Coming soon to a T-shirt near you: pink bubble monsters, two-headed lavender snakes and a sinister Bugs Bunny brandishing big scissors.
These are among the designs artists have created for apparel companies — and there are more to come.
Art and commerce are becoming a potent combination as more apparel labels, particularly in streetwear and the action sports industry, collaborate with artists and bands to use their drawings and music as images and branding tools.
Some artists have signed deals to split profits equally with clothing manufacturers. A 27-year-old painter with the street name Buff Monster, who studied fine art and business at the University of Southern California, is one of them.
“I can be creative and focus on the art and, you know, the collections more from an artistic point of view and not be bothered by the detail of production, distribution and sales,” he said, declining to give his real name. Having previously displayed his signature pink bubbles on T-shirts for Vans and tricked out boardshorts for Hurley, Buff Monster partnered with Los Angeles’ Line to introduce his own Ts and hoodies for this holiday season.
“These artists can provide an amazing story for a T-shirt brand,” said Rama Mayo, who runs Line with his production partner, Guillermo Lopez, and works with other artists who go by monikers such as Freegum, Came Crashing and Hydrahead. “We make merchandise for these artists that have a strong existing fan base. It’s not about the graphics. It’s what’s behind it.”
The desire to reach a new audience drives many of these partnerships.
“Everybody wants to be connected to this hard-to-penetrate tastemaker,” said Darren Romanelli, the owner of high-end clothing label Dr. Romanelli. He approached Warner Bros. last year about injecting new life into the Looney Tunes brand with a collaborative project called DRx. “Kids obsess over these — street culture [and] collaboration culture,” he said.
Consumers also want wearable art, said Ted Vadakan, co-founder of Los Angeles’ Poketo, a line of wallets, T-shirts and bags, which has collaborated with more than 70 artists on everything from vinyl wallets to plastic and porcelain dinnerware that it hopes to introduce as early as next spring. “It’s a traveling art show,” he said.
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Shane Wallace, president of Active, a 16-door board sports retail chain based in Ontario, Calif., said that in his stores the artist, more than the clothing brand, attracts shoppers. He cited Obey and Rvca as the leading practitioners of collaborations between artists and apparel companies.
Los Angeles’ Obey was founded by Shepard Fairey, a skateboarder who started a clothing label focused on his street art. Rvca, based in Costa Mesa, Calif., has been operating its Artist Network Program since the company started in 2000 as a source of graphics and textile designs for its clothes.
“Instead of using four or five logos, [apparel companies] get into this pool of amazing artists,” Wallace said, noting that collaborations with artists make up less than 5 percent of Active’s stock because exclusivity adds cachet.
The trend, however, is becoming too commonplace for Miguel Garcia, co-owner of Barracuda, a boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles that carries street labels, including Buddhist Punk, Hysteric Glamour and Converse by John Varvatos. Garcia used to reserve the store’s stairwell as a blank canvas for street artists to paint murals and began selling artist-designed clothes in 2003. “I’m tired of it,” Garcia said. “It’s too mainstream,” added co-owner Diana Contreras.
Garcia said they plan to stay ahead of the curve by selling clothes with old-school rock graphics and exhibiting in-store conceptual art, such as cardboard signs drawn by vagrants, and photographs by Lionel Deluy.
For a mainstream entertainment company like Warner Bros., based in Burbank, Calif., the collaboration with Dr. Romanelli on DRx allows it to reach an edgy, older audience. Warner Bros. advertised for the first time in the June and September issues of Mean, a Beverly Hills magazine targeting urban hipsters, and approved a menacing mural painted on the side of an auto parts shop on La Brea Avenue near the intersection with Melrose in Los Angeles.
In the mural, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and other Looney Tunes characters dressed in hospital scrubs hover over body tissue shaped as “DRX.” Mear, the artist who created the mural, also spray-painted life-size characters on the walls of Los Angeles’ 181 Martel, Romanelli’s gallery-cum-boutique that will sell exclusively the DRx T-shirts, Army jackets, Converse sneakers and other items priced from $162 to $540.
To underscore the exclusivity, Romanelli said he made 100 jackets and 50 pairs of shoes that have the DRx logo embroidered on the tongues. While the line is geared to men, the tops can be unisex. Romanelli also decorated the space with stethoscopes, IV drips and a hospital bed.
“That’s a key component because when you walk into this space, you’ll automatically feel the difference,” said Maryellen Zarakas, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros. Consumer Products. After the launch party at 181 Martel last Friday, the exhibit is running for about a month before heading to Tokyo and other foreign cities, she said.
Because of the focus on visual artists, action sports label Ezekiel is targeting musicians through a program called Sound Movement Society that gives bands clothes and posts links to the groups’ Web sites on Ezekiel’s site. Since Ezekiel, based in Irvine, Calif., launched SMS on its Web site in June, the number of daily unique visitors more than doubled to between 900 and 1,000 from 400.
“Most of our retailers are more concerned with what we’ve been doing with Sound Movement than our [sponsored] team riders,” said Josh Johnson, the marketing and publicity director who is in charge of SMS, citing Zumiez as one of the stores excited about the new program. One band Johnson plans to add is The Redcoats Are Coming, a Brooklyn, N.Y., female duo that sings spooky but catchy pop songs with names like “The Haunting.” “Most of our consumers are only educated on surf and skate videos,” Johnson said. “There are so many good bands out there that aren’t so easily at their fingertips.”
In the case of Element Skateboard’s women’s brand, Eden, gathering a team of creative women allows the brand to reach beyond skater girls. The newest addition is Ishle Park, a Queens, N.Y., musician and poet who will release a CD cosponsored by Element next year. “It blends in more with our boutique vibe,” said Rhima Khoury, a sales manager at Element in Irvine, Calif. “It’s creating and projecting a positive image of women.”