For the past five years, Cactus Plant Flea Market's smiley-face-emblazoned tees and hoodies have teleported the most important and prolific musicians in the world (plus Timothée Chalamet) into another dimension of style. “When I wear Cactus Plant, I feel like I have on antigravity,” says Pharrell, who had a hand in the brand's creation. “I don't feel like I am living within the matrix of the social norm.”
That mind-expanding effect is why Cactus Plant's puff-print graphics—which look like dreamy doodles you might find in the margins of a dog-eared Kesey novel—have sprouted up everywhere you look. Back in 2016, to get your hands on CPFM, you would have had to go to a boutique like Dover Street Market, where, if you were lucky, you might find a few crunchy hand-dyed tees and hoodies with slogans like “We Are All Powered by the Sun.” Lately you just had to go to your favorite artist's merch stand—Pharrell, Kanye West, the A$AP Mob, Kid Cudi, and even the Rolling Stones have all commissioned CPFM designs for recent tours.
Despite support from style oracles like Frank Ocean and Lil Uzi Vert, Cactus Plant Flea Market remains shrouded in mystery. Since launching the brand five years ago, its sphinx-like founder, Cynthia Lu, has never given an interview. And thus grew the legend—that she did it all working solo out of a small Brooklyn apartment; that your tees might arrive with your name lovingly sewn into the collar; that when she met with Nike's design team to work on the first CPFM sneaker, she stunned the room by dumping a duffel bag of prototypes she had already DIY'd onto the table. (All true, it turns out: Lu stitched the sneakers together using off-the-rack VaporMaxes, T-shirt scraps, lights cut from Payless sneakers, and garden wire.)
Cactus Plant represents a rare antidote to the sameness that is rampant in fashion. Call it artisanal streetwear. If you managed to score one of the few CPFM x Denim Tears pieces Lu made with Tremaine Emory in May, you'll never find another like it, as the print—a yellow smiley face wearing a David Hammons African American-flag bandana—was done on vintage sweats. Many Cactus Plant pieces feature unique hand-dye treatments or embroidery, often done by Lu herself. One of the most coveted CPFM products is a custom enamel-and-diamond friendship bracelet Lu creates with hip-hop jeweler of record Jacob & Co. Her other collaborators include Comme des Garçons, Nike, Stüssy, and Alpinestars.
The seeds of Lu's project fell into fertile soil in 2012, when she landed a job with the P.R. office at Pharrell's streetwear label Billionaire Boys Club. A shy fashion addict who grew up in the Midwest, Lu registered a sort of cosmic kinship with Pharrell one day when they were both wearing matching Céline slip-ons. “She had this amazing energy that would come through in the stuff she wore and how she thought. We just instantly had a connection,” Pharrell says. He hired her to be his assistant and stylist soon after.
Lu's friends almost exclusively refer to her as Cactus or Plant. (She declined to be interviewed for this story, letting her friends—and the clothes—do the talking.) As Pharrell tells it, the nickname felt like destiny: “Cynthia is a beautiful name, but when we were working together I was like, ‘Man, this doesn't really match you. It puts a lid on your energy.’ ” Then Lu told him that she'd been teased with the name Cactus at a previous job, after she adopted an unwanted prickly plant. “I was like, ‘That's it,’ ” Pharrell says. “ ‘You're Cactus. You're short, you're sharp, and you're not easy to touch. And in the driest of times, you're the one with the water.’ ”
Lu's higher calling was revealed when she began designing clothes for Pharrell, re-creating vintage pieces she would find in Parisian flea markets. “I was like, ‘Man, you need to be doing this. Like, this is your thing,’ ” Pharrell recalls of her early creations. She began experimenting with her own label on the side, creating custom sweatbands emblazoned with her new brand name—a synthesis of her moniker and the place where she found her eccentric and odd inspiration—and Comme des Garçons-inspired graphic tees, printed on Hanes x Supreme blanks, that she would send to friends. Then, in June of 2015, when Pharrell was accepting his CFDA Fashion Icon award, he closed his speech by telling his “genius assistant Cactus” to “listen to your instincts.” According to those close to Lu, that was when the brand really crystallized. She listened to her instincts and never looked back.
Lu has maintained a level of anonymity that would make Martin Margiela jealous. A remarkable feat, considering she is still Pharrell's stylist and, pandemic notwithstanding, is usually hiding in plain sight at events among all the world's coolest musicians, athletes, designers, and stylists.
“Her anonymity is not a shtick to make the design go further,” says Virgil Abloh. “She's a pure artist. The designs stand on their own, and they don't need to be promoted.” Abloh sees Lu's work opening a new dialogue in a streetwear world dominated by male designers. “She's in her own genre,” he says.
Last year, Lu expanded her ambitions beyond tees and sweats with a ready-to-wear line called CPFM.XYZ—think purple shibori-dyed painter's pants and slouchy satin flight jackets—which is produced in Japan with the help of streetwear O.G. Nigo. “I wanted to give her the freedom to make what she wanted,” the Bape founder said via email. Even with the backing of an apparel legend, CPFM.XYZ's drops are sporadic and unpredictable. And no less guaranteed to sell out.
With the coronavirus crisis and Black Lives Matter protest movement forcing brands big and small to rethink the way they make, market, and hawk their clothes, Lu's spiritual detachment from the relentless fashion cycle feels prescient. “I made a statement maybe six months ago that ‘streetwear’ is going to die, and I firmly believe that Cynthia is an example of the future of it,” says Abloh, who designs his collections for Louis Vuitton and Off-White on a rigid annual production schedule. “I think she is the prototype for the next epicenter of ideas. She just makes work and it comes out. She doesn't process it, doesn't have to use hype.”
It's easy to write off any new brand that catches fire as a fad, but here's an upstart label run out of a Brooklyn apartment by an unknown designer that's getting more airtime than some billion-dollar luxury houses. If your wardrobe is looking dusty, let Cactus bring the water.
Samuel Hine is GQ's senior associate editor.
A version of this story originally appears in the August 2020 issue with the title "The Mysterious Mind Garden of Cactus Plant Flea Market".
