Siberia Hills
Daf Orlovsky met Kanye West in New York while still in high school and told him he wanted to work with him on clothing. West gave him his email and cc’d Virgil Abloh on the subsequent messages — a gesture that, for a teenager in the mid-2010s, amounted to a blessing from the two figures who were about to reshape the relationship between streetwear and high fashion. Orlovsky enrolled at Parsons School of Design and failed out, a setback that proved more productive than the education would have been: he took a two-month trip through the Himalayas and India that, by his own account, generated the creative spark for a brand that would merge dark mysticism, anime aesthetics, and the visual language of internet subculture into something that felt native to a generation raised on screens.
Siberia Hills launched on September 8, 2017, with two colorways of long-sleeved t-shirts displaying scenes from a fictional film created to express the label’s aesthetic — an origin that was characteristically oblique, proposing a narrative universe before proposing a product line. The name referenced Orlovsky’s Siberian roots and the snow-capped landscapes that informed the brand’s visual palette, and the early collections established the territory that subsequent work would elaborate: dark silhouettes populated by aliens, mutant animals, and gothic text, hand-printed in Los Angeles using eco-friendly inks in small batches that maintained the DIY character of independent production.
The collections that followed mapped a mythology. “A Brush With Violence” (Fall/Winter 2017) announced the brand’s darker register. “Alien Creatures” (Spring/Summer 2019) was a forty-two-piece collection featuring winged baby deer, alien skulls, and spiritual zodiac imagery alongside the debut of “The Dark Queen,” a recurring graphic character. “Animal Kingdom” (Spring/Summer 2020) expanded to fifty-eight styles — from graphic tees to varsity jackets to rabbit fur jackets — and was showcased at Paris Fashion Week, where it generated over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in orders from stores worldwide, a breakthrough for a brand that had existed for barely three years. The Spirit diffusion line, featuring Sailor Moon-inspired graphics on light colorways and pastels, catalyzed the brand’s popularity among a broader audience and demonstrated Orlovsky’s instinct for the specific anime references that his generation treated as cultural scripture.
The trajectory was not without complication. A 2019 capsule collaboration with Billie Eilish — featuring hoodies and t-shirts with the Love Live! character Nozomi Tojo — was cancelled after the graphics were accused of copying artwork by the illustrator Makoto Kurokawa without permission. Siberia Hills issued an Instagram apology, the merchandise was pulled, and the episode became a cautionary lesson in the perils of the visual-reference culture that the brand both inhabited and depended on — the line between homage and appropriation being thinner in anime-influenced streetwear than in almost any other design context.
The brand found its retail footing through stockists that spanned the global streetwear circuit — FourTwoFour on Fairfax in Los Angeles, RESTIR in Tokyo, HBX online, Jeffrey in New York, EJDER in London — and through early celebrity support from Travis Scott and Billie Eilish that positioned Siberia Hills within the circuit of internet-native brands that bypassed traditional fashion infrastructure entirely. A 2022 collaboration with Ed Hardy, released on Valentine’s Day, reworked the tattoo brand’s signature artwork for a contemporary audience and marked Siberia Hills’ formal introduction into dedicated womenswear — connecting the Y2K revival to the anime-horror vocabulary that Orlovsky had been developing since his Himalayan epiphany. What Siberia Hills represents is the streetwear brand as world-building exercise: not a clothing line with graphic themes but a fictional universe that happens to express itself through garments, sold to a generation that makes no distinction between the two.