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 Fit to Print Jessica Herman sizes up the art of the T-shirt
Eleven years ago, Yoshi Kawasaki turned passion for art into a
profession, becoming the unofficial publicist for any fine artist whose
work he wanted to see on T-shirts. He founded 2K in Japan, silk
screening onto T-shirts everything from designs by well-known artists
such as Basquiat and Warhol to graphics from 1950s Herman Miller ads.
Realizing that America, unlike Japan, was starving for wearable art sold
outside the confines of museum and gallery shops, he transplanted his
business to Los Angeles in the mid-nineties.
"I was kind of frustrated because basically the T-shirts you can
find is mainstream art, plastic art like Picasso," says Kawasaki in
slightly broken English but with obvious fervor. "It's not really
competitive so we started to produce our own T-shirts." That was last
century.
The proliferation of Urban Outfitters-type shirts, mass produced with
the pretense of resembling one-of-a-kind or vintage garb, has made the
chance to collect affordable, original art shirts more and more
appealing. Three Chicago-based companies share a mission similar to 2K
by spreading the work of artists via casual wear. However, they differ
from one another in terms of how they straddle the line between
promoting a brand name versus promoting an artist. Imperfect Articles
The newest addition to the pile of T-shirt making collectives,
Imperfect Articles functions as an amorphous art gallery. The only
difference between this exhibition from others is geographic; admission
to Imperfect Articles is free to the public 24 hours a day at
www.imperfectarticles.com.
Barely three weeks old now, the website houses a virtual gallery of
artworks by a dozen fine artists, mostly in the Chicago area. The
site's
co-founder and practicing painter, Noah Singer, handpicked his friends
and acquaintances to design their own original shirts. Using American
Apparel white cotton shirts, he hand-dyes the wares in a color of his
choosing and sculptor Mike Andrews, the other co-founder, prints the
designs.
"For artists in particular it is their only chance for having their
kind of tour T-shirts," Singer says over the phone. Gallery goers
navigate the website by clicking on simple icons, symbols that Andrews
snagged from generic clothing labels. The shirts appear like
luminescent
blobs of colors, hung out to dry on an illustrated clothesline. The
viewer also finds the brief biographical sketches of the designers
along
with links to their personal websites and black-and-white line drawings
of the images that appear on their shirts. The artists' styles range
from surreal, digital-style cityscapes to Chris Kerr's portrait of two
resting nuts to Deva Maitland's cursive "For Love." He and Andrews
plan to print a load of new prints every season.
Singer offers the artists a generous cut of the profit, though he
says many of them are less interested in the money than the project.
Rather than promoting a brand name, he describes Imperfect Articles as
a
community where artists can see and support one another's work. Threadless
The inside of Threadless' warehouse-style home looks like the inside
of a Crayola box; the place is dominated by metal shelves piled high
with rainbow-colored shirts, the same shirts that hang stretched across
frames like paintings on their living-room wall and across the chests
of
half-nude mannequins standing around the floor. These 200-odd T-shirts,
designed mostly by graphic designers around the world, are the results
of the weekly T-shirt design competition that anyone who stumbles
across
threadless.com can enter.
The 23-year-old and 24-year-old founders, Jacob DeHart and Jake
Nickell, started the competition in 2000 after Nickell garnered first
place in a London-based T-shirt design contest. The two had met through
Dreamless, a now defunct, invite-only message board for designers.
Sharing interests both in web programming and graphic design, they
formed skinnyCorp, a web-development company, with Threadless as their
own client.
The business that does not happen in cyber space takes place in this
room: an assembly line of guys who manage packaging and shipments stand
at one wall, entertaining themselves with a Jennifer Aniston movie
playing on the TV screen and three Big Gulps. A farm of new computer
monitors and a puppy pen occupies the main workspace.
"We made these desks," says Nickell pointing to the chunky wooden
tables.
He describes the democratic process of selecting the winning
designs: subscribers rank the submitted T-shirt designs daily and then
DeHart and Nickell study their collected data to select which of the
winning designs they will print. Between reprints and new designs, two
go to print every week. The authors of every design receive at least
$400 and a $100 merchandise certificate to Threadless. Some of their
most popular shirts are ones they don't even like, says Nickell,
pointing to a shirt entitled Flowers in the Attic with an image of a
decapitated girl emitting red butterflies from her gory cavity. The
competition is stiff; since the site's launch four years ago, they've
received about 30,000 submissions.
However, the process encourages artists to promote their own work.
Nickell and DeHart send self-promotion packets via email (including an
email to forward their friends and advertorial banners that the
designers can post on their personal websites) to everyone who enters.
The fortunate byproduct, they explain, is that word about Threadless is
constantly getting around without formal advertising.
Adamantly resisting "selling out," they've rejected such
potentially lucrative offers as designing shirts for Target. The vast
majority of their shirts are sold on the website, but small batches are
sent to vendors across the states, to the local boutique Akira, and to
overseas vendors in the burgeoning design communities of Australia.
Last
year, they sold almost 100,000 shirts this way.
Back in their conference room, the young entrepreneurs bring up the
topic of their two newest endeavors: first, men's ties designed in the
same manner as the T-shirts. Nickell retrieves a wooden box emblazoned
with the motto "Naked & Angry." The box holds an original tie that
was
selected through a process identical to threadless.com; they'll offer
100 ties of each design at around $100 a pop. Their other project, OMG
Clothing, involves competitions for the best slogans, thereby offering
non-design-oriented folks an opportunity to participate in the game.
Launched last week, the OMG Clothing site already received 2,500
slogans
in the first day.
The men of Threadless are none too shy to show off what they have
accomplished; the wall is covered in framed magazine and newspaper
clips
that mention Threadless and, above that, a row of plastic letters
spells
out "We Are Awesome." Syndrome
Unlike Threadless and Imperfect Articles, Syndrome promotes itself as
a brand. Hesitant to reveal the tricks of their trade or step on any
designers' toes, Luke Cho and Adam Rajcevich walk with trepidation
through their explanation of building a label from the ground up, with
reams of raw fabric as their foundation.
Complemented by an extensive line of cut and sewn garments, from
canvas totes to crop cotton pants, T-shirts are Syndrome's best
advertisers. Sitting in their basement office, sucking on cigarette
butts, they attempt to explain the two-pronged approach: promoting the
label name as well as the freelance artists who produce graphics for
half of their shirts. While Syndrome takes on illustrations by
little-known names from across the country, they garner a half-dozen
designs every season from three established local artists: Cody Hudson,
Kelly Breslin and Ray Noland. Occasionally using "Duel tags," which
are tags that feature the name of the brand alongside the name of the
freelance designer, and including biographies of the featured artists
in
their yearly catalogue, Syndrome makes an effort to build the artists'
reputations. However, Cho emphasizes that Syndrome is first and
foremost a fashion label, not an art gallery and certainly not yet a
lucrative business, although they're selling more than 10,000 T-shirts
a year.
Cho and Rajcevich work closely with the artists to translate the kind
of concepts that jive with Syndrome's sensibility. They loosely
designate seasonal themes that reflect the current political or social
scene. "That doesn't mean Bush with a gun," Cho says, elaborating on
the charged images of the fall line. "It's just an ideology, but most
of the time [the artists] do whatever they want." Perusing some of the
spring prints, Rajkevich points to a melancholy, whimsical line drawing
by Kelly Breslin with the crooning lyrics, "I love you but I have
chosen darkness"; a sentimental Cody Hudson print that reads, "What a
drag it is getting old"; and a comically rendered Dracula face with
gold "bling" teeth by Cho and Rajkevich.
"I'm mostly trying to capture certain feelings or emotions,
something to evoke emotions in words or images," says Rajkevich.
Mildly self-effacing, the men explain how they go the distance of a
Calvin Klein operation but earn the keep of a corner-store owner. The
shirts are for the most part custom-made, and the screen-printing is
mostly done in-house because the process is more complex than your
average printing job. (They use water-based inks that fade and soften
like vintage shirts and their designs often require oversized screens.)
These efforts reflect Cho's original motivation for starting the
company
four years ago. His wife now runs most aspects of Untitled, the apparel
business they opened in 1990, so that Cho could dedicate his time to
enlivening the men's fashion scene. Struggling to define his
coworker's
daily tasks, Cho anoints Rajcevich, who was once his store manager,
with
the title "Chief of Operations."
The repetitive click and buzz of their eight-person, part-time staff
provides the background music for their office banter, translating
Syndrome's big ideas into physical garments. A propeller-like
silk-screening machine squats in the center of cardboard boxes, blank
and used screens and random cans of paint. They sell to a handful of
domestic accounts, including Fred Segal and American Rag in Los
Angeles,
Penelope's in Chicago and, of course, Untitled and Urban Outfitters in
the U.S. and the U.K. Eighty percent of the sales go to Japan. Cho
explains that in the last two years the number of T-shirt businesses
has
increased by 300 percent; referencing companies such as Stussy, Ecko
Unltd. and Triple Five Soul, Cho says that T-shirts are the launch pad
for expanding in the fashion industry.
Also by Jessica Herman Stone roses
Dancing with myself
Flower power
Skin spun
Black Violin
Dziner clothes
No sweatshop
Designs for living
India chic
The craft of giving
Plush and stuff
Fur or Faux?
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