The more time I spent in Hong Kong, the harder it was for me to know myself apart from it. In my earlier travels, I didn’t know where to eat outside the mall’s California Pizza Kitchen. Now I’d zigzag fluidly through the neighborhoods and MTR subways, stopping momentarily at corner vendors for a swig of bitter black tea or fatty dim sum. I’d bathed in the chaos of typhoons and night markets and let the oily bedlam wash over me. Even at home in Los Angeles, I’d feel most at ease near busy streets and crowded restaurants. Suddenly American sidewalks felt sparse and the rooms deafeningly quiet, and I was strangely lonely. At work, I also noticed Hong Kong’s hand guiding mine in the design process. I went from dressing in solids to designing with clashing patterns, the unlikely marriage of colors that reminded me of the dissonant open-market fabrics. While other designers used palettes of primary reds and blues, mine were now montages of kaleidoscopic confetti. I mixed yellow houndstooth with overdyed indigo. Army fatigues with a buttery chambray.
I was already averse to conformity, but Hong Kong persuaded me to color further outside the lines. By its biology, the nation itself exists between rules: Hong Kong is a melting pot of cultures—ethnic, social, and underground. It’s the gateway to Asia, but only recently free from British dominion, making for a unique English accent. Because of its geography, there’s heavy Australian crossover, and due to its trading ports Hong Kong attracts Americans on business. The fashion manifestation is, unsurprisingly then, characteristically indecisive. In Hong Kong, it’s normal to eat dinner at an Irish pub with a French Chinese girl from Melbourne. Just as it’s okay to match bright red basketball shoes with a camouflage backpack and a parasol. The people dress more confidently because they’re liberated from order and tradition. It’s an open-minded fashion that supports experimental design. It was this philosophy that enabled me to see L.A. style anew. I’d learned a lesson that could only be gleaned in the bowels of southern Kowloon, seven thousand miles from home.
At the time, I don’t think our customers understood the design direction of The Hundreds apparel. I’m sure it was confusing. We had established our name on colorful parody T-shirts that sourced nostalgic 1980s and ’90s culture. So, I’m assuming they wanted something more straight and narrow from us once it got to outer layers. Maybe a basic zip-up sweatshirt? Skinny jeans? No—our first cut-and-sew offerings were made up of $300 raw selvage Japanese denim, wet micronylon jackets, and cardigans. I designed multicolored JAGS-patterned leather belts, zebra-stripe cargo shorts, and a reversible pink-and-brown scarf hoody (a scarf that also acts as a hood). It wasn’t a scalable model—nothing that could be packaged and marketed to a broader customer base—but I was throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. I was experimenting. Actually, I was learning.
Over the years, we’ve whittled down the collection to a unified The Hundreds aesthetic, merchandised sellable seasons around it, and cemented a “look” that is entirely ours—classic, core California streetwear. But when you get down to the granular details—the warp and weft of the jeans, the railroad tracks of a flat-lock stitch—you’ll find tailored into the ribbed cuffs the noise and aroma of Hong Kong, Ben Cheung and Alyasha Owerka-Moore and their invaluable lessons, and a twenty-five-year-old me, splashing paint onto the sidewalks and jumping into rainbow puddles.
20. ALLOVER
THE EASIEST WAY to chronicle streetwear is by trend. Nobody keeps track of the straightforward stuff—the yarn-dye striped shirts, and coach’s jackets, and knit beanies. That’s all white noise. Streetwear’s timeline is punctuated with boisterous, and often regrettable, trends that draw store lineups and fetch fat resale prices. It’s on the brands to get a little weird and design outside the box. But that’s not what sets off market trends. It’s rappers and other celebrities who popularize fads. Like what Tyler, the Creator did with tie-dye and Supreme box caps. Or how Kanye moved on Rob Garcia’s En Noir and made leather jogging pants popular enough to garner a Jimmy Kimmel joke. But streetwear wasn’t always on celebrities’ radar, and vice versa. In fact, streetwear, in its early stages, did its best to work outside the mainstream spotlight. When I think back on those years and how trends ignited, I think it was more about brands working together to reject the status quo and impact the market. The greatest example of this is what happened with allover print in the mid-2000s.
Allover print is exactly what it sounds like: a repeating screen-printed pattern that covers an entire T-shirt or hooded sweatshirt. Military camouflage is the original allover print. We begin with camo and end somewhere around Louis Vuitton’s LV monogram. Somewhere between exists a recurring trend that permeates streetwear every five to ten years. As you read this, depending on the season and where we’re at on the fashion spectrum, allover print sounds either fun and irreverent or downright hideous. It’s a recurring trend that never ages well. But every few years, we catch a collective bout of amnesia and welcome it back with open arms. It’s like swearing into the toilet, “Ugh, I’m never drinking again!” while rolling around the cold tile with a hangover and twelve hours later taking another tequila shot to the neck.
Fashion volleys between extremes. Responding to the urban industry’s slate of sedated tones and uninspired graphic design in the mid-2000s, young independent streetwear brands cracked the color palette wide open. I think we were all bored of department store labels like Rocawear and Akademiks. The more sophisticated consumers wanted to stand out. They didn’t just want to wear something that was exclusively found in Japan. They wanted their clothes to pop in a crowd. A Bathing Ape did that. The premium Japanese label wasn’t afraid of dancing all over the Pantone book. While American street labels were conservatively paring their hues to dark grays, navies, and reds, Bape was vomiting fluorescent Skittle rainbows over their customers. In fact, their oversized allover-print sweatshirts were often ridiculed and compared to pajamas—loud, Technicolor, and immature.
We wanted to make something like that but didn’t have the means to produce overseas. We couldn’t cut-and-sew allover-printed sweatshirts here in the States, and even if we could, we couldn’t meet the minimum orders. So, we resorted to an old-school screen-printing technique called belt printing using antiquated machinery that most shops discarded at some point in the 1980s.
By the mid-2000s, there was one factory left in L.A. that had held on to its belt printer. Pac Splash knew that allover print would find its way back after a mad run in the 1980s.
“You T-shirt companies and your belt prints,” grumbled the man in charge. “One day everyone wakes up and decides that they want allover prints again. What do you do, call each other?”
He leads us to the back of his warehouse and pulls back the covering on the Gutenberg press of screen printing.
“Sure, we’ll dust off the machine, work it to the bone for a year, and then y’all will kill it outta nowhere, for no reason. Happens every decade.”1 He shakes his head.
The way belt printers work is by repeating a pattern over a garment’s seams. A typical screen-printing machine snags a hemline or collar, and the paint pools around the bump, making for an unsightly error along the creases. But a belt printer steamrolls right over those stitches. It’s not an entirely clean and exact process, but it’s a convenient alternative to doing it the long way (printing the T-shirt panels first, then sewing the piece together).
The Venice-based, Rob Dyrdek–owned Rogue Status did it first. You may remember their Gun Show pattern, with rows of firearms marching around the tees and hoodies. Other popular allover prints in streetwear at the time were Nom de Guerre’s Arabic writing, Crooks & Castles’ Chain Gang, and Mighty Healthy’s MCM rip.
Our first contribution to the allover-print craze was the “Paisley,” offered on a black zip-up hooded sweatshirt, incorporating repeating white (or tonal black) buta droplets, inspired by a classic bandanna print. To be honest, I don’t even like the paisley pattern, but I did like how it looked on a sweatshirt template. This allover print was uniquely ours. Pac Splash p
rinted five hundred of them, and we planned to sell them for $100 each, which we thought was fair considering the elaborate printing costs and because we were cool, dude.
There’s a video I’d shot floating around on YouTube of 7909 Rosewood Avenue—not yet our first store, but our first office. It would become a makeshift clubhouse in the early afternoons, depending on how much we felt like doing our jobs, how much our friends felt like doing their jobs, and who had weed. In the video, there are a few of us hanging out front on the narrow sidewalk, including Nick Tershay of Diamond, Mega of Black Scale, and Aaron Pepper (RIP). The guys are hovering around a brown cardboard box that is overflowing with black hoodies. Sleeves are haphazardly hanging over the edge like tentacles as the guys dig in. Ben and I had just gotten back from Pac Splash with a fresh batch of Paisley hoodies, and everyone wanted first dibs. You can see Nick and Mega pull the zips on, throw their hoods up, and study how the pattern locks up along the sleeves’ edges.
Seeing the sweatshirts on their backs, Ben and I couldn’t wait to share them with the rest of the world. We didn’t have the patience to go through the traditional wholesale channels, selling them to stores and shipping them out weeks later. So, I went on our website and announced the Paisley hoodie would go on sale later that night in our online shop, even though we’d never set up a proper e-commerce platform before. I uploaded the video to our blog, along with flats of the sweatshirt and photographs of the homies in the Paisley hoodie.2 Then I jury-rigged the PayPal cart together with a spool of dental floss and passed out on the sofa around 3:00 a.m. The splash page for thehundreds.com now advertised the new Paisley hoodie for sale. The last thing I remember was turning my phone off. I wanted to sleep just a tiny bit before Ben blew my phone up in the morning with something I’d mistyped out of exhaustion.
* * *
THUMP. I cracked an eyelid open. That sounded as if it came from … thump thump thump … my front door. What time was it? I looked at my phone. Dead battery. I looked for the clock. Eight thirty in the morning. It must be my landlord. I’m late on rent again. “Hold on, putting pants on.”
“Bobby! It’s Misa!” It’s my girlfriend. She’s usually on her way to work at this time in the morning. What’s she doing at my apartment? I swing the door open and the world rushes in. The angry morning traffic, streaks of sunlight through the trees, and Misa in her work clothes with a flushed—yet excited—face.
“Is your phone off? We’ve been trying to call you all morning!”
“We?”
“Me and Ben. He sent me here because we couldn’t get through to you.” She catches her breath, setting up the important news. “Pull the website down! You have to take it down, now!”
“What? Why?”
“You guys sold out of those Paisley hoodies, but you oversold. I guess you blew out of them in the first hour they went up, so for the past five hours, you guys have been selling tens of thousands of dollars of hoodies you don’t have!”
Oh, my Gucci. As preposterous as this sounded, she was making perfect sense. One of the problems with substituting a legitimate shopping cart for a PayPal button was that there was no way to set an inventory or limit. Neither Ben nor I had foreseen this problem. We’d anticipated selling only a handful of hoodies overnight. We’d planned on absorbing the orders as they rolled in over the next few days, one by one. What we hadn’t imagined—no way, no how—was that we would sell thousands of sweatshirts overnight. I hastily kissed my girlfriend, thanked her, and then whipped my laptop open. Within minutes, I had pulled all traces of the Paisley hoodie off our website. Then I booked it to the Rosewood office, where Ben was pacing back and forth on the street, waiting for me.
“Fuck!” he screamed. As is often the case with Ben, I couldn’t tell if he was mad or happy or mad that he was happy. “What do we do?”
We let the dust settle on that golden Friday morning and started by refunding over half the money and fulfilling the rest of the orders. Then we celebrated our win by treating ourselves to lunch at an Italian restaurant on Melrose. It was 11:00 in the morning, and we were the only patrons. Ben, Scotty, and I rolled up in our loud streetwear clothes. These ratty kids had just made $100,000 overnight. It was like waking up to find your band had topped the Billboard charts. We sat around that table in reverie, slurping our Bolognese, celebrating our first hit single. If there were this many people out there who were down to buy something from us, what else could we sell them?
Bigger question: What do we do with all this cash? We weren’t stressing the luxuries and toys (I was perfectly happy with my rusty RAV4). What we needed was a way to make this money make more money. What would help our brand, a community-oriented project, be the best version of itself?
We returned to the office, stood on the curb, and stared at our big open windows. Truth be told, Ben and I had forever talked about having a shop one day. But that future was now in sight. A retail store seemed adult and serious. Plus, it required a lot of money. I looked around and imagined kids shopping, learning, and making friends. Customers lining up for limited-edition product, locals skating up and down Rosewood Avenue. We already had a solid little crew forming around our clubhouse, but if we had a permanent home, The Hundreds could convert a generation of youth. Ben and I secretly wanted our first store to be in the corner spot of Fairfax and Rosewood’s main intersection, but Sal Barbier had already planted his flag there with his SLB boutique. So, for the time being, we preferred to keep a low profile. We stayed in the cut. It was very streetwear of us.
“We’re gonna turn this into a store now,” Ben said, of 7909. “Our store.”
Everyone already knew to find us there. It was time to make it official. Outside a couple plates of ravioli and some table wine, we didn’t pocket a dime of that Paisley money. We drew up plans for our first store, instead. Now was the time for The Hundreds Los Angeles.
This was the end of the beginning.
21. WE DON’T BUILD STORES. WE BUILD STORIES.
ONE DAY, I’LL have to explain brick-and-mortar retail stores to my grandchildren. “You know that big apartment building on the corner? Where your friends X-343a and m29u live? That used to be a shopping mall,” I’ll tell them. “Each one of those apartments was once a store that sold stuff we needed.”
“Like a hundred little Amazons?”
“Yes, dear, something like that.”
“But Grandpa, didn’t they just drop off everything you bought with drones?”
“Not quite, it was the other way around. Before Amazon delivered our military rations to us, we had to get into our cars and drive ourselves to the stores.”
“Grandpa! You drove your own cars?”
“Yes, as dangerous as that sounds, the government trusted us to control our own speeding death machines down the highways.”
“Wow! How did people find the time to go to the store for eggs and shoes and things between fighting robots and fleeing the receding coastline?”
“Well, it’s worse than you think. We had to drive all over town and go to different stores for different items. We bought our groceries from a supermarket. We bought our phones from an electronics store. And there were entire shops just for greeting cards!”
“Sigh. No wonder Emperor Trump came into power. America wasn’t making very good decisions back then, Grandpa.”
“No, I guess we deserved the fall of democracy.”
“Grandpa?”
“Yes, dear?”
“What’s a phone?”
* * *
WE HAD four hundred square feet to play with. A white box the size of a large living room. This was to be our first store, and we needed to make a statement. Plus, we were still looked at as a small-time T-shirt project—a couple of kids with an elaborate extracurricular activity. A physical home base would tell the world we meant business.
Japan was driving the street fashion trends, especially with regard to store build-out. If you looked at what New York boutiques were doing, there was a m
inimalist influence that trickled down from Tokyo retail architecture. Blank walls, cold gray concrete, floating racks with spaced-out hangers. A single item of each style rested quietly, immaculately folded on a birch-wood shelf, enveloped with incense smoke. I’m not sure if it was conscious, but because the inventory wasn’t grab-and-go, you were at the staff’s mercy for sizes and colors. The clerks dictated the shopping relationship. It was in their power to judge whether you were worthy of buying something in their shop. And thus, the snobby, cool guy stereotype of streetwear retail was born. Although, for better or worse, that cool guy attitude and snobbery contributed to streetwear’s enduring mystique and allure.
Eventually, a new wave of sneaker and streetwear stores would open across the world, simulating the clean and subtle aesthetic. How convenient! Minimalist design was not only easy to duplicate but also gentle on the pocketbook. All that was required to complete the look were a set of IKEA LACK shelves bolted into the wall, glass countertops, and some Medicom Bearbrick toys.
If we wanted our shop design to stand apart and be noticed, we had to fall out of line. Instead of stark concrete, what about warm wood? We invested in dark custom cabinetry and flooring that synced up along the edges and projected a seamless design. As opposed to sterile white tones, we made our store black, which correlated with the color used most prominently throughout our brand.1 No prefabricated IKEA furniture in the shop, not even in the bathroom. We didn’t cut any corners. Fearful that our brand’s longevity would last only as long as the fixtures, we paid top dollar for the finest-quality materials.
This Is Not a T-Shirt Page 14
