This Is Not a T-Shirt

by Bobby Hundreds

  2.  Today, the North American mall is buckling under the immensity of e-commerce. Its future is predicated on experiential distinctions, like Southern California–style outdoor malls or layouts that mimic mom-and-pop Main Street shopping. But malls as we remember them will soon be history, and retail as a whole will soon be completely renovated.

  3.  It wasn’t until much, much later in my life that I appreciated the art of radio stars like Tupac and Nirvana. The notion that these artists couldn’t be any good because other people listened to them seems ridiculous now.

  4.  To this day, I have yet to watch an episode of Friends.

  5.  Most consumers, of any product, in fact, are newbies. They aren’t concerned with setting trends, but they also don’t want to be late to the party. This is the bell curve of the “mainstream.”

  11. In Good Company

  1.  Arguably the greatest shoe of all time, the Air Jordan IV is the Nike designer Tinker Hatfield’s crowning achievement—a basketball shoe that works well with shorts, pants, or dresses.

  2.  Most of these stores were poorly merchandised, flea-market-style shitshows of dead-stock inventory that the owners had accumulated over the years. When the retro sneaker boom hit, they’d hatched accidental gold mines. One man’s trash became a sneakerhead’s treasure.

  3.  Drew and I are still good friends. He has made a successful career as an attorney and lives in Palos Verdes with his wife, Kathy, and children, Walter and Bea, who are better than you at every board sport you can imagine. And, as of this writing, they only come up to your elbows.

  12. Fanning the Flames of Content

  1.  T-shirts are a cheap and fast gateway into brand building. For any amateur businessperson, T-shirts are an ideal first endeavor. You can stick with the traditional program and catapult into seasonal fashion collections. Or you can make hundreds of millions with a direct-to-consumer printables business as Travis Barker did with Famous or Neek did with Anti Social Social Club.

  13. Get Up Kids

  1.  This is the meaning behind our Wildfire flag logo. Through community, a single idea can spread like an inferno.

  2.  Scotty’s friend base of degenerate skate rats would transcend Santa Clarita and grow up to dominate the streetwear industry. Diamond, Primitive, Huf, you name the brand and Santa Clarita kids were behind the scenes. We’ve probably cut paychecks to ten to fifteen people from the original clan; they could star in their own Dogtown and Z-Boys–type documentary. Scotty was the first to make it, though, if not the unlikeliest.

  3.  Scotty stayed with us for the next thirteen years. He spent the majority of that time being our sales director, which also made him our highest-paid employee. Almost everybody who interacted with Scotty—his clients and buyers—believed that the brand was his. Not because he peacocked around with that claim, but because he owned The Hundreds’ name with pride. He wasn’t there from the start, but pretty damn near it, and it was a sad and tearful evening when he told us it was time to say goodbye. We’d watched this kid elevate from bonehead to businessman and felt as if we’d raised him. Ben and I were proud of Scotty and, in a strange way, proud of ourselves for having brought him along.

  4.  This has been true for every generation since. Nostalgia explains not only Nike’s cyclical retro resurgence but also those of other luxury brands, like A Bathing Ape, which people admired in their youth but couldn’t afford until they caught a paycheck.

  5.  For me, this is par for the course. I can’t just enjoy a medium as a fan. If I get deep enough into it, I want to do it myself. I can’t watch a movie without putting myself in the director’s seat. I can’t read a book without rearranging paragraphs to my liking. And I couldn’t be a passive fashion consumer without figuring out how I could do it better myself. I wasn’t the type of kid who opened up the radio just to see how it worked. I was the kid trying to build a better radio.

  16. The Hardest Part

  1.  We ran that poor truck into the ground with deliveries back and forth from the screen printers and shops. Once the back window was lopped off and the transmission popped, Ben retired it and left it for two years in the corner of our parking lot, where it was converted into a makeshift home for pigeons, the way a shipwreck becomes a coral playground.

  17. The Black Tarp Strategy

  1.  In recent years, retail has transcended the wholesale model and moved more online direct between brand and consumer, threatening the necessity of trade shows altogether. Consumer-facing expos like Shanghai’s Yo’Hood and Long Beach’s ComplexCon are rethinking the model by eliminating the middleman and providing a Comic Con–esque experience for the customer. But trade shows cemented a networking foundation for the industry. As a brand, we’ve built many of our friendships over the years with fellow designers, sales teams, and media on the show floor (and especially the official after-parties). After all, how else would these dudes get their work done without industry hookups and champagne-room business deals? Trade shows are like summer camp for grown-ups who never grew up.

  2.  These were the early days of Aaron Levant’s scrappy Agenda, the premier platform for surf, skate, and street brands. Like our streetwear class that rebelled against the greater men’s apparel industry, Aaron was going toe-to-toe with the trade-show goliaths ASR and MAGIC. I’ve never met someone as dogged and indefatigable as Aaron. He once told me a story of how his parents shipped him off to a boarding school in the mountains and he hiked all the way home. It took a week. Sometimes I think he started Agenda just to prove that the dark horse could win the race. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry with but a handful of players. A ragtag, graffiti kid like Aaron Levant was a long shot. He’d been written off and scoffed at in meetings. Eventually, some of the bigger shows tired of his presence—the cooler brands were fleeing the corporate arena to be associated with his trendier indie show—and tried to absorb him. Their offers insulted Aaron. In turn, it wasn’t long before he devoured them. A few years back, Aaron did sell Agenda to the highest bidder. I think his company’s valuation clocked in at $50 million (but you didn’t hear it from me).

  3.  Ben and I met two people that week with whom we remain close friends and business confidants today: Andres Izquieta and Dee Murthy of Five Four. The USC grads had a year on us in the industry but were already charging ahead with some impressive cut-and-sew. That season, Five Four was attempting to be one of those LRG-ish brands that targeted the Creative Recreation–wearing, polished hip-hop set. After a few failed turns and changes of partners, Dee and Andres reinvented Five Four as a respectable menswear line. Today, their brand is heralded as a legitimate L.A. fashion success story, dominating the men’s subscription game, pulling in hundreds of millions a year. Oh yeah, and Andres was the guy wearing two Polo shirts at the same time. What a lame.

  4.  The crown jewel of High 5 was a promising brand named Mato NYC—two Chinese kids from New York who had a background in apparel design and production. Like Uppercut, they had a couple pairs of denim and some wovens on their hangers and attracted loving attention from buyers and media hunting for the next big thing. Mato folded soon after that year’s MAGIC show.

  5.  This store would close its doors a year later.

  6.  You know what? Trade shows in general were the antithesis of streetwear in the early 2000s. Most of the brands that we looked up to sold exclusively through their own stores or international distributors. Real streetwear brands didn’t wholesale in America. Yeah, we bucked that too.

  19. Outside the Lines

  1.  A city where hands are shaken and dollars are made. You don’t just have lunch to catch up with friends here. In this city, if there’s no business to be made over a meal, no clear path to profits cut by the time the check arrives, it’s considered time wasted. Time is currency in Hong Kong. Efficiency is a style of business valued as highly as parsimony.

  2.  Aly has fathered generations of brands in streetwear’s young h
istory, from the mass and American urban to the niche and Japanese. Every step was birthed with a story and purpose. Alphanumeric looked at late-nineties skateboarding attire from a technical standpoint—lots of performance fabrics and bungee cords—weaving in Asian car culture and backpack hip-hop. His latest, Thee Teen-Aged, was a denim brand rich with mid-century American nostalgia, rock and roll, and post-skate. There is a reason for everything in Aly’s choices. The greatest streetwear designers, to me, stand for the same principles. They all paint a cohesive story with their work, substantiated by experience and credibility. To me, it’s never mattered how financially viable an idea might be, how popular a brand gets in the mainstream, or whom the blogs are shouting out. After the hype dies (and it always does), it’s the emotional repercussions that bestow a legacy. It’s like that Maya Angelou quotation: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I couldn’t tell you the most popular sneaker to drop last week, but I do remember every Undercover piece I’ve worn and loved, the inside of the original SSUR store in New York, and my first X-Large OG Gorilla hoodie, because of how much culture and narrative were attached to the brands and their offerings. Nowadays, it’s all about the celebrity associations and price tag, but timeless design is all about the narratives, the historical and emotional value.

  20. Allover

  1.  He was dead right.

  2.  Social media hadn’t been invented yet, so I updated my blog several times a day as you would an Instagram. Except I was processing photos and embedding them into Dreamweaver HTML through an FTP. I was literally building and rebuilding our website every few hours to get fresh content out there. You kids have it so easy with your status updates and camera rolls.

  21. We Don’t Build Stores. We Build Stories.

  1.  Although we’re known for pop accents, our base is black. It’s a nod to the intersection of eighties California sports teams like the Raiders and Kings. It was also a common denominator among heavy metal, punk, and rap.

  2.  There is this sense of earning your stripes in following streetwear. There are specific barriers that make a product rare and exclusive. First is price. Obviously, the more expensive the clothes, the less people can afford them, the fewer kids at your school will be wearing the same thing. Then there is distance. When I got into the game, it was a geographical challenge. If someone wore a Bape polo or Supreme cap, you knew he had traveled to Tokyo or New York to get it (or his cousin had gone on vacation and hooked it up). E-commerce and eBay changed that. Nowadays, it’s about how long you were willing to wait in line for something. To say you camped out for an item scores bragging rights, as ridiculous as that sounds.

  3.  You can pay for all the accurate data, but there’s a social current that paints a truer depiction of the people, the consumer climate, and a brand’s viability in a specific market. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s the emotional X factor that keeps tastemakers and influencers ahead of the curve. One day, an algorithm will consider all environmental causes and trend fluctuations in reporting what’s next, but there will still be those of us who connect off-line and make authentic movements happen outside a computer’s scope of comprehension.

  22. Blow Up

  1.  The rapper Iggy Azalea later bought this character from me as her first logo: “SUPERIOR PUSSY.”

  2.  Over the years, we’ve worked closely with Disney on collaborative projects. It’s amazing how it treats its characters—especially Mickey Mouse—as actual beings with behaviors and histories. “Donald would never say that! Minnie doesn’t wear shoes like this!” Long after Walt’s departure, after decades of worldwide proliferation, Disney remains a stalwart brand. That sacredness, that brand reinforcement, is a testament to how Disney persists and is so well-preserved.

  3.  An old streetwear trick. If you ever have trouble selling something, slap a basketball on it and hold on to your butts.

  23. Boom

  1.  Ben and I bought good, grown-up homes, and he eventually forced me to sell my RAV4. “It’s not good for company morale for the boss to be driving the worst car in the parking lot,” he said, shaking his head. I didn’t see what was wrong with my SUV. It got me from point A to point B just fine, even if I was missing a taillight and the glove compartment’s mouth dangled open as if it were aghast. I relented and leased a platinum BMW, with all the trimmings. (“What you think I rap for, to push a fuckin’ Rav 4?” —Kanye West, “Run This Town”)

  2.  I once went two days without eating, before I settled on a can of Spam that had survived three moves. I dusted off the tin, but couldn’t find an expiration date. I called the 800 number, and the lady asked me to read the last four digits off the stamped code. Turns out I had several years left. “Wanna hear a secret?” she said. “The truth is we don’t know when it expires. For all we know, it lasts forever.”

  3.  Sampling frozen ants that Alex Atala (of São Paulo’s D.O.M.) plucked from the Amazon rain forest (tasted like lemon!) or drinking sake at Hong Kong’s Yardbird with Lindsay Jang and Matt Abergel.

  25. Big Deal

  1.  The way I’ve always understood it, nothing is guaranteed except disappointment because that’s an outcome you can create. I think I’m part optimist, part pessimist. I just go with whatever works in my favor under the circumstances. Pessimists always win out, I’ve surmised. They’re either wrong or pleasantly surprised. And I like those odds.

  2.  Something to do with a man who’d walked up to Young’s car, rolled up his sleeve, and flashed a tattoo of stick-figure sex. Young drove away, then came back with a friend and broke the dude’s arm. He later threatened one of the witnesses in the case with “I’m going to cut the throat of your mother, your wife, your daughter, and you.”

  3.  A brand like Diamond is a prime example of what the dollars look like beyond racial and cultural borders and customer silos. Nick Tershay’s skate hardware brand was gunning for hundreds of millions, powered by high-profile apparel collaborations with Wiz Khalifa and Cassie. Diamond defied the skate industry’s tired parameters and protocol, echoing Nick’s interest in rock and rap, fast cars, and chunky watches. He created a lifestyle brand that made a lot more sense to the twenty-first-century teenager than a pigeonholed logo. Who was the next Diamond? Where was the next Supreme? Did the States have their own A Bathing Ape? The sharks circled. The Hundreds started to look a lot more appetizing.

  4.  Obviously, I took that to heart. Years later, I designed the Wildfire flag logo that is our mainstay icon today. Thank you, Tommy.

  26. Don’t Get Me Wrong

  1.  It gets worse when the majority of your audience misinterprets your offerings. I remember Fred Durst complaining about this with Limp Bizkit—how his fan base became the meathead bullies his music stood against. Creative people are forlorn types, but this is where things get profoundly lonely. To have all this love for all the wrong reasons.

  27. Point Proven

  1.  Social bonds and identities are not like businesses; they’re not dependent on revenue. Once people feel as if they belong to a brand, they stick with the association forever, even if the business is defunct. This also explains the success of dead brands in vintage or why licensing companies resurrect labels time and again.

  28. Sometimes It Takes Some Time

  1.  We were also reacting to the rise in American Apparel’s popularity. White hipster T-shirt labels capitalized on Dov Charney’s razor-thin, extra-medium soft tee, but there was nothing “street” about a threadbare thrift store shirt. The coarse and boxy Alstyle AAA T-shirt offered a sharp rebuttal.

  2.  Cool is polarizing. By its very nature, Cool means Uncool to a smaller subset, and as Cool grows, it shifts the weight to the other side of the scale. With regard to streetwear, you’re never as cool as you are on day one. Every day you lose a little bit of credibility to someone. As you gain popularity, you co
nversely lose traction. The yin and yang of notoriety.

  3.  I must disclaim—in the interest of perspective and as an admission of privilege—The Hundreds was still a robust business at our lowest lows. At our worst, the brand was still operating as a $10 million company. While earnings dipped in the States and other key markets around the world, The Hundreds was stoking fires in new territories like Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, Dubai, and Russia.

  4.  This store met an early end just a couple years later, once this short-lived streetwear trend subsided. We empathized.

  5.  Then we rented out that extra warehouse space to a rising star in the fashion industry, our friend’s label Fashion Nova. Score.

  6.  Some examples of missed connections: The Hundreds X Coca-Cola, Deftones, Pixar, Teva, Street Fighter II, Stüssy, Mad magazine, Hayley Williams of Paramore, Mortimer Mouse, Theophilus London.