This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 5

  A Bathing Ape took my hand and led me further down the corridors of Japanese streetwear. I learned that prior to Ape, Nigo and Jun Takahashi were partners in the seminal NOWHERE boutique. Jun carried on to create one of my favorite lines, Undercover—a predominantly women’s fashion label that evolved to make avant-garde men’s apparel as well. Then there were the very cool and very sought-after brands WTAPS and Neighborhood, propagating a more westernized, military, and biker aesthetic in Japanese streetwear. I also discovered a tiny clubhouse of a boutique, in the back of the Harajuku neighborhood, called Bounty Hunter. The founder, Hikaru Iwanaga, started off with vinyl collectibles but went from toys to streetwear as his audience clamored for his signature black-and-white punk-style T-shirts. Of all the labels and designers making news out of Tokyo, I was most drawn to Bounty Hunter. It was probably the hardcore punk thing, but Hikaru’s simplicity in design, frankness in opinion, and integrity around selling out exemplified everything I wanted in a clothing brand.

  One day, I returned home to our Nagoya apartment to a stack of mail. Misa was still at her job at the elementary school, so I picked through the envelopes at the kitchen table. There was a big packet from Loyola Law School—“Congratulations!” I had been admitted for the fall semester of 2002. My time in Japan was drawing to a close, as were my Peter Pan years of freelance writing and designing. It was time to grow up and get a real job.

  Back to the United States. Back to reality.

  * * *

  IN THE summer of 2002, I started at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles. With my background in activism, I was curious about public interest or human rights work. I could make enough money to live, help out the underserved and voiceless, then focus on my art in the evenings. Maybe after graduating, I’d go work for the ACLU.

  On my first day, I signed up for the National Lawyers Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest progressive bar association. Upholding the mantra of “Human rights over property interests,” I spent most of my time with the NLG wearing its fluorescent-green cap and documenting police brutality at protests.

  Then I learned about the big law firms like O’Melveny & Myers and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.2 For almost all legal students, a big-firm gig is the pot at the end of the rainbow. Students invest three years of their lives, racking up crushing debt, in hope of beginning careers with $125,000-a-year starting salaries and offices with gyms and built-in supermarkets (it wasn’t until much later that I realized the law firms did this so you wouldn’t escape). The prospect of lawyering for a towering Century City firm was enticing. Partners would descend on our campus and coax recruits with Dodgers tickets, fancy dinners, and sports cars.

  I was scared straight for that first semester, throwing elbows against Harvard grads and overachievers, gunning for that blue-ribbon placement in the top 10 percent of the class. The only way to secure job interviews with the better firms after school was by standing atop the other 90 percent of your classmates. Because we were graded on a curve (meaning half the class would be in the bottom 50 percent), friends became rivals, study groups splintered apart, and by finals it was every man and woman for themselves.

  * * *

  FOR THE first time in my life, I actually tried at school, instead of sleeping through my classes and cheating on exams. I’d treated high school and college as recreational, but law school was different. Perhaps it was the fear of failing into nothingness or the peer pressure of intense competition, but I was now warring it out against one hundred other sharks like me. We had all cut corners and conned our way to good grades, but now we were pitted against each other, like a battle royal of swindlers. That first year of law school, I ground myself down to the bone and discovered my parents’ work ethic buried inside.

  I was trying to become a lawyer so that I could be an artist, and although that sounds as dumb to me now as it did to everyone else back then, I was crestfallen with how my plan was backfiring. Law was clearly not for me; neither was a professional life. I wasn’t opposed to the work—it was honorable and challenging, and I was good at it. I just didn’t feel as if I fit the mold. Deep down, I longed to rekindle my pursuits in design, photography, and creative writing and connect them with my appreciation of street fashion. I devised an extracurricular summer project to follow my first year of law school where I would take my art, print it on T-shirts to be sold at cool boutiques, and write about it on my blog. If my drawings and paintings weren’t getting recognition in galleries or on the internet, then T-shirts would advertise my talents. There were no plans to turn this into a brand or to make money. I called it the Bobby Kim Project (very original) and advertised it on my website’s splash page to absolutely no one at all.

  PART TWO

  9.   BURN

  “GUYS, WHAT THE hell is going on here?” Tommy Hilfiger’s partner, Kenneth, is tapping his pen nervously along the edge of a financial report in front of him. Kenneth, my partner, Ben, and I are wedged in the back corner of Park’s BBQ. Grill smoke fills the room, heightening the spirited, drunken energy as we clear small trays of banchan and pull in closer around the documents on the table. Enclosed are the last six months of our company’s expected projections alongside actual hard earnings. Our hearts sink as we survey the figures.

  In the fall of 2013, ten years after Ben and I founded The Hundreds, we started a serious dialogue with the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger and his team of attorneys and finance officers. We were looking for a fresh set of eyes on our business. We were looking for a partner with experience and resources that would offer an injection of capital. And we were looking to rebuild our brand with an eye toward the future. We were also looking for a bit of peace of mind to the tune of a few million dollars each. It was time to reward ourselves after a decade of grinding. We felt we deserved it.

  In the first few months of that budding partnership between The Hundreds and Tommy Hilfiger, all signs pointed to a happy outcome for both parties. Not only did we respect each other, but our revenue and profits were strong, proving a smart investment for Tommy’s group. Tommy offered a deep well of production resources, connections to large factories, and of course decades of invaluable experience in the garment business. Dreams of a successful partnership with Tommy Hilfiger robbed me of countless nights of sleep. Finally, I’d be assured that all my years of hard work building and growing The Hundreds’ brand were not in vain. If the company crashed tomorrow, I’d still be all right, at least financially.

  “No need for alarm just yet, but this is a little worrisome,” Kenneth said.

  Here we were, wading through page after page of dream-crushing spreadsheets. Our numbers were trending in the wrong direction. Our decline was slow, almost imperceptible, but for a company that only knew how to climb, everything looked upside down.

  Of course, we weren’t totally asleep at the wheel. For the past few seasons, we’d done our best to adapt to a volatile market. The streetwear bubble of the late 2000s had popped—indie boutiques were caving, brands were folding—and the big fashion houses were shaping a new paradigm by crossing skate culture with haute couture. Having ridden a decade-long wave, The Hundreds had reached its crest and began to crash. One by one, accounts stopped placing orders. Retail stores weren’t just adjusting their buys; with the rise of online shopping, many simply ceased operation. Our European business took a hit as the euro plummeted and distributors evaporated, no longer able to afford the markup on American brands. And in China, a drought devastated the cotton crop, inflating production costs.

  All breakups trigger the same series of emotions: at first, discomfort and confusion; later, the coldness of finality. As the email chains between The Hundreds and Tommy Hilfiger got shorter and the conference calls fewer, it became clear that we were breaking up. That night at Park’s BBQ marked the last of a string of dinners between the two companies. Months later, a low valuation of our business from Tommy’s people would signal the end.

  Fashion trends can turn at the drop of a hat. It’s a
fast and schizophrenic beast on which there appears to be no reliable science. In The Hundreds’ first ten years, we rejected this truth, like a dinosaur that can’t fathom an earth-cracking meteor. In our eyes, everything was going fine, we were thriving, and our success had no foreseeable end. Yes, fashion is finicky, but we’d convinced ourselves that we were more than just a fad. We were running a lifestyle brand based on our own lifestyle; we were in control of our own destiny.

  We were, unfortunately, gravely mistaken.

  10.   KILL ’EM MALL

  I’m not a punk, how can I be?

  Show me the way to conformity

  —Descendents, “I’m Not a Punk”

  BEN AND I have only ever really gotten into one fight. Of course, there have been plenty of disagreements, and there are times when I’ve wanted to tackle him through a window. Those clashes arise out of the friction between art and commerce. Like, when I want to collaborate with an obscure sculptor who designed album covers for a nineties stoner rock band with a cult following. It’s a cool story, but not exactly a fruitful return on investment. Or in our seasonal previews when Ben cuts weaker pieces from our collection without compassion or warning. As a designer, I’m sensitive and exposed; my art leaves me splayed wide open. And Ben can be abrasive. It never feels good to, for example, be told that a piece you’ve worked on for weeks “sucks ass.” Oh my God, he’d be the worst dentist.

  Ben gets frustrated by me too: by my volatility and wild trains of thought. Like the time I installed an aquarium in our shop while he was away on vacation. The rare tropical fish died within a weekend after someone poured beer into the filter. I had to haul the tank out of there, dead, bloated fish and all. “What were you thinking?” Ben demanded, irritated that I hadn’t run the idea by him. The answer was that I wasn’t thinking. I’d woken up that day and just wanted to see fish in the store.

  There’s a refrain I hear at every one of Ben’s backyard barbecues. His childhood friends will pull me aside and half teasingly, half seriously ask, “How are you still putting up with this guy?” My buddies ask Ben the same about me. We are both obstinate and selfish and uncooperative. I imagine this is why we ended up working for ourselves: no one else would take us. I like to think of myself as laid-back, but the reality is that eventually everybody rubs me the wrong way. I’m the most gregarious misanthrope you’ll ever meet, like Larry David on Molly. I’ve never held on to a best friend and can only take people in spurts. Ben, meanwhile, is more my wife than my wife. After fifteen years of growing The Hundreds together—breathing the same office air, sharing at least a meal a day, and seeing the world from the same vantage point—I’d say we’re probably composed of nearly identical brain matter.

  That one real fight—it didn’t involve fists or broken teeth. There were no fingers pointed. It wasn’t about jealousy or ego. And we didn’t hurl unforgivable insults at each other. In fact, the most haunting part of the fight was its silent end. I’d simply walked out of a meeting with Ben, our sales director, Scotty iLL, our former marketing director, Ashley, and the rest of our executive team. I got into my car and sped off into L.A. rush hour traffic.

  The meeting was about selling The Hundreds to the mall. For the first seven years, we had limited our wholesale distribution to premier international boutiques, core skate shops, and purist streetwear retailers. Stores like Union in New York, Wish in Atlanta, and Starcow in Paris. Although there were certain border towns where we sold to independent mall-based accounts—the coolest shops in those area codes—we purposefully abstained from nationwide chains like Tillys, Metropark, and Pacific Sunwear (later known as PacSun). We resisted the call, even after our competitors at the time opened the skate/street chain Zumiez. Beyond any philosophical opposition we might have had to selling our gear in malls, we just never felt ready for the big time.

  The first chain store we distributed through was a Southern California–based action sports retailer named Active Ride Shop. Several years into the brand, I was visiting my parents back home in Riverside and went in search of cool stores. We weren’t selling our brand in Riverside yet; in fact, we were nowhere close to the county. There were a couple core skate shops, but they weren’t interested in streetwear, so I meandered into Active. There were a handful of brands that complemented The Hundreds (like the Seventh Letter and Stüssy) on the tables, so I squinted and tried to imagine our product on the floor.

  “Hey, are you Bobby?”

  A ginger-haired sales associate with thick black plugs stuck his hand out.1

  “I know what you do. It’s pretty cool. You’re from here, right? So, how come you don’t sell The Hundreds in Riverside?”

  Good point. This was my backyard. Why would I rob my own people of The Hundreds? It didn’t seem fair that just because someone was geographically undesirable, they shouldn’t be able to buy cool streetwear. How many Bobbys were growing up in this town without access to better brands? Reselling and online shopping had yet to take hold in the global streetwear marketplace, so these suburban kids were stuck with second-tier clothing companies. I remember this well, having shopped for back-to-school clothes at the swap meet throughout my youth.

  We opened Active Riverside as an official account. Then we went down the line and sold to Active’s network of Southern California stores in Valencia, Burbank, Brea, and beyond. That broke our hard-line, restrictive sales doctrine. As much as I admired the exclusivity of prime streetwear, Ben and I and The Hundreds were inclusionary by default. Although we had to fake the funk early to portray a certain elitist image, it’s just never been in our nature as humans to be snobs. Our top priority is to design and make quality product, but we also want people to be able to have fair access to our work.

  Active Ride Shop was one thing, though. Although widespread, most Actives are freestanding stores, located outside traditional shopping malls. Selling to stores inside the mall—like Zumiez and PacSun—was an entirely different story.

  The mall means different things to different people. For midwesterners and the suburban middle class, the mall can be a community grounds—a shelter from unforgiving weather, a haven for bored youth. For senior citizens, the mall concourse is an indoor track for Sunday morning strolls and people watching. In the cities, malls may be classified as tourist destinations.

  The mall also means different things to different generations. In the 1970s and ’80s, malls birthed their own youth culture (see Jason Lee in Mallrats or the zombie flick Dawn of the Dead). The MTV-era American teenager was cast in the foamy mold of Orange Julius and Merry Go Round. This is where Valley Girl–speak originated and big Jersey hair sprouted, where horny adolescent boys stared down girls’ B.U.M. tank tops from second-floor banisters (before home video game systems seduced them from the arcades, and even longer before the internet stole their attention). The mall provided many Americans their first job. In the 1990s, there were about three million mall jobs for teens sixteen to nineteen years old. The United States was erecting 140 shopping malls a year. Supermalls, like the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, pumped hormones into a consumer epidemic. Many Americans planned entire recreational days at the mall, starting with breakfast at the pretzel stand and ending with nighttime desserts at Mrs. Fields.2

  In towns like Riverside, which account for the majority of America, the shopping malls host the coolest brick-and-mortar shops in the neighborhood. I confess one of my first jobs was working retail in a rave shop called Limbo Lounge. I peddled choker necklaces made of shower curtain chains, black-light posters, and geek glasses with yellow lenses. I worked with a buff rebel dude named Jason who shaped his eyebrows and wore platform shoes. And by “worked with” him, I mean I covered the floor while he nailed girls in the dressing rooms. My manager was a bottle-blond Colombian woman named Cali whom I’d nicknamed Caliente. I sold visors and UFO cargo pants to teenagers shopping with their parents. They reminded me of myself when I was in the eighth grade, dragging my mom to the mall to hunt for Stüssy and F
reshjive. For me, a kid who grew up ninety minutes outside the city, my comprehension of streetwear was reinforced by the American shopping mall. We didn’t have Animal Farm or KITH. In nineties Everytown, U.S.A., the retailers that sold the hot underground “streetwear” were Nordstrom, Beach Access, and Pacific Sunwear—all of them mall accounts. Nordstrom, the upscale department store, was the top-shelf Stüssy depot in the Southland. Beach Access was chiefly a surf and skate shop in the same mall as Limbo Lounge, but it started delving into the stylish beach/urban wear that reiterated Stüssy’s spirit. They carried Drawls and Underworld Element, funky indie brands that printed cartoon character T-shirt graphics. And PacSun was forty minutes out, at the Montclair Plaza and Santa Ana Main Place Mall. They stocked Jive and had a strong supporting cast of rave/street companies like 26 Red, Blür, and Sjobeck.

  Even though I sourced my streetwear fashion in the mid-1990s from the shopping mall, I was always hesitant to actually shop there. I’d put my head down, make a beeline from my favorite brands to the register, and be back in the car before you could say, “Fall into the Gap.” I wanted to be different, to stand apart from the rest of the kids in my school. It’s why I rejected pop music3 and must-see TV.4 Mall clothes, to me, were a by-product of lazy shopping and middling taste. I mean, everyone’s mom shopped back-to-school clothing at the mall. Half the kids in my class wore the same Gotcha shorts and Quiksilver flannel hoodies on the first day. As I entered high school, my lifestyle choices had to come from somewhere dark and distant, far away from the uninspired haunts of jocks and cheerleaders. I watched Faces of Death, Dolemite, and Cheech and Chong, not My So-Called Life. And I shopped for my clothes at Rebel skate shop or the California Cheap Skates mail-order catalog, not Marshalls or JCPenney.