Joey A.X doesn’t enter rooms so much as he materializes in them—somewhere between a prophet and a glitch in the matrix. He speaks in cinematic fragments with the rapid fire wit of a Sorkin script. He dresses like a 80’s villain lookbook raised in the Warhol Factory. He’s the kind of creative director who might quote Virginia Woolf in a moodboard meeting and then disappear to the underbelly of Napoli “for texture.”
In short: A.X, as the kids say, is really Him—the elusive polymath whose genius always teeters on the edge of something combustible.
To call him a major influence on today’s pop culture is an understatement. His trademark aesthetic has been spin cycled, and, in some cases, straight up stolen by world renowned brands since 2019. While he rarely does press, he has never bitten his tongue in any of these matters. A.X Openly roasting the billion dollar corporations, (and showing receipts, email exchanges & more) who have stolen, almost pixel by pixel, international campaigns, concepts and in some cases, their entire identity, is pop corn worthy.
Diet Prada could and has, featured a highlight reel of that alone.
From Clark’s Footwear to pro soccer franchise Brooklyn FC- Joey has never been shy with David’s slingshot.
You never really know what you’re in for with A.X – in that manner he’s a throwback to a time when art was dangerous, daring, and punk rock as fuck.
To put any tag on him, let alone the “influencer” one is equally as misguided. In fact, he’s so anti influencer as a culture point that his last company, F*VE was acquired for millions by Hoo.be – making him an owner/investor for one of the most successful influencer talent driven IPs on earth today, yet he has never once even appeared to use the product or engage the swath of influencers at his disposal.
“I hate anyone who calls themselves an influencer– that shit has been dead since Covid. When the world was burning you had OnlyFans models and the Kardashians trying to out cringe each other with social justice captions on a pic of them in a g-string on daddy’s party yacht… the only thing you should call yourself is a tone deaf only ass child at that point.” He snaps between Parliament drags.
From being a founding member and the voice of streetwear icon (karmaloop.com creator & CEO) Greg Selkoe’s Wanderset- to opening multiple studios, and several ingenious start ups which raised millions from his parents basement where, as a teen, he’d draw for hours and practice instruments rocket shipped- A.X simply is the culture.
His work, he opines “You know, the words only Greg (Selkoe), my brother Drew (McCarver, now Creative mind behind Selkoe’s new esports superteam X-SET) and Matthew (Growney, original investor & the first brand curator for the narrative driven ecom hub responsible for making once small, yet global brands like Fear Of God, Norwood Chapters, Represent UK, For Those Who Sin, and comeback kids Kappa the emerging “stree-tluxe” fashion genre staples by 2018) read. And like a few scene cats from NoHo, The Village, a few of my homies in New Haven & Brooklyn, and maybe if I really lucked out, Amiri coke heads in West Hollywood who love fuckin’ Chelsea boots.”
“I don’t even believe in that box they tell you to think outside of” he said. “I never fit in anywhere until Wanderset, it was just a hell of an era, a perfect storm brewed together. And in the end, I have memories no one else could dream up or nightmare in equal measure. As used & spit out as I felt, God always had a plan- one far more impactful than any of my own, really. We think our plans matter, man. Let go and let God.”
Typically early to the party as a former skate & backpack kid who grew up in the shadow of NYC, he was one of the first to recognize that the emerging esports world in 2018, from gamers to live streamers, had true generational influence. “They authentically resonate with their people, it’s a real community, they’re the alternative to fap fodder and click bait with a linktree, and they fuckin’ stay on live stream or camera in general, where fits can be taken in for a minute.”
It worked so well that Wanderset took over and then semi-became esports team FaZe Clan in a matter of months, with operations in two continents- the culture, talent and HQ was based in West Hollywood and the tech teams, in the bass pulsing heart of Germany- Berlin.
Every word written that made Wanderset culturally valid in the zeitgeist, built pockets of real groundswells that lived offline as well, and connected the buyers & audience to the story and soul behind each piece was typed by A.X.
“Remind me to tell you the story about way too many Moonrocks and the stolen handle of Lagavulin at the Del Toro pop up in Astor Place with (NBA star, Green of the Warriors) Draymond. Actually, nah. If you were there you know.”
While no one could have predicted the Wanderset/FaZe Clan fuse burning so brightly – he consciously doubled down on it by seeing what could be; manifesting it not by chanting Ohms or root chakras; but graft, and an obsessive work ethic to tell the stories the world needed to hear.
By 2019, he moved back disillusioned from Hollywood’s casted spells of egomania and toxicity to the Tri State metro where he grew up in an attempt to find himself again. It was the first of three later-diagnosed mental breakdowns.
Suffering those clinical crushings had nothing to do with a job loss.
He candidly admits “With all the taxes in Cali, I was basically a minimum wage jobber. I shoulda worked on the railroad or bussed tables on the weekend, man. The top end of the secretive ass leadership was making 95% of the company profits, including having ‘invisible ink arrangements” with talent scouts, agents, and fixers for a myriad of reasons.”
“There was BRILLIANT tech that my dear friend and (current business partner in two new late 2025-26 venture launches) Jillian Yoe-Graves lead dev teams of wizards and oracles across the Atlantic in Berlin to create. It was so, so, beyond it’s time. Entire worlds, shopmobility at every point, portal’s into very cool shit and this was before “metaverses” and AR goggles.
We knew what was next because at that age and frame, we were the market. We were fans first. And we dreamt of what fans really never had before but always wanted, and kept a focus on the rawly authentic, the undiscovered, the emerging and the square pegs for round holes. Those who dared to rearrange the vanguard in the era that changed the trajectory from top down, to bottom up.”
“To me, it was a love letter to the culture that gave me a shot.”
Mental health destruction, massive bipolar swings and isolation, and “accidental” overdoses were par for the course that ensued from the fall out of what FaZe Clan had become, and the tyrannical discarding of the heart of the original why.
The “Why”, A.X says like he wants someone to remember this- “is the only thing that matters. Lose that or say your why is like, I dunno, getting money, and you don’t even know you’re cooked.”
A.X was relatively quiet when I asked him what the day he got the call that his Goliath-sized influence since inception was no longer needed, but welcomed. Due to pending legal cases with the FaZe IP, steep accusations against their camp’s former leadership post Selkoe and Co., and the later crypto scheme FaZe pulled around the Pandemic, a lot of the details on just what happened in West Hollywood are missing pages by design.
“None of the past matters. If I lived in the past, I couldn’t create the future.”
Now, he’s stepping into his most high-vis, technocolored role yet: creative director for the living funk deity that is Bootsy Collins.
Yes, that Bootsy.
The intergalactic bass sorcerer. The human glitter bomb. The Parliament-Funkadelic legend whose style, sound, and stardust defied gravity long before the internet caught up. And it’s Joey A.X—a self-proclaimed “bipolar futurist with a beat machine”—who’s been entrusted with reintroducing him to a new generation.
“It’s not a rebrand,” A.X says. “It’s a resurrection.”
We’re sitting in his subterranean studio in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC- or what he calls “The Basement”—a post-industrial Manhattan lair filled with hand-painted leather jackets, analog synths and vinyl record stacks, countless Assouline hard covers on various art movements, half-melted VHS tapes labeled things like Funk Rituals and Sex Pistols in Heaven, a host of strikingly massive in progress paintings, and a white board wall with endless notes that could easily be confused for that scene in the 2000s film A Beautiful Mind.
It’s calculated chaos, neatly and obsessively organized for any artist, but its chaos.
“Thats why I need to live super minimally…” he jokes. “Cuz whats going on in my head is so loud, textured, and colorful all the time.”
He lights up a Parliament and smirks, commenting, “I know, there’s a Bootsy Collins joke in there somewhere…Parliaments and all you know.” He shrugs.
This is where the comeback begins. Not just for Bootsy, but for A.X himself.
Because before this renaissance, there was ruin. Lots and lots of ruin.
A.X has weathered public breakdowns, vanished from entire continents, and survived a carousel of vices—addiction, mania, the merciless churn of a culture that fetishizes chaos but rarely funds recovery. He’s talked about his bipolar disorder in passing, usually also with a smirk and a cigarette. But now, there’s a different tone—less myth, more marrow.
“I used to think my brain was trying to kill me,” he says. “Now I know it was just trying to get my attention.”
“The thing that made me really look at life through a whole new lens was when I learned from my doctor that the devil is a one trick pony – he lies to us in our own voice to kill, steal and destroy. That’s what makes this disease so tricky. “
There’s a quiet in the room after he says it. Then he laughs, loud and unfiltered. That’s the thing with A.X: he shapeshifts between agony, academia and absurdity without warning.
He’ll tell you his lowest moment involved breaking into a Soho warehouse to paint murals “for God,” on bundles of dope, with a squad of subway fiends and then pivot into a monologue about the future of avatar-based fashion with dead-serious precision.
And yet, through all the spirals, what’s kept him relevant—dare say revered—is the work.
Campaigns that look like acid trips in Paris. Music videos that feel like dystopian theatre. Lookbooks and entire collections for global gentleman’s club franchise Spearmint Rhino- where when tasked with “club merch” at their biggest locations, he created a full lifestyle line, threw out their existing brand, rebranded them in three verticals, and went back to the roots of the lore in 80’s Hair Metal, leopard print & whiskey LA and created a neon-noir dipped upside down Sunset Strip, using the dancers from the clubs are models with high hair and higher stilettos, that had far more in common with say, Bladerunner or a Dick Tracy stylistically than T&A typicals. His visuals don’t “go viral”—they get remembered.
Which is why RocNation & Bootsy called.
The Bootsy Collins project, as A.X describes it, isn’t just a gig. It’s “the magnum opus of everything I’ve survived with a clean slate to reimagine the future.” The plan? To make Bootsy as culturally undeniable to the Gen Z/ millennial segment as he was to the Soul Train generation—but without sanding down a single sparkle.
“There’s no ‘modernizing’ Bootsy,” A.X shrugs. “The world just finally caught up.”
He hints at immersive fashion drops. A short film scored entirely by a curated roster of cult following Djs, A line of performance wear inspired by vintage Parliament tour jackets and revolving password protected, tier bracket drops with some of the most grailed designers as collaborators. He references Barbarella, cyberpunk zines, blacksploitation films, Jncos coming back and James Brown in the same breath. It sounds like madness. Really, it all deeply connects when explained in such a manner.
But the madness part, that’s really how you know it’s going to work.
What’s different this time, A.X says, is the clarity. Sobriety, yes—but also discipline.
Focus.
Boundaries.
He’s learned that genius, left unsupervised, burns bright and then burns out. James Dean’s crashed car is an almost too perfect visual metaphor. He’s had a front row seat at more funerals than he can recall of dear friends. His 2023 suicide attempt failed, and the only thing he said about it was “rope is super overpriced for the results these days.”
Now, he’s lighting controlled fires—with an international icon in Bootsy as his muse.
“I’m not building a brand,” he says. “I’m building a cathedral. For joy again. For funk. Shit, everything that movement even stood for. Most of all its for anyone who ever thought their weirdness was a liability.”
“Society sends kids to be programmed by winner-written lies and strategic half truths throughout primary school and rewires your God given sentient imagination to believe anything that’s different from keeping the blinders on is bullshit.”
He opines.
“At least for me and my circle, it was clear the shit is all programming. Right from the start the system keeps them in the hampster wheel of debt in secondary schooling- all to churn out good little NPCs. I knew by like the second day of first grade this wasn’t gunna work for me. So they prescribed me such heavy doses of tang-meth (Adderal 20 mgs. He clarifies) by 10 that there’s no way it didn’t play a massive role in my Addiction and dark caves the disease takes us all to.”
It’s a hell of a thing to watch: a man who’s clawed back from collapse, now leading a legend into his next chapter. Joey A.X isn’t just staging a comeback. He’s staging a spectacle.
And Bootsy? He’s strapping on the star-shaped bass and blasting off—with A.X in the cockpit.
Follow Joey A.X.
