The New York Artist Embroidering Knicks Merch on the Street

Reported by Vogue.

When the New York Knicks clinched their first NBA championship in 53 years last Saturday night, the city did exactly what you'd expect: it lost its mind in the best possible way. Streets flooded, horns blared, orange and blue took over Brooklyn. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a man named Ramell-Correen Frederick — "Cheeks" to everyone who knows him — set up a 3x2 table outside Habana Outpost in Fort Greene and got to work.

Cheeks is a Queens-born, Brooklyn-raised textile artist and denim tailor with 23 years in the fashion industry. His company, Tattoo'd Cloth, operates through DMs, email, and what he calls "going rogue" — loading his vintage embroidery machine onto a dolly and pushing it through the boroughs until a corner feels right. Last Saturday, that corner was half a mile from his apartment, and he worked from 7 p.m. to 1:30 in the morning, stitching custom Knicks championship pieces onto whatever people handed him: hats, jerseys, jackets, anything. Fees started at $20. Slogans ranged from the straightforward "2026 Champs" to the deeply petty "Send the Spurs to the Knick-U." He made 15 pieces and left with none of them, according to Vogue.

The Machine, the Method, the Philosophy

The equipment is not incidental to the story. Cheeks works on a 104-year-old hand-crank chainstitch Singer 114w103 — her name is Jessica. He also owns Bertha, a 124-year-old French longarm, and Story, an Indian-made international model he acquired last year. The process is entirely analog: design by hand or screen, draw or print the pattern onto the garment, then stitch it one pull at a time. A name can take 60 seconds. A 24x36-inch tribute to Chadwick Boseman took 48 hours. He is, by his own account, almost entirely self-taught — shaped by one fear-breaking sewing class, a sharp critique from his seamstress grandmother, and a formative internship with patternmaker Shilo Byrd. Formal art school didn't work out. He went rogue from that, too.

What makes Cheeks's work hit differently isn't the championship timing or the viral photos — it's the underlying logic. "I don't want you to have to buy something," he told Vogue. "I want you to take what you have and give it new life." Every piece he makes in the street is one-of-one. The goal isn't merchandise; it's memory, made permanent on something you already own. He's clear that embroidery is his entry point into people's lives, not his ceiling — his large-scale wall work is where his real ambitions live — but on a night the city waited 53 years for, a table on a Brooklyn sidewalk was exactly the right place to be.

In a fashion landscape saturated with drops, collabs, and limited-edition hype, Cheeks is doing something genuinely radical: showing up, in public, with a century-old machine, and making the thing you're wearing into art.

Read the original at Vogue.