This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 3

  Years later, when we started The Hundreds, I carried over the hardcore philosophy into our brand experience. The goal was to be transparent and accessible with our fans just as my favorite hardcore bands were with me. When it came to my back-to-school clothes, I admired all these cool skate and surf companies, but I really didn’t know anything about the founders behind them. What were their beliefs? Could I be friends with them in real life? If I were to advertise these clothing companies on my back like a walking billboard, I wanted to make sure our personalities aligned. What if there was an apparel brand that was so public and honest that you knew everything the people behind it loved and supported, and regardless of whether you agreed with them, you felt as if you could invite them over for dinner?1

  The second-best thing about hardcore was that it was self-motivating and entrepreneurial. While the lesser-known bands opened, my crew sat outside on the picnic benches, bullshitted, and bought $5 merch (the traveling acts sold homemade T-shirts for food and gas). Many straight-edge kids took their self-discipline further to veganism and animal rights. Usually, there’d be a couple of skinhead girls hosting a Food Not Bombs bake sale in the front of the house. Before blogs and Instagram, most hardcore kids took their ideas to Kinko’s, cut and glued layouts to stapled paper, and published their own photocopied zines. I went to a lot of punk and ska shows, even the occasional backpack rap concert, but the hardcore scene was a different animal. The kids weren’t satisfied with a round of casual dancing and a night of live music. And we didn’t just mosh to vent about our parents and homework and break each other’s faces in half. There was a true entrepreneurial spirit around nineties hardcore life. Much of this came from the do-it-yourself ethos that built the culture. Kids organized out of habit and participated in the exchange of ideas,2 breeding a motivated generation of thinkers and doers. Many of us in streetwear have hardcore roots: Benny Gold, Brain Dead, Pleasures, Bodega, and Babylon. So do other successful luminaries who framed their careers on the straight-edge hardcore ethic, including the chef Tal Ronnen of Crossroads, the pro wrestler CM Punk, and the DJ Steve Aoki.

  After Minor Threat broke up, Ian MacKaye’s follow-up act was a post-hardcore band named Fugazi. To many fans and critics, this was MacKaye’s greatest contribution to music and punk rock philosophy. He abandoned the straight edge3 and his signature tune. Fugazi developed a sophisticated, mature sound that played more to funk and reggae than to D.C. hardcore. Compared with MacKaye’s prior punk repertoire, Fugazi songs were easier, more anthemic. The song “Waiting Room” even worked its way up the mainstream rock radio charts.

  But Fugazi’s influence went way beyond the music. The real distinction: the band’s ideology on business and “selling out.” Fugazi refused major label deals, preferring to establish their own indie instead (Dischord Records). They insisted on $5 tickets for their shows, which made for affordable yet extremely crowded tours. They subverted the expectations of their audience by banning moshing and merch at their own concerts. Like the Bill Watterson of punk rock, MacKaye denied die-hard concertgoers official tour T-shirts, stickers, and paraphernalia.

  “I just don’t give a fuck about T-shirts,” he once said.

  Someone, somewhere, at some point in time, couldn’t accept the fact that there were no Fugazi shirts out there. So, that person printed an unlicensed T-shirt that read, “This is not a Fugazi T-shirt,” and sold a ton of them, and to this day that shirt has become virtually synonymous with the band’s legacy. So much so that Ian MacKaye eventually endorsed the shirt and requested that all proceeds benefit a cause. That this random person printed an illegal T-shirt of a band that didn’t believe in T-shirts and that it became one of the most iconic T-shirts in music history is just so perfectly punk. It’s like the inception of punk rock negation.

  Skateboarding and hardcore taught me to question everything, repeatedly, to constantly challenge myself. The cover art for Minor Threat’s Out of Step features a lone black sheep turning away from the white pack. The black sheep is where my eye is immediately drawn. It’s in my nature to go against. I know this might sound stupid, but if everyone is moving in the same direction, that’s a red flag that I should head the other way. Even if it burns bridges, even if it means less “cool” and less money. This detour from the well-traveled road is part of what distinguished me and The Hundreds from other brands, helped me to see things before everyone else did, and granted me the freedom to wander. I identify with that black sheep.

  It was at this point that I had a vision. Black sheep, like me, dotting the rolling hills of skate culture, flocking to the new frontier of streetwear. But we weren’t lost, not nearly. We were looking for each other. In step with being out of step—together.

  Can’t keep up!

  Out of step, with the world!

  5.   OUTSIDE THE BOX

  IN THE FALL of 1997, at the age of seventeen, I broke up with my girlfriend, rolled up some band posters from my childhood bedroom, and split from the barren strip malls of Riverside.

  I moved into the dorms at the University of California, San Diego, as a freshman. And I would give UCSD four years of my life, immediately gunning for a triple major. Eventually, I’d pick up another field of study, majoring in communications with three minors: psychology, theater, and computing in the arts. But it wasn’t enough. I needed more.

  I DJ’d a slot on the college radio station, playing early emo and indie from Cap’n Jazz, the Get Up Kids, and Hot Water Music. I threw jungle parties for the rave club and visited the Hare Krishna temple in Pacific Beach twice a week. I did stand-up comedy, produced one-man shows in the school’s black box theater, and published an on-campus zine to promote interfaith religious dialogue. In my last two years of college, I ran for office and won the AS commissioner of communication position by a landslide.1

  I threw Project X–style house parties, but I was still afflicted with boredom. By junior year, I had grown impatient with the pace of college life and was eager to find out what I’d be when I grew up. My professor’s boyfriend, Kevin Imamura, was an editor at Warp, one of the magazines under Transworld Media (Transworld Skateboarding, Snowboarding, and at the time Surf). Warp was one of my favorite magazines because it wasn’t dedicated to just skateboarding, snowboarding, or music. Warp combined all those interests into one journal. I applied for an internship and, with my professor’s recommendation, got the job.

  In my time with Warp, we re-branded as Stance, positioned celebrities like Eminem and a sixteen-year-old Mila Kunis on the cover, and formatted the book to cover all relevant youth culture from skateboarding to cars to fashion. It’s arguable that Stance was a precursor to what Complex is today; it was just far too ahead of its time in the early 2000s to survive on grocery store shelves (midwestern kids were more interested in Fred Durst than in Nigo). Stance owed a lot to Kevin, who had a knack for picking up early on subculture vibrations. He was the one who had me calling the Supreme store for editorial product in 1999 or flying up to San Francisco to profile ROLO and Recon. Kevin also introduced me to my favorite artists to this day, like Barry McGee and ESPO (in their Street Market era), as well as to the mysterious world of Japanese street fashion.

  So, nothing was more shocking than the morning I got to the office and saw Kevin opening a box of Nikes at his desk.

  “Nike?” I questioned. Nike was for pigheaded jocks! Plus, the corporation was dogged with child labor scandals. For an anti-authoritarian skate punk, there was nothing cool about Nike. The swoosh had no place in this building, let alone in skate culture.

  “These are the Alphanumeric Dunks,” he calmly replied. He situated the sneakers on the shelf—right between his Michael Lau Gardener figures—not to be worn but to be displayed as collectible art. The Nike Dunks were low-tops with reflective 3M panels. On the toe, right where a triple-stitched, double-layered ollie pad should go, was a high-density embroidered yellow Alphanumeric logo. I was utterly confused. Why was Alpha—a reputable skate brand—collaborating with a
giant athletics company on basketball shoes?

  I knew the retro Jordan trend was emerging out of Tokyo and there was a cult of curiosity around rare Japanese streetwear and Medicom Bearbrick toys. What I failed to realize was that all of the coolest skaters of the period like Eric Koston, Scott Johnston, and Keith Hufnagel were avid collectors. Although those guys were sponsored by skate-shoe companies, they were flying back and forth from Japan and hoarding vintage Nike Dunks for a hobby. A few years earlier, when I was in high school, Nike had tried to penetrate the skateboarding market with a team led by Gino Iannucci, playing commercials on ESPN. I even found a pair of the early normcore-style shoes on the Ross sales rack. The backlash against the corporation from the core skate community was swift and pitiless, however, and Nike rip-corded.

  But here was a sudden, unexpected break for Beaverton. Prior to this, no amount of compensation could persuade skateboarding’s biggest, core idols to back the swoosh. Skaters were averse to framing their pastime as an organized sport, and the traditional athlete sponsorship looked corporate and disingenuous—a total sellout move. Yet if Nike approached skateboarding via culture and community (like Japanese otaku—hyper-obsessive collecters), they could tap its biggest stars.2

  This collision of worlds was transformative for youth culture and fashion. I want to highlight this point: as much as we can trace modern streetwear back to the surf/hip-hop interchange of the 1980s and Tokyo’s obsessiveness in the 1990s, this concept of sneaker culture meets skateboarding, perhaps more than any other factor, catalyzed the early-2000s chapter of street fashion. The lineups and resellers, the collaborations, the hype. Sneaker culture made it okay for straight young men to participate in fashion, it brought money and publicity into the industry, and it unrolled a terrain from which streetwear would sprout. It started from the ground up. These streetwear kids were shopping for something to match their shoes. Ruminating on those Alphanumeric Dunks as a teenager, all I saw was a sports company culture-vulturing off independent skateboarding. What Nike did for streetwear, however, was connect disparate youth communities through underground tunnels.

  Eventually, Kevin exited Stance and moved to Oregon to help start Nike’s skateboarding division, Nike SB. The remainder of the original Stance crew dismantled. I stayed at Transworld a bit longer, but it never felt the same in Oceanside without the architects around. Plus, my interest was piqued by this budding movement of renegade T-shirt designers and sneaker collectors. The more I scraped at the surface, the more I found oceans of information roiling underneath. From skateboarding to hardcore, I forged my identity around subcultural communities. But this underworld of brands spoke to me directly. I was inspired by the art, captivated by the personalities behind the labels, and drawn in by the clandestine culture. Little did I know how much I would end up shaping it and how much it would come to shape me.

  I learned a lot in college, but the greatest lesson didn’t come from professors or textbooks. I still carry this note I wrote in my journal during my last weeks in San Diego: “The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know anything at all.” I had no idea.

  6.   STREETWEAR: A BRIEF HISTORY

  To break the rules, you must first know the rules.

  —Jav Dolla

  NO MATTER WHERE we begin the streetwear story, we start in the middle.

  Defining streetwear is like fencing in a mirage. Streetwear’s just one of those phenomena—the tighter you crop in, the less focused the picture becomes. Like the way memories slip through your fingers the harder you hold on to them. Most people see T-shirts and ball caps and think streetwear is hip-hop clothes or skater style (that’s typically how I explain it to anyone over the age of forty). Streetwear, however, is simply the merchandise associated with an attitude. Teenage rebellion, youth culture, and fashion snobbery have long been parts of American life. Whether it’s called “beach counterculture” or “urban,” young people have long adopted T-shirt labels as identifiers and differentiators.

  Today, we call it streetwear, but we didn’t always.1 “Streetwear” came into widespread use in the mid-2000s as a handy media catchall for the start-ups in our class—the designers standing up to department store labels and corporate sportswear. Without cut-and-sew capabilities and capital, we centered on graphic T-shirts and collaborations. Our brands were inspired by designers who sold exclusively through their retail stores like Bape and Supreme, but we wanted to open up wholesale doors on an indie level. We also wanted to open up streetwear via the internet.

  So we blogged. Some of the most notable websites included mine (thehundreds.com), Honeyee, Beinghunted, SlamXHype, The Brilliance, Highsnobiety, A Silent Flute, and Hypebeast. The web also gifted us with the online shop, wherein brands could cut the middleman altogether. Despite e-commerce, streetwear boutiques boomed. Suddenly there were more than a handful of stores in the world that catered to our kind. Skaters became disenfranchised by organized action sports and wanted something more grounded, rootsy, and fashionable to wear. The burgeoning retro sneaker culture needed to be dressed from the ankles up. All of these factors converged on an industry, a movement, that required a catchphrase. Moreover, this new customer—young, mostly male, and preoccupied with fashion—sought a flag to brandish. “Streetwear” fit just right.

  When we started The Hundreds, brands in our category were classified as independent, underground, or hipster. Stores and trade shows didn’t know what to make of our catering to such a diverse demographic. In the mid-2000s, the stores and trade shows compartmentalized young men’s fashion in two silos: “skate” and “urban.” As brands like LRG and Ice Cream started to outgrow this binary portrait, the industry concocted the embarrassing portmanteau “skurban” to explain the black kids on their skateboarding teams.

  I recall standing outside our trade-show booths and getting asked by buyers and journalists, “Are you hip-hop or action sports?” Translation: “Are you for black kids or white kids?”

  Ben and I would look at each other. He, of Iranian Jewish descent. Me, a Korean American kid who grew up thinking I was Latino. “Neither,” we’d respond.

  It’s as if, subconsciously or by design, we’d created a streetwear brand just so we could exist. There’s no contesting the white male majority’s contributions to youth fashion through the decades, but as a person of color I felt excluded from the lifestyle. There were few role models who looked like me in clothing, rap, and skateboarding. I pinned Thrasher ads of Daewon Song, Gideon Choi, and Spencer Fujimoto to my wall, but the industry itself never called to me as a potential career. If you look up and down the halls of menswear history, you’ll see white faces everywhere. The surf industry was founded on board shorts, sewn by the hands of white Aussies and Americans. In the 1950s, the American couple Nancy and Walter Katin cut boat cover canvas to make the first-ever surf shorts. Decades later, in Australia, Gordon Merchant would triple stitch his Billabong shorts. In the seventies, Bob McKnight discovered Quiksilver board shorts down under and introduced them stateside. Today, the surf industry is still dominated by Orange County–based Caucasian men with the exception of Pat Tenore of RVCA. Bob Hurley helms Hurley, Volcom was founded by Richard Woolcott and Tucker Hall, and Vans by the Van Dorens.

  The same can be said for skateboarding. Although its participant base has opened up and diversified with time, the majority of the companies remain owned and operated by white men. Meanwhile, the urban clothing sector of the late 1990s—although fronted by black rappers and designers—was also controlled by white men and Jewish garmentos. That’s why streetwear was important, necessary, and inevitable for an era of kids who looked unlike any generation prior. Although the men’s marketplace lazily spun a tale of two narratives—teenagers tidily divided into white and black culture—the youth broke the levees. What about the black kids who skateboarded and the white kids who listened to rap—not to mention all the shades of brown in between? Finally, it was time to hear from—and speak to—Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, tho
se of mixed backgrounds, the LGBTQ community, and women! All peoples left out of the traditionally binary dialogue. These kids found residence in streetwear, and today’s brand founders are more reflective of their multifarious followers.

  Did hip-hop music originate in the late 1970s with Kool Herc’s playground parties in the Bronx? Or do we follow rap’s bread crumbs to Muhammad Ali’s ringside insults or to the dozens or to West African griot?

  Likewise, does streetwear commence with the Orange County designer Shawn Stussy’s namesake T-shirts in the 1980s? He was the first to popularize the hip-hop-meets-surf aesthetic within street chic, pairing luxury logo mash-ups on drop-shouldered tees with baggy trousers. Powered by the surfboard shaper’s graffiti-like signature, Stüssy caught on globally and continues to drive streetwear trends to this day.

  But if we point to Stussy, then we’d have to rope in his peers and predecessors in surf like Peter Schroff and Jimmy Ganzer of Jimmy’z. Theirs were the wild-styled surfboards and neon-patterned pants that derived from aerosol paint and graffiti art. We can’t neglect the Zephyr freestyle skate team of 1970s West Los Angeles and their fusion of Venice gang culture with local surf politics. Craig Stecyk documented this synthesis of shaggy blond hair and cholo style—embodied in radical figures like the late Jay Adams—and broadcast it to global youth. Streetwear can dig deeper still, pulling on inspiration from the street gangs of 1970s New York, with their crews’ names and iconography branded across denim vests, to Angeleno pachucos (rioting in billowing zoot suits).