“The most profitable brands will be directed by their moral compass”
Simon Whitehouse and his wife have an unusual tradition. Once a year, the couple will leave their home in Brooklyn – where they have lived for the past three years – and head to a nearby tattoo parlour to get a joint inking. “It symbolises what we’ve been through that year,” the fashion executive says over Zoom, his rounded Stoke drawl completely unaffected by all the noise of New York. “It’s like our weird ritual”.
Only this past year, Nadine, who was pregnant with their firstborn, couldn’t join. “My mother had just died 18 months before,” Whitehouse says, “so I had her last words tattooed on me.” Add to this a major career move and a global pandemic, and the 45-year-old was feeling, understandably, alone. “There were a lot of different things bubbling around. I went to a pub afterwards and just broke down in tears.” But as he sat there, swilling the dregs of a Guinness, something came to him – a mantra, or perhaps, a slogan. “The most profitable brands will be directed by their moral compass,” he says, careful to enunciate every syllable. “I became obsessed with that for about two months. My mind latched on to it and I just couldn’t put it down.” He repeats the sentence again, even slower this time.
To become suddenly, and overwhelmingly, preoccupied with brand strategy while in the grips of loss may seem strange, but Whitehouse has spent the entirety of his adult life submerged in that very world. For the past 25 years he has moved between New York, Milan and London, from director positions at DKNY and Diesel to CEO roles at JW Anderson, talent agency ArtPartner and now Eco-Age, a sustainability consultancy. “So I started taking the sentence apart. Looking at what it meant. Thinking about what would happen if I just started something completely new. Something completely different.” Within the space of a few months, EBIT was born – a mental-health collective which aims to shift the conversation surrounding wellbeing through art, music, fashion and everything in between.
“Only art can really change things,” Whitehouse says. “By giving artists total freedom to create, we can provoke a shift in dialogue and empathy, intercepting the vocabulary around mental health.” On these orders, EBIT has commissioned a variety of serotonin-stimulating works from photographer Glen Luchford, virtual fashion creator Aron Versteeg and model Soo Joo (who Whitehouse describes as “the vibe and energy of EBIT”).
While these partnerships may never explicitly reference mental health, they embody a collective coming together, “a window to breathe and let our feelings go,” as sound designer Michel Gaubert said of his EBIT project, a trilogy of uplifting mixes which dropped on January 17, otherwise known as Blue Monday – the so-called most depressing day of the year. It was actually one of Whitehouse’s most meaningful collaborations to date, which is no surprise considering he painted his entire teenage room in a garish cobalt blue following the release of New Order’s track “Blue Monday” in 1983.
Yet despite these links to fashion’s glitterati, EBIT – which technically stands for “Enjoy Being in Transition” – is quite unlike anything Whitehouse has previously committed himself to. And though he looks back on his many corporate titles with affection, Whitehouse was never a “navy blue suit,” as he puts it. He had grown up listening to Factory Records, pinballing between Renaissance and the Haçienda – northern superclubs at the centre of a hardcore rave scene.
The scene probably would have continued for Whitehouse had the fun not taken a turn for the worse in his early twenties. Still, the principles of that movement, “when people were off the algorithm”, are ingrained into EBIT.
“It was all about being aware of people’s wellbeing. Like, are you OK? Are you having a good time? They were the only things that mattered.” Because of this, Whitehouse catalogues EBIT projects in explicit homage to the Factory Records discography; the numerical archive so far spans from [E000] to [E010].
The inaugural piece and visual identity, [E001], was created by M/M (Paris).
The latest EBIT creation, “Spectrum of Footwear”, maps the development of mental-health medicine on to the evolution of the trainer. Developed with design studio INDG, ten digitally rendered shoes (soon to be traded as NFTs) journey from individual, functional sports models, to hybridised, contemporary sneaker styles, echoing the advance from the isolated, siloed diagnoses of the 20th century to the holistic, systemic therapies of today. Classic basketball dunkers morph into flat grain leather hi-tops and blossom into Frankenstein slingback mules – inspired by British Knights, Kickers and Pods, footwear that was at the centre of cultural change in the mid-1980s. “It’s all subliminal,” Whitehouse says, “a parallel reference to the nuanced spectrum of mental health conditions and how different traits overlap.” These subtle narratives are woven into every EBIT collaboration. Eventually, the founder hopes this system of subconscious rewiring will overwhelm the “algorithm” – which for Whitehouse, does mean social media, but also the wider technological and capitalist structures that divide us.
That said, Whitehouse attests that EBIT is not remotely tasked with structural change. “Art doesn’t challenge politics – or maybe sometimes it does,” he says, backtracking slightly. “EBIT isn’t about that, anyway, at least not in its beginning form.” It’s a surprising statement given that Whitehouse, who is speaking with the same fervour as Vivienne Westwood at a climate protest, is clearly raging against the machine. Especially considering that EBIT’s very name parodies the financial term “Earnings Before Interest and Taxes”, a deliberate critique on the slam of extreme capitalism and the dire need for its undoing. “The business model of the world is fucked,” he says. “Making stuff, slapping a logo on it, making a better margin, not giving a shit about the supply chains, all for a profit that the fat guy upstairs takes offshore. That’s affected the planet and all of these things have affected our mental health.”
Perhaps, then, as much as EBIT and its collective of creatives are focused on providing sanctuary away from profit-hungry boardrooms, it’s in these moments of direct confrontation that its message is most clear. Whitehouse knows this is not always easy, however. Unless we remove ourselves from society altogether, hemp bags slung over
the shoulder on a bindle stick, so much of living responsibly is predicated upon the inevitable compromises we have to make with consumerism. I wonder how Whitehouse reconciles his own self-professed radical outlook with such a singularly corporate past. “I think everybody walks their own moral path,” he concedes. “And I think there’s nothing wrong with making things and selling them. Unless we’re damaging society. Unless we’re damaging the Earth. All of these people do things for just pure profit and margin. And it’s like, actually, where’s all the love?
“How can we really provoke a very profound cultural change?” he adds. Though, at this point, Bobbi, Whitehouse’s newborn, starts to babble away in the background. He’s itching to come off the call but could seemingly talk about EBIT for hours on end – “this is very artistic, very deep, profound,” he concludes, as if he was making a promise. “It’s the seeding of a vocabulary, of societal change. And I think that that can be very powerful. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, I don’t know, but I think it’s worth exploring.”