one of his buddies was telling him to skate to Tompkins. With his unassuming demeanor, Mock seems constitutionally averse to fanboy behavior, which makes it all the more striking that Bieber seems to be fanboying over him. For every kid who quit college to become an Instagram or TikTok star, a text from Justin Bieber would seem like a sure sign that they made it. But then again, a lot of them probably dream of social stardom because Mock has proven just how far a personal brand can go.
Who wouldn’t want to invite Mock to their beach house, the Biebers included? His entire life is conducted with a special kind of effortlessness. He greets everyone he meets like a childhood friend, and if he’s ever felt even one iota of awkwardness at a party, or in front of a camera, or on the street when heads snap to take another look at this guy whose magnetism could register on a compass, he doesn’t show it. His friends happily fall in behind him. “With Evan, I want to follow his lead,” says the fashion stylist Donté McGuine. “I don’t follow anybody, but Evan has this aura. He knows everybody. He knows how to do anything and everything.” He skateboards with the grace and poise of a Bolshoi dancer. Most impressively, perhaps, is that unlike most other downtown influencers, Mock dresses with the ease and confidence of a man who knows himself.
Today, he’s wearing a plaid button down, carpenter jorts, a trucker hat and beat up Converse skate shoes, and carrying a big fat Dior saddle bag. He infrequently posts fit pics to Instagram, but his luxurious-skater vibe is still the leading menswear paradigm of 2022. (According to Mock, approximately half of his 1.1 million Instagram followers are men; a few years ago, his following was 80% women.) But the piece Mock’s most excited about is his graphic T-shirt, an original design from his new fashion line, Wahine, which he launched in early June. (Wahine is slang in Mock’s home state, Hawaii, for girls who surf or skate.)
“I wanted to make something I would want to wear,” says Mock, who also has a hoodies-and-phone-cases merch brand called Sorry In Advance. Wahine, which he runs with McGuine, represents a more personal and ambitious project. He approached launching the brand with a level of intensity that surprised his partner, who says he’s used to Mock tossing out a dozen ideas for potential projects a day. “When he keeps saying something, I know he’s serious,” McGuine says. Wahine started as something of a lark: last spring, the duo got back to Mock’s apartment after a night out clubbing, and decided to start designing the collection right then and there. “I pulled out his favorite pieces from his closet and threw them on the ground and I said, ‘Ok, here’s your collection,’” says McGuine.
The first drop includes many of those greatest hits from Mock’s wardrobe, remixed with details that bring to mind the beaches of Oahu’s North Shore: a cropped corduroy varsity jacket with an “Aloha” patch; a pair of wide-legged cargo pants in a pleasing shade of taro. The best seller so far has been a striped button down shirt with the phrase “My Boyfriend Is Out Of Town” printed across the front. “A lot of girls bought it,” he says.
As Mock gazes at the street from behind his black Prada shades, a guy cruises by on a Citibike. “Wahine shirt!” Mock exclaims. And, indeed, it is: the dude is wearing a Wahine tee bearing a picture of the beach Mock grew up on. You can even see Mock’s house, a smudge in the distance under fluffy white clouds. It’s the first time Mock has seen someone he doesn’t know wearing his gear in the wild. “That’s fire,” he says. The likes of Dua Lipa and Kid Cudi, he says, are “obsessed” with their Wahine gear, but Mock seems more excited by this random chance sighting: “At the end of the day, it’s for the people, anyway. It’s more important to have the every-dayers like it.” As of right now, the plan is to make a lot more Wahine gear in the future. According to McGuine, they’re currently fielding requests for collaborations with several unspecified luxury brands.
Ultimately, the gang decides that it’s too beautiful out to spend the day in a car, and so the Hamptons plan is scotched. Mock’s favorite skate spot is just a few blocks away. If there’s one reason why Mock has been able to stay grounded as he’s careened into celebrity, it’s skating. “I have a therapist, but skating is my therapy, too,” he says. Gossip Girl has turned his skateboard into something like a prop, but Mock is the rare skater-turned-model/actor—perhaps the only one—whose skill and passion for the lifestyle is basically unquestioned by even the most hardcore purists. “I can’t live without it. I need it,” he says.
Though Mock might be itching to return to the relatively humble life of a pro skater, Hollywood has other ideas. Mock is preparing to appear in his first movie; the shoot will precede production on the third season of Gossip Girl. (Yes, there will be a third season of the popular but critically challenged show, according to Mock.) All Mock will say is the movie is “action/romance,” before joking that he’s actually starring in Spiderman 29. Well, why not? Mock is his captivating and possessed self on Gossip Girl, and he’s got the athletic grace of the web slinger in spades. Does any part of him, I ask, want to grow into a generational tinseltown flame on the level of, say, Tom Holland?
All Mock will say is that he’s working toward the goal of being slightly less ubiquitous on the margins. That means pulling back from all of the fashion shows and event appearances and campaigns and social media opportunities that have stoked the flames of his celebrity. “That’s the ultimate goal,” he says. “To not have to do that stuff anymore. To work myself up to that level.” The implication being that he’ll be so famous he’ll be able to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Which doesn’t sound all that different from his current life as a professional extrovert. “Until then, I’ll be outside,” he says. “And even if I do get to that level, I’ll probably still be outside.”
