his story appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.When I was a teenager who dressed solely in Gap Kids (past the age when that could ever be deemed "cool"), I would cut out images from magazines and tack them in collaged shrines to fashion on my bedroom walls. One of these works starred an oiled-up Amazonian woman in a fur hat and a red, gold, and green striped bikini. She looked ridiculous, even to my starry 14-year-old eyes, but also ridiculously glamorous. This, I know now, was the model Gisele Bündchen, in an ad for Dior's Rastafari-inspired 2004 capsule collection.Recently, on an internet deep dive into John Galliano's early-2000s collections for Dior (which walk the line between dangerous and brilliant), I came across this image again, as well as Dior's entire oeuvre of Rasta-striped accessories. There are red, gold, and green striped kitten heel mules, saddlebag purses, and, perhaps most improbably, quilted snow boots. There is also a red, gold, and green Dior snowboard for sale on eBay (was this a Cool Runnings-style joke?). The more I googled, the clearer it became that 2004 was a very different era in fashion: a sort of Wild West for cultural grab bagging.On TV, 2004 was the final year of Dior fan Carrie Bradshaw's wild (and sometimes wincingly appropriative) forays into fashion in Sex and the City and also the year teen queen Marissa Cooper of The O.C. wore one of Galliano's Rasta-inspired Dior bags. Seeing colors that represent a religion intrinsically opposed to commercial excess flaunted by a wealthy high schooler in early- 2000s Orange County is like hearing reggae music in Babylon.Continue reading on i-D.