This Is Not a T-Shirt by Bobby Hundreds

Author:Bobby Hundreds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

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