This Is Not a T-Shirt

by Bobby Hundreds

  There was a deafening pause. A third lawyer jumped on the line. “Ahem, we’re gonna have to call you back.” And then a click.

  Ben and I rolled our eyes. I rose up and started making my way out of his office. We figured it was going to take the afternoon, if not a few days, to hear back from the thieves. But as I was opening the door, Ben’s line rang.

  “Hello?”

  “American Eagle is willing to forfeit the boxers without admission of wrongdoing. We will round up all the boxer shorts with the design at issue and donate them to a charity we work with in Africa. Are you okay with this resolution?”

  This time, we were happy to concede to their demands. “Yes. Very much so. Thank you.”

  American Eagle was right. We would have made a lot of money by signing a licensing agreement on those boxers. At twenty thousand pairs, sold for roughly $10 a pop and a 12 percent cut, Ben and I were fit to take home roughly $25,000. This was a lot of money to us at the time (it still is!) and could have solved so many headaches we were wrestling with: our looming rent, a shipment of new sweatpants that had arrived earlier that week, or even our own personal bills like car payments and salaries. Times were tough, but we were perfectly happy having nothing. Ben and I were rich off the hope and promise of what was to come. That’s all we needed to survive. But American Eagle had tried stealing that from us. Take our work, take our time, but you can’t take our legacy. Fuck that.

  It didn’t feel great saying goodbye to those twenty-five racks, but we knew we’d see them again. Over the years, Adam Bomb–driven product has been responsible for millions and millions of dollars in sales, making it one of the most iconic logos in streetwear history. It still cracks me up to think that somewhere a kid in Africa is wearing that rare set of The Hundreds X American Eagle Outfitters boxers, skidmarking all over a piece of streetwear history.

  19.   OUTSIDE THE LINES

  The world is my fuse

  —Rites of Spring, “Deeper Than Inside”

  CLICK-CLACK. I’M SEVEN years old and en route to Seoul, South Korea. It’s the summer of 1987. Click-clack. The armrest’s ashtray opens wide like Hungry Hungry Hippos. I swing the cold metallic flap shut with my finger. Cigarette ashes line the mouth of the tray, like margarita salt, left over from the rolled paper stub belonging to the businessman seated next to me. My hands probably shouldn’t be in here, poking around the darkness for buried treasure, but this is my in-flight entertainment for the next twelve hours.

  If you’re reading this on a plane, this is going to sound crazy. Even if you’re old enough to remember, I’m sure you’ve forgotten. But until a couple decades ago, adult passengers could wantonly smoke cigarettes in that seat you’re sitting in now. The nicotine headaches were real and pounding and the cabin was suffocating. There were no touch screens with movies on demand, no gluten-free southwestern chicken wraps at your beck and call, which is especially bizarre when I think back on traveling for twelve hours straight as a kid. When I was a child, my parents would walk me right up to the gate and hand me off to a random stewardess to cross the Pacific Ocean armed with nothing more than a bright yellow placard and a special pin from the pilot.

  I won’t even let my children go into the front yard without me. Yet when we were kids, my older brother, Larry, and I would take this international flight in the summers to stay with aunts and uncles and grandparents who spoke in a strange tongue, would squeeze our cheeks as if there were American honey in there, and drowned us with cartons of banana-flavored soy milk. Some of my favorite childhood memories come from those humid summer months spent in the postwar South Korean capital. We walked to school in the mornings, our shirts sticking to our backs under the dank air. Our book bags over our shoulders, we’d cross through street markets and hear local farmers in slippers selling round pears, nuts, and dried fish. We’d often get interrogated at the cash register. “Are you Korean? What a disgrace. Why don’t you speak Korean?” Larry and I would shrug, grab our snacks, and run.

  Upon returning to the States at summer’s end, I’d kiss the carpet in my air-conditioned bedroom. I was so happy to be home under the red, white, and blue. We had so much space, so much freedom and diversity. I loved going to a school where everyone had different-colored hair and ate various things for lunch: sandwiches and burritos and corkscrew pasta. Nothing made me appreciate home more than leaving it. But I always felt like a new person in the fall, as if I’d wrapped my mind a little further around the world over the summer in ways my classmates didn’t see and couldn’t understand.

  My dad worked himself into the ground. The only time he came up for air was for vacations. So, he used those brief windows of family time to pluck us from the California basin and show us the world. There were road trips up north to national parks and south of the border to Mexican beach towns. One summer, we stood on a blue glacier in Alaska. Next, we were whitewater rafting down the rivers of Costa Rica. I was a kid; of course I wanted to stay home with my friends over spring break and Dorito my brains out on Sega Genesis. But my dad was slowly curating our worldview. The more people we met, the more places we visited, the more we saw outside our suburban existence—and ourselves. The world is a big and limitless place. And those trips helped me understand how small and humble we truly are.

  When young people come to me seeking direction, whether in life or career, my first suggestion is to travel. Even if it’s getting on a bus and going three towns up the highway. The fastest way to grow is by leaving your comfort zone. You gotta stay uncomfortable, constantly adjusting to new contexts, shuffling life’s Rubik’s Cube around in your hands and studying it from all angles. If you’re at ease, if the answers are on your dinner plate every night, you’ll get lazy. You’ll stop listening to yourself, which can be fatal, and you’ll stop learning, which is even worse. If you’re being challenged, you’ll exercise your brain in creative ways. You have to persist and adapt. Traveling does that for you. Waking up in new beds, tasting exotic foods, deciphering directions when you can’t read the language. Traveling puts you in other people’s shoes. It teaches you compassion and empathy and, greatest of all, humility. It’s impossible to visit a country, encounter new people, and not imagine yourself as one of those people. The goal is to uncork yourself from the center of the universe.

  When people ask me what my favorite part of The Hundreds is, I say, “All the people I get to meet around the world.” The Hundreds has provided Ben and me (and our staff—from designers to salespeople) with an awesome gift: an excuse to exercise the privilege of worldwide travel. At least once a month, we fly somewhere. São Paulo, Brazil, to check in with our licensing partner. Stockholm, Sweden, to throw a party around a collaboration. Seoul, South Korea, for shopping and design inspiration. But one city in particular stands out as a second home for myself and The Hundreds, and it’s maybe not one you’d expect: the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, or for short, Hong Muthafuckin’ Kong.

  * * *

  “DUDE, THAT’S Alyasha.”

  “Go up to him and say something!”

  “Like what? ‘Dude, you’re Alyasha’? I think he’s aware of that.”

  We’re standing outside Agenda’s exhibition in downtown San Diego, and I’m gathering my nerve. Aaron Levant has gotten a few of these trade shows under his belt. Now he’s taking on the massive, corporate Action Sports Retailer show at the San Diego Convention Center. He’s unapologetically parked Agenda in an open warehouse right out front of the larger conference. It looks like a flea market inside with rolling racks gridlocked in a veritable mosh pit of start-up T-shirt brands, indie skate companies, and Etsy-ish women’s labels. Lots of fashion mullets, hot pink, and splatter paint. Relax, it’s 2005.

  The cooler kids have congregated on the sidewalk out front after the show. Ben and I are linking up with old friends and making new ones. San Diego had a vibrant design scene in the early 2000s, an answer to the fashion bubble of Rainbow flip-flops and jarhead f
ades that have historically demarcated sunny, sleepy S.D. There was Green Lady, who was responsible for HunterGatherer. Shepard Fairey had his Blk/Mrkt agency in Hillcrest with Dave Kinsey (Shep’s OBEY wheatpaste propaganda was still in its Andre the Giant Has a Posse infancy). San Diego was also home to the mainstream skate and surf industry. But the more radical designers were looking outside the space for inspiration—everything from designer denim like Diesel, to Japanese street fashion, to experimental hip-hop by the likes of Kid Koala and Deltron 3030. A collective of firebrand artists and brand visionaries was also coalescing downtown—Irons, selfdiscovery.prj, Human Resources—many of them refugees of Alphanumeric—a technical skate brand that was far ahead of its time.

  Alpha was founded and commandeered by Alyasha Owerka-Moore, a New York wunderkind in the urban and skate fashion arena who played a dominant role in Russell Simmons’s Phat Farm, Shut Skateboards, and American Dream Inc. Aly is lanky; like a Christmas tree that’s too big for its room, he curls over at the top. His father is black and Native American, his mother a blond Russian. In the nineties, when mainstream skateboarding was first finding its footing, Aly moved out west to launch Droors and Dub, the apparel component to DC Shoes. He then introduced Alphanumeric to the world, a culturally innovative skate brand known for its diverse team, technical apparel, and tie-ins with car culture. Now he was standing ten feet from me and Ben, wearing Fiberops, his latest project, an upscale Japanese street brand in partnership with Tabo Kagaya (RIP).

  “Excuse me, Alyasha,” I said. “My name is Bobby. My friend Ben and I started a new brand. It’s called The Hundreds and—”

  “I’ve heard of you,” he said, cutting me short.

  “You have?”

  “Yeah! Good to meet you. What are you guys doing for dinner?”

  It was that fast and Aly was that chill. He walked us a few hundred yards over to his studio in the Gaslamp Quarter. We shot some pool and went through his custom action figure collection. There were rare vintage Nikes clumped in heaps upstairs, foreign movie posters, punk rock patches, and pinup art. Aly’s studio is well-known—the ultimate cool guy’s man cave. Knives and pinup babes and timeless records. Later that night, we walked down the street with a larger crew for dinner at a local haunt. I was beside myself. Alyasha was one of my legitimate heroes. I had studied his every move from logo design to the bias of a plaid on a button-up. Why was he being so cool to us?

  “Just ride with it,” Ben said with a shrug.

  “Do you guys do any cut-and-sew?” Aly asked us later that evening, once we were properly stuffed and glazed.

  We sheepishly shook our heads. “No, just T-shirts for now.”

  “What are you doing next week?” he asked me.

  “Um, I … uh, nothing?” Absolutely freaking nothing. Damn, this was embarrassing.

  “You’re coming with me to Hong Kong. I want you to meet my agent out there, Ben Cheung. You guys need to be making cut-and-sew. He’ll get you situated.”

  It’s Friday night. “Like, next week, next week?”

  “My flight leaves Tuesday afternoon.”

  I’m going to Hong Kong.

  * * *

  HONG KONG is unlike any other place in the world. But I guess you can say the same for New York City, or Dubrovnik, or your local Cracker Barrel. Every place is unlike any other place in the world, really. Hong Kong, however, is its own reality. It’s simultaneously sci-fi and old world. It’s hi-tech yet primitive, like a pinball machine. It’s the incessant hum of pink powdered gas sputtering through neon signs. It’s the cacophony of varied languages colliding with cab horns. It’s the smell of churning AC exhaust intermingling with the air of a tropical storm. It’s roughly fourteen hours between LAX and HKG. Another half-hour train ride into the city. I remember the first time I emerged from the subway station and set foot into the Atlantic City–meets–Blade Runner bustle of Causeway Bay. I stood still for a moment, duffel bag in tow, but it felt like I was moving a hundred miles per hour. I stayed in a friend’s tenth-floor warehouse space, a glorified inventory closet, sleeping on a cot behind a fort of brown boxes. In my next visits, I’d lodge in hostels with communal bathrooms. I traveled alone on those first trips, exploring the island in solitude, listening to its rhythms. I ate greasy, delicious foods in unclean restaurants and paid dearly with paralyzing MSG poisoning or worse, dysentery.

  Many clothing companies produce their goods farther east in mainland China (in smoggy factory towns like Guangzhou and Shenzhen), but Hong Kong is China’s foyer. The nation’s waiting room.1 The international portal that is Hong Kong retains enough Western flavor to ease the cultural transition for tourists and people there on business. Typically, travelers hang their hats on the island for a few days before forging deeper into naked Chinese territory. But this is usually my first and final stop. It’s where I was trained and mentored as a young designer. Here, in the Blue Nail office, high in the Kowloon skyline, home to Ben Cheung, lies ground zero for The Hundreds apparel.

  If you were walking along one of Hong Kong’s busy streets in the middle of the day, you might not notice Ben Cheung scurrying along. He’s salt-and-peppery now but maintains a boyish grin and zeal. Sometimes he’ll pair funky prescription glasses with a puffy mesh cap, but then so do a lot of H.K. locals. Even if you’re sharing an office with Ben, you might miss him. And I often did. He’ll camouflage into the fabric swatch books surrounding his desk. Ben Cheung is an unassuming guy, but he’s punk rock, and his design speaks for him. As a founding member of the legendary Purple Pin one-stop shop that introduced nineties urban labels like Mecca, he broke off fifteen years ago to start his own venture, Blue Nail. Ben Cheung is our secret weapon—a Hong Kong production agent who is also one of the best designers in the game. You won’t find him discussed in any Hypebeast comments thread, but industry veterans know him. And they know he’s with us.

  I think there’s a misconception that because I work in clothing, I’m into fashion. I’m not. I enjoy the imaginative design that high fashion offers. I do appreciate the theater of it all—the extravagant photo shoots, the fashion week paparazzi, and the limited-edition exclusivity of special product. I just don’t get the politics and the snobbery that come with fashion—the pretense of it all. There’s an ugly classism that lingers in the garments like stale cigar smoke.

  That’s why I champion streetwear, because it’s less to do with the pomp and circumstance and more about the storytelling. I’m a black T-shirt, Chucks, and Dickies guy because (a) it’s pragmatic and no-nonsense attire, and (b) it says everything about what’s mattered most to me in my life: California, skateboarding, and punk. When it comes to design, I don’t look high and I don’t look to my side. I prefer to look behind me.

  Ben Cheung recognized this appeal to practicality. He appreciated that I’d rather dress everyday people in functional gear than outfit an emperor in new clothes. He wanted me to bear down on the essence of L.A. street style while expanding from within. I could use staple garments and silhouettes as a base while applying a deeper understanding of the materials to make the clothes exceptional. Ben explained the properties of twill, loop back, and ripstop nylon, opening my mind to a language of apparel design beyond T-shirt blanks and swap meet clothing. Men’s fashion might not be as flamboyant and complex as women’s, but I welcomed this challenge of designing within limited means. As Ben showed me, a half-inch adjustment in sleeve width could make a significant difference in a garment, as did 240 g/m2 cotton over 320 for a fleece pullover, or a tackle twill for a sewn-on patch versus self-fabric.

  Alyasha’s influence was also present in my work. I was a fan, then a student, then an unworthy reproduction. In my early Hong Kong trips, he would patiently teach me how to use the Adobe Illustrator pen tool to draw CADs. We’d sit in the shadows of my damp hostel, and he’d explain tech packs to me (technical drawings of the garment, blueprints for the factories to follow). Aly taught me there’s not only one way to open a pocket, that screen printing isn’
t just for T-shirts, and he’d take me research shopping at luxury boutiques and secondhand stores to prove it. Aly’s the reason I fell in love with Hysteric Glamour. His gift was in extracting and highlighting the details in garments and allowing his designs to flow from there. From the luster of pearl buttons to the coarse grain of raw denim, there is always a purpose and appropriate application for each design element. Alyasha is always buried in the minutiae of his designs, like a hacker poring over code. His degree of care is outweighed only by his enthusiasm for narrative.2

  * * *

  I HAVE terrible sleep habits, and jet lag just makes things worse. During my regular Hong Kong visits, I’d overcome the first forty-eight hours of sleeplessness by pounding the pavement in the fabric district. Here, in the bustling Kowloon neighborhood of Sham Shui Po, Ben Cheung and Alyasha Owerka-Moore would guide me through the fabric market, educating me on the feel, stretch, and wearability of different materials. For blocks, these tiny shops hung waterfall racks of fabric swatches. Small squares of tartan, yarn-dyed stripes, and allover-print polka dots stapled onto cards. If you liked what you saw, you’d call the mill’s number on the card to order a certain yardage—if there was any left. A lot of this stuff was overage, leftover reams of fabric from major-designer production runs. Occasionally, a Bape camo print might pop up, or a knockoff Burberry plaid, but there were also superior Japanese fabrics and premium denim made to order.

  Wading through the dense humidity, we traversed the district with tote bags teeming with swatches over our shoulders, the loose fibers clinging to our hair and sweat-stained backs. We’d step over stray dogs and naked beggars, pass sidewalk butchers selling soiled poultry in the sun, and duck out of freak thunderstorms. All to scour for ingredients to cook up in the next The Hundreds collection. There were entire stores just for fluorescent synthetics and zippers. One of my favorite haunts sold every kind of camouflage you can imagine, from tiger stripe to purple-brown French brushstrokes. Checkered flannels, corduroy, lenticular plastics, and speckled slub knits. It’s like a music producer finding an entire city of beats to thumb through.