#boot legs

It’s a Saturday morning in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan--a day off for most.  For the fashion and creative sets however, in this city, a Monday through Friday work week is just a loose guideline.  At Milk Studios, where the two worlds collide in 80,000 square feet of perfectly manicured brick, iron, wood, and concrete-filled raw space there’s not quite ever a time when someone isn’t working.  Today, it’s Kalvin, alone in the northeast corner of the second floor that is homebase to the video production, fashion week, and social media arms of the studio; home to Milk Made.  A casting for musical tweens is overflowing across the hall. “Rassi came up with the name with Jason Cannon who runs the photo retouching,” Kalvin explains.  “They were just tossing around an idea about how to talk about the retouching and then it got away from retouching and went into fashion week and we already had this site called Milk Made so they decided with branding and with everything they’d just call everything Milk Made.” Rassi is Mazdack Rassi, the owner and Creative Director of Milk and a slew of smaller companies under its umbrella, what Kalvin calls ”a creative clubhouse for some of the most talented people he's met.” Kalvin is Kalvin Lazarte, Creative Director of Milk Made.  And Milk Made, well it's the creative catch-all for everything that’s worthy of the Milk Studios seal but not quite on brand enough to get its branding.  “We’re becoming a digital agency where we offer people branding and we offer people social media help and we can be the liaisons in website development.  It became like being a videographer to a blogger to now the Creative Director of a media company.” I’d speculate there aren’t many places left in New York where you’d actually be able to work your way up from the bottom, but Milk is one of those places.  It’s workforce is fanatical, tightly knit, talented, incestuous, catty, driven, and aggressively loving and protective of their own.  It’s the atmosphere that embraced and elevated Kalvin’s dedication and talent from his first gig as Resident Studio Barista to the eye and voice of Milk Made.  “It was the nicest place I had been to in New York.  As soon as I saw the view I thought, ‘I’m going to do whatever it takes to stay here forever.'” “Basically what I wanted to do with Milk Made is create a platform where we could show the world what Milk's community is all about, so anyone who checks out Milk Made and likes it could easily fit inside our community too.  And probably be someone I could be friends with.  I wanted to make a spot where we could be the next, I don’t know, Factory.  We’re a fashion photography studio but the culture and the people that surrounds it is so much more. [With Milk Made] you can cultivate your culture and tell people about Milk constantly.”  The Milk Made fashion, the skateboarding, the photography, the social media, the art—since 2009 it’s all been thanks to Kalvin.