In honor of Gregg Araki's birthday, we asked V Magazine editor and unofficial president of the Araki fan club, Patrik Sandberg, to say a few words on our cinema hero.

Didn’t you realize it’s Gregg Araki’s birthday on Saturday? Have you ever heard of the Rapture? Wake up and smell the cappuccino, geek. It’s like, we all know way down in our souls that our generation is going to witness the end of everything. Acid rain, nuclear dumping, no ozone left, the whole planet’s a goner. I give it another five years max. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the big earthquake hit? And all the nuclear power plants in California blew up? What the f*@% are you going to be wearing?

Gregg Araki is the ultimate. Nobody prepared us for the shitty zeroes decade like he did, by mining the depths of Angeleno isolation, gay malaise, and hyperreal doom prophecies while offering us palms-up powdery clusters of X to make it all look and feel a little more like heaven—in his crucial and desperate movies like The Living End, Totally F**ked Up, The Doom Generation, and most importantly, Nowhere. Of course, the master of teenage disaster continues to run over our brains with a Suzuki Samurai in movies like Mysterious Skin, Smiley Face, and Kaboom.

Where normal people have a heart, Gregg Araki has a bottomless black hole. And if you don’t watch out—and you’re REALLY lucky—you can fall in and get lost forever. Here, we pay tribute to the total package with our most Araki ensembles—commonly worn by Satanists, homosexuals, and other dangerous cults.

FILED UNDER: birthday , patrik sandberg , ine wine , gregg araki , t by alexander wang , opening ceremony collection , jean paul gaultier , ostwald helgason , house of holland , ay not dead , chloe sevigny for opening ceremony , comme des garcons , the muppets x opening ceremony , jeremy scott , house of matching colours , delfina delettrez