Artist-Born Brands Tap Authentic Communities

SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Clothing brands launched by graphic and street artists tend to come with a left-leaning, anti-authoritarian culture rooted in the mores of the graffiti community. Deep suspicion of faceless corporations, mistrust of state power, a belief in community over competition and a general tendency towards anti-capitalism are not things one would normally identify as the basis for a successful fashion business. Yet a number of small apparel brands started by artists and artist communities as accessible platforms for their work have harnessed social media fluency, originality, collectability, a sense of shared purpose and a personal connection to the creative process to generate the kind of fierce brand loyalty and buzzy product drops that should make them the envy of the wider apparel industry.

The Facebook page for the London-based brand AnyForty, launched six years ago by illustrator and graphic designer Alan Wardle, is peppered with pictures of the label’s fans showing off their purchases and sharing styling tips, well-established behaviour for teenaged girls, but markedly less common among the burly, bearded men who make up AnyForty’s core consumer base. AnyForty offers four “chapters” consisting of eight to sixteen garment designs per year, as well as half a dozen “strike” products that appear between collections, all created in collaboration with artists from around the world. The latest “chapter” features designs by 45rpm, Mr Bowlegs, Moose & Yeti, Zombie Corp and Jack & Mac, as well as Wardle’s own designs. Each design is manufactured as a strictly limited edition of 100, but whether featuring an established artist or a little-known up-and-comer, all items are priced at the same affordable price point: £25 (about $40) for a t-shirt, £50 for sweatshirt.

But what the brand’s Facebook page makes clear is that Wardle operates at the heart of a family of artists and fans (not to mention his actual family – his mother has been lending a hand at the new dispatch and distribution centre) and a wider community of alliances extending to musicians, skaters and other small independent businesses. The sense of community is reinforced by tactics like temporary shops, events and publications. Last year, Wardle took a space at “pop-up mall” Boxpark in London’s Shoreditch and hosted a series of in-store gigs and parties that allowed him to meet his customers. This year, he’s celebrating six years of artist collaborations with a book of designs and an exhibition that’s set to open in June.

AnyForty merchandise | Source: AnyForty

“I have a core of really dedicated people around AnyForty,” explains Wardle. “When I have a new collection coming out, I flag it up on social media; there’s definitely a core of customers who are hungry for everything I drop.” The countdown to the arrival of a new collection is accompanied by snaps from behind the scenes of the lookbook shoot and Wardle unpacking boxes. “I get a lot of feedback because people can see it’s just me,” says Wardle. “If they look on Instagram they can see that it’s a real person, working hard and being passionate about what they’re doing, rather than just another faceless brand.” Wardle compares his customers’ excitement over each new product drop to the way he felt about magazines as a teenager, describing the mounting anticipation before the release of a new edition and the hunger to build up a complete set.

AnyForty sells through 14 independent retailers in the UK, two stockists in Australia, and two online retailers, as well as directly to consumers through the label’s own site. The last few years have been tough on small shops, which, in turn, has made things difficult for labels like AnyForty, but the number of designs the company produces per “chapter” has increased year-on-year and, in 2014, Wardle is planning to visit trade shows in Germany and the US with the aim of finding European and North American distributors for the label.

Eva Balg started her Kid Vanilla label about six years ago, after studying fashion at Antwerp’s Royal Academy. At the time, she was living in a big house with a group of friends, all of whom were involved in graffiti and art. They started a small gallery on the ground floor and exhibited work by a different artist each month. “I thought it would be nice to have a brand that combined art and fashion,” recalls Balg. The first Kid Vanilla collection — colourful sportswear-influenced garments with striking graphics produced in collaboration with artists that she met through the house and gallery — was started with €500 (about $700) and the help of two friends. Now, based in Cologne, Germany, the label puts out one collection a year for men, women and children, with prints designed by her and an invited artist, such as the Barcelona-based graffiti writer Numi. Early on, Balg won a place at the Bread & Butter trade show and received interest from stockists in Scandinavia and Japan, both of which are now important markets for the label. Kid Vanilla currently has around 25 points of sale worldwide, most of which are small boutiques and streetwear shops, or galleries that sell artist-associated clothes.

While the business has grown, Balg explains that it is the connection with artists that still lies at the heart of Kid Vanilla. "It's not only about me and the brand; I've tried to push my friends too," she says. "It's authentic — I'm not using street culture and graffiti; it's what I grew up with and what my friends did. It came naturally and quite spontaneously." Balg is careful, however, to select collaborators whose graphic work fits with the punchy but humorous Kid Vanilla aesthetic, a choice that has allowed the label to hang on to an identifiably sassy look.

Kid Vanilla ice cream sweater | Source: Kid Vanilla

Like AnyForty, Kid Vanilla has grown a tribe of core customers who are involved with the artists and the scene around them, and form the heart of the company’s wider customer base. The label’s approach – prioritising limited editions, DIY business practices, direct contact with customers — is echoed by other artist-centric labels, such as Dutch artist Parra’s Rockwell brand and Barcelona-based Animal Bandido, which was created by masked artist Zosen Bandido and designer Clàudia Font. Operating outside of the traditional fashion system, these labels rely on their fans’ excitement over new artwork, their desire to get their hands on designs made in very limited production runs, and their impulse to build up a collection of artist-associated works to drive sales.

Tristan Manco, author of several books on street art and graffiti, including The Street Sketchbook, points out that there is nothing new in artists expanding their working practice into pieces that their peers and fans can afford, pointing back to Keith Haring's Pop Shop, which opened in Manhattan in 1986. "It's cyclical — in the 1980s in New York you'd get a Keith Haring-printed t-shirt; and three decades later it's happening again. What's new now is how it works on a global as well as a local level." Fitting with the do-it-yourself ethos of the scene, graffiti and street artists, who move around frequently from city to city, often carry self-initiated products with them, like 'zines, stickers and t-shirts. "Meeting other artists and selling person to person within other markets, they can end up shifting quite a bit [of merchandise]."

Manco identifies the challenge that exists for any artist wishing to step up from this level to build a more formal business: “They start as anarchic and become brands that need to protect themselves when their designs get bootlegged. How do they stay authentic?” It’s a tension that famously dogs Shepard Fairey’s Obey and other internationally ubiquitous streetwear brands with roots in street art. “Today, Obey is stocked next to Levi’s, but [Shepard Fairey] has been around for a long time — if you were into Obey in 1998, you’d now find the label far removed from its origins in street art and being a sub-cultural brand.  People wear these t-shirts who may have no idea how they started – Obey was an idea about anti-branding, using a logo that referenced the work of [artist] Barbara Kruger — but today it’s become a powerful brand itself.”

The San Francisco-based company Upper Playground provides one model for how artist-designed garments selling to a core creative community can be expanded into a larger business without losing its all-important authenticity. Started in the late 1990s in founder Matt Revelli’s apartment, Upper Playground now has four stores — in San Francisco, Berkeley, Portland and Mexico City — as well as the Fifty24SF art gallery, various online projects and links to events, magazines and music. “At the end of the day, the Upper Playground brand is really a platform that has many different things under one umbrella,” explains Ravelli. “I feel that that is the culture I am a part of. Thinking back to 1999, lines were being blurred, it was okay to like country music, skateboarding and abstract aboriginal art. I felt that genres had started bending and merging. I wanted Upper Playground to reflect that.”

Upper Playground now produce hundreds of products across multiple categories — everything from plush toys to infant onesies, snap back caps to sweaters — at accessible price points ($24 for a men’s t-shirt, $50 to $90 for a hoodie) which sell to customers who range from “collectors and die-hard fans to celebrities, musicians, professional artists and students to pretty much all kinds of people from all walks of life that appreciate creative merchandise and art.”

Upper Playground store, San Francisco | Source: Upper Playground

Part of the core ethos that has given Upper Playground longevity and allowed it to grow as a business has been the company’s insistence on prioritising the enablement of artists over profits. “The gallery has always been what I think helped us stand apart,” explains Revelli. “With Upper Playground being one of the first pioneers of the art-clothing genre, I always knew it was important to run the gallery in concert with the store. The relationship has typically been taking dollars from Upper Playground to finance a gallery that doesn't operate with the financial constraints of a normal gallery and without the bureaucracy of a museum. We are the kind of space that encourages artists to do what they want to do without the pressure of having to sell work if that's not what they're interest in doing.”

Revelli's latest venture is an on-demand design, fabrication and e-commerce platform run via the The Citrus Report (an online arts magazine started in 2008 with links to Upper Playground). Using state-of-the-art design software and digital printing tools, the invitation-only platform (participants are curated by Upper Playground) lets artists completely cover garments and accessories in their graphic designs, with dramatic and often spectacular results. What's more, participating designers and artists are able to experiment with fashioning their own garments without having to take on the financial risks and overhead costs normally associated with starting a clothing line. Indeed, they never even have to handle the product; once ordered, a design is printed, stitched and dispatched directly to the customer.

“I see this as a natural extension of what Upper Playground has been doing for years,” says Revelli, “which is to support and empower creatives to make outstanding merchandise, doing what they do best.”