On a steamy late-summer Monday, Rhuigi Villaseñor eased his black McLaren 720S (gull wing doors, gold rims, $300K price tag) down from his house in the Hollywood Hills and into the sweeping driveway of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The Polo Lounge, just off the lobby, is where generations of Hollywood machers have downed martinis and struck deals, and it's also where Villaseñor, the brains behind the menswear label Rhude, takes his meetings.
The lobby was eerily quiet—a pandemic spares no one, not even the crown jewel of a hotel group owned by the Sultan of Brunei—but Villaseñor, in a silky black button-down, diamond studs, backless snakeskin Celine babouches, and a don't-try-this-at-home Caesar haircut, was unfazed. He gave warm hellos and elbow bumps to various staff members, making the lobby feel more like a living room. Later, after lunch, when the valet brought the supercar back around, Villaseñor tipped him a crisp $100 bill. I didn't know if all this—the location, the flexing—was a performance for my benefit or for his own, or if this was just what happens every Monday in Rhude World. It didn't really matter. The message was delivered efficiently: Rhuigi Villaseñor belongs here.
Over chopped salads, it became clear that the qualities that attract Villaseñor to the Polo Lounge—a love of old-school principles and glamour, an abiding interest in the language of power and access—are the same ones that helped him turn his five-year-old brand from a once flailing T-shirt-and-hoodie operation into a thriving label worn by Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, and an army of fashion-conscious young men who build and break brands in 2020.
This was not an obvious outcome for Rhuigi. The Villaseñors lived in Manila, where they were well placed. “My grandfather was part of the government,” Rhuigi said. And, uh, some other stuff: “I mean, he also ran, like, illegal businesses. Very Mafia guy.” It was Grandpa's idea that his progeny's names would start with the letters Rh. “I thought that was the coolest fucking thing ever,” Rhuigi said. He spent his childhood following his architect father around the globe—Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Egypt. He was nine in 2001, when the family, spurred by regime change back in the Philippines, moved to the States, settling in a one-bedroom apartment in the L.A. suburb of Woodland Hills. The transition was tough. Villaseñor was afraid he'd be stranded between languages—his mastery of Tagalog halted by the move and his command of English hopelessly undermined by his late start. He laughs now (“What kind of kid has that fear?”), but it proved to be a foundational anxiety: He would spend the next two decades learning how to make himself heard.
In L.A., he molded himself into a kind of detective, obsessed with figuring out what other people liked. “It was about fitting in,” he explained, “understanding the language that the rest of my peers were speaking.” In Manila, he'd loved the Backstreet Boys, Disney movies, the Otis Redding records his parents played. His new peers loved Tupac, so he got into Tupac. Along the way, he was compiling a storehouse of cultural references—Kobe Bryant, his mom's beloved Cary Grant—that he's still drawing from today. “I never departed from what I loved,” he said. “I just needed to understand what other people [loved].”
But being an outsider meant being an outsider. He graduated at the top of his class in 2010, he said, but when “every kid is deciding whether they want to go to Harvard, I'm thinking to myself, My parents don't have the financial capabilities.” That the family was undocumented made things even more challenging.
Fashion was an interest, if not exactly a career. He bought and resold vintage sunglasses and caught an early lesson in the power of branding when he slapped a Saint Laurent label on an old L.L. Bean bomber jacket and instantly sold it to a buddy. He became MySpace pals with a group of insurgent, pre-fame fashion-heads: Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, the designer Shayne Oliver. They realized earlier than anyone else that hip-hop and high fashion converged on the internet.
He saw a generation of emerging designers blowing up off single designs and decided he'd try. He mocked up a tee—a blown-out bandana print, in black or red. He built a website, took photos, modeled the shirt himself, and…waited. He bought the first one, mostly to experience how a sale would feel. And then, almost inexplicably, pay dirt. Those MySpace connections paid off. Kendrick Lamar's stylist called him up out of the blue in 2012, to request the shirt in both colors. He couldn't believe his luck. “I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ ” he recalled. “To be honest with you, I never saw it coming.”
The brand didn't even have a name yet—it wasn't even a brand, really. He didn't have a bank account, but his Paypal blew up with orders the next day. “I made like a quarter million in one day,” he said. (Elsewhere, he's described the sum as closer to $150,000.) What he did have was heat, and plenty more ideas.
Rhuigi always knew what he liked, even if he couldn't always afford it. That first T-shirt drop funded a vintage Mercedes—a money pit but also his dream car. He started collecting vintage watches. A childhood job assembling furniture with an uncle led to a love of design. “I kept the dream so high up from the get-go, even to the point where I was going to go bankrupt, bro,” he told me. “I bought watches and cars where I thought, ‘Holy shit. I'm not going to be able to live. What am I going to do?’ But it's my bet on the lifestyle. I want to live a particular way, and I hope it doesn't bite me.”
He did get bit, a few times. The T-shirt money that didn't go to his car went to an immigration lawyer, which meant he couldn't actually make the T-shirts that he'd promised his customers. He spent the next few years consoling angry would-be buyers, negotiating with his creditors, and erecting baroque production and funding arrangements. Coming clean was off the table. If his family's undocumented status was made public, he thought, he'd be unable to market the above-it-all, aspirational brand he wanted to project. “I always wanted to keep the perception of the brand as high as I could,” he said. “Whether there were holes that were going to sink the boat or not, I would always say that the boat is fucking golden.” So he kept quiet, trusting that if he could hold out a little bit longer, everything would fall into place.
The whole thing should have gone sideways; it isn't clear to me—or to Rhuigi, for that matter—why it didn't. The answer that suggests itself, of course, is the clothes, which made fans of NBA stars, rappers, and—most importantly—the kids who want to dress like them. Since 2015, Villaseñor's been cranking out hypebeast catnip: boxy tees, drop-crotch shorts, Jordan-inspired sneakers. Obsessed-over details—triangular pocket flaps on jackets, extra-long yellow drawstrings on bottoms—became signature touches. Villaseñor credits his radar to his off-kilter upbringing. “I grew up having interest in all the things that I thought were luxurious because I'm coming from the perspective of an immigrant,” he said. “I was on the outside, just seeing what America was. I thought it was Beverly Hills.” The background he thought would hinder him in fact helped: “I may not be from America, but I can really reinterpret what American luxury is.” (After nearly 20 years of uncertainty, Villaseñor finally became an American citizen last summer. “I've never felt that emotional in my life,” he said.)
That reinterpretation of American luxury has found its audience. The brand does about $30 million in sales, he said, and has proven resistant to an industry-wrecking pandemic. His customers remain bizarrely, unseasonably hungry. “Last month I sold the most leather jeans I have yet,” he said, surprised. “Where the hell are they going? I have zero clue. I want to know, because I want to wear leather jeans too. Tell me where you all are going!”
Life on the inside has been about as cool as he dreamed it would be. A spate of collaborations track both the brand's growing ambitions and his own developing interests: Vans, the official sneakers of L.A.; a Formula 1 collection with McLaren for the Monaco Grand Prix; Rhude cigars with Davidoff; a hat with the Los Angeles Lakers, which both he and his friend Jay-Z have worn courtside together. “[There are ] two people that I always said that I would never feel comfortable being around,” he said. “It's Kobe and Jay-Z.”
Villaseñor can finally afford the advanced taste he's always had. He's relieved that his customers are growing up with him—that they're seeing his McLaren and his collection of handbags and his closet of fine tailoring and deciding they'd like to live in Rhude World too. “Our customers want me to speed it up, because they're seeing the things that I love that we currently don't provide,” he said. “After a while, the kid no longer wants to be sold toys. He's like, ‘Give me the real car. I don't want the toy car anymore.’ ”
Sam Schube is GQ's senior editor.
A version of this story originally appears in the February 2021 issue with the title "Welcome To Rhude World."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Emman Montalvan
Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon using Fresh at The Rex Agency
