Mae McKagan Just Launched a Fashion Line, and Dad’s in Guns N’ Roses

For most young people coping with the transition from high school to college is a handful. Add professional modeling and launching a fashion collection to the workload, though, and you have Mae McKagan’s freshman year. Her self-titled capsule, six months in the making, officially kicked off last night with a punk-studded party at I Need More on the Lower East Side, the boutique founded by Jimmy Webb of the infamous punk emporium Trash and Vaudeville on St. Marks Place, where everyone from Debbie Harry to the Ramones outfitted themselves.

Showing up to fête Mae was not only Harry herself—who graffitied a love note to Webb on his store’s wall—but Mae’s proud dad, Duff McKagan, the legendary Guns N’ Roses bassist who’d played a gig a couple nights earlier to support his new solo record, Tenderness, recorded with Shooter Jennings and his band.

The day after the gig, though, Duff seemed as eager to play second fiddle to his daughter’s big debut as he was incapable of staying quiet about it.

“She’s always had this really keen, really cool fashion sense,” says Duff, who’s outfitted in black jeans, a sleeveless black Iggy Pop T-shirt, and an assortment of chains around his neck and wrist that only a rock star can really pull off. The three of us are sitting over a plate of fries at a sunlit table at a bar around the corner from I Need More, where Mae—who models with No Agency in between studying fashion and journalism at the New School—has been working all day after flying in the night before from Paris. “She doesn’t talk a lot or brag a lot—she just does it. Boom! She makes her own stuff, for girls that she knows—and who better to make stuff for her generation—it can’t be some 40-year-old, right? That’s fuckin’ old as shit! Or me, at 55? Fuck off, grandpa! I couldn’t be more proud. I’ll shut up now.”

“Thanks, dad!” says Mae, who’s wearing a red-and-black Miu Miu pinstripe sweater under a vintage black silk dress. Her self-titled label currently consists of two suits—a military suit and a gangster suit, each in two colors; a long plaid skirt in two colors; a cropped striped knit sweater in two colors; and two corsets in collaboration with New York City–based corsetress Veritée Hill. “Everything has safety pins in it, everything’s super punk rock,” Mae says. “It’s cool.”

“Her mom said, ‘Don’t try to make corsets or anything with underwire,’” he says. “First thing she does: a corset.” He’s beaming. (Mae’s mom: Vogue cover model—dubbed “The Body” by Steven Meisel—and eco-friendly swimsuit designer Susan Holmes McKagan. Mae’s sister, Grace, meanwhile, has been shot by Hedi Slimane and fronts a punk band, the Pink Slips, that’s been touring and recording and has a new video out—voilà—today.)

Webb—the kind of 24/7/365 rock and roller who lives in custom-made lace-up leather pants, collects Jesus figurines, and once dressed as a quaalude on Halloween—served as midwife to the collection. “I’ve known Jimmy since I was a little kid,” Mae says. “And he saw my fashion illustrations on Instagram and reached out—he thought that my aesthetic really fit the store and wanted me to make a line for him, and I told him I wanted to do something kind of like Vivienne Westwood, and that I was taking inspiration from Velvet Goldmine and from James Brown and Johnny Rotten and a lot of cool people. After that I approached a patternmaker—I honestly had no idea what I was doing going into it, but my mom gave me a little bit of input—and picked the fabrics and started production from there.”

I ask Mae, who took her first baby steps on a tour bus, if it’s ever been a little weird to have such a rock-and-roll dad.

“When I was younger, I didn’t like it, to be honest,” she says. “I wanted my parents to be like businesspeople because that’s what the parents of the kids I went to school with did. But now I think it’s really badass—and it’s inspiring that they do what they want to do.”

What Mae’s mom wants to do, lately, is write novels (her debut, The Velvet Rose, came out earlier this year). Duff, meanwhile—in addition to playing bass in one of the legendary bands in all of rock and roll—has toiled as a financial columnist (after leaving Guns N’ Roses in 1997 and eventually straightening out some severe substance-abuse issues, Duff enrolled in college to study business), founded a financial management firm to help musicians manage their money, and written two best-selling memoirs.

More recently, though, what he wanted to do was put a different kind of solo record out. “I wasn’t setting up to do an alt-country record,” he says. “I was actually writing a third book and had an acoustic guitar on the road with me, and started writing three-chord songs to these vignettes that I was starting off new chapters with. I’ve always wanted to do something like Mark Lanegan’s first two records or like Johnny Thunders’s acoustic record. Now was just time. I’m really happy with it.”

The record is at once super-political—there are songs addressing the Parkland shootings and gun control, America’s homeless problem, the MeToo movement, and drug abuse and addiction in very specific terms—and, at the same time, utterly devoid of politics.

“It’s just about us taking care of ourselves—having each others’ backs,” Duff says. “I went out on the road after turning off the news and all the social media talk about ‘the divide’ in the country, and just talked to people all over the place: south, north, east, west, middle, everywhere. There’s no red states or blue states: It’s just people—the same people that I’ve been touring in front of and visiting with for the last 30-plus years. The overarching theme of the record, hopefully, is one of tenderness: This will pass, and we’ll be okay together. I have two daughters, and one thing that drove me to write what was originally going to be a third book was that I’ve seen them grow up, and I feel that my generation is responsible to our children and me to my girls; sure, I was in punk rock bands railing against these things since, you know, 1979, but I started thinking about this kind of question—‘Dad, what did you do about all of this stuff?’ And this is what I’m trying to do, girls: I’m trying to lead by example.

I mean, I was a world-champion alcoholic. I stopped that and had to be the world champion at working, at being a student, at being a man. Then I wanted to be the best father I could be for them. Their mother works her ass off. And the girls have seen this—they’re both driven as fuck! I mean, Grace is terrifying onstage because it’s the real fucking deal. So that work ethic that Guns N’ Roses had? Each of us in our family has that. We’re all A-type personalities."

About that G N’ R work ethic: I ask Duff about the various rumors, whispers, and speciously sourced studio sightings suggesting that he and his bandmates may be recording new material.

“I love it! I love that!” he says, neither confirming nor denying. “Um…you asked me a question?”

I ask it again.

“I’ll just tell you this,” Duff says. “Things are going very positively for our band, and we really fucking love each other. And that’s the coolest thing.” (The band’s infamous singer, meanwhile, is getting more woke by the day.)

In the meantime, though, after touring Tenderness across the country and to Europe, the G N’ R Not In This Lifetime tour—already the band’s lengthiest, at more than three years running—cranks up again this fall.

“We might have to call it something else after a while,” Duff says, cipher-like. “But there might be a reason to call it something else.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue