Shepard Fairey and Rick Klotz are remix entrepreneurs. Fairey, famous for turning wrestler Andre the Giant's likeness into ubiquitous urban art (you know those Obey Giant flyers, posters, and stickers you see everywhere?), heads a design firm, a publishing house, and a clothing company – all dedicated to visual appropriation. Klotz sparked the trend of reworking pop iconography and product logos for streetwear: Fifteen years ago, he launched his Freshjive line by printing T-shirts with graphics based on the Tide detergent box, 7-Eleven's Big Gulp, and Special K cereal packaging. Wired talked to Klotz and Fairey about the art of pilfering popular culture.
WIRED: What's the point of your remixes? KLOTZ: It comes from the same impulse that drives hip hop producers to use samples in their music. It's about taking something you like and putting your own twist on it. If I take a logo and make a shirt out of it, I'm saying, Hey, this graphic that you see all the time is pretty cool looking if you draw out the right elements. FAIREY: I was in Hawaii and went to a skate shop. The guy working there recognized me and asked about a T-shirt I'd done – it was a design that superimposed the Obey Giant logo over this iconic portrait of Iggy Pop. He said he'd been looking all over and that he'd pay any price for it. I realized that he wasn't just interested in an Obey shirt or an Iggy Pop shirt – it was specifically the merging of the two images that he was after.
So how has this aesthetic changed fashion? KLOTZ: Well, to some degree, it's always been there – clothing companies have built off of each other's ideas since the beginning. Designers get a lot of ideas for new styles by looking through old clothing catalogs. But specifically in terms of brand appropriations, the remix aesthetic levels the playing field for aspiring designers. You don't necessarily have to be formally trained as an artist to take preexisting graphics and rework them. So when logo remixes first started to take hold, you saw a huge surge in companies doing them. But a lot of the stuff was garbage, and so a lot of guys went out of business. FAIREY: For a while, the joke was that anyone with Photoshop and a silk screen in their garage could start a clothing company. The truth is that it takes a lot more than that to do this stuff well. You've got to have a sharp eye to do quality work.
Rick, what's the story with the lawsuit filed against you by Stussy [a competing streetwear label]? KLOTZ: A few months ago, I made a group of shirts that parody the logos of companies like Quiksilver, Volcom, and even Shepard's Obey Giant brand. The idea was to comment on how similar everyone's designs are these days. One of the shirts was a Stussy takeoff – the graphic combines the word Freshjive with the scribble that Stussy uses in its logo (pictured below). Unfortunately, Stussy sued us, saying that the clothes would confuse customers. But the thing is, they've been doing logo appropriations for years. In fact, some of their most popular designs are takeoffs. They did a Gucci remix that they called Stucci and have reworked Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and others. [Stussy tells Wired that it has not made clothing with appropriated logos in the past 10 years.] FAIREY: The major difference is that Rick was parodying his peers instead of high fashion. Maybe it hit a little too close to home for Stussy.
Obey Giant's Shepard Fairey (left) and Freshjive's Rick Klotz David Ash
Some of Rick Klotz's best-known re-fashions
Remix Planet
| Intro
| Making of a Remix: Robot Chicken
| Making of a Remix: The Avalanches
| Making of a Remix: MTV2’s Video Mods
| iMods
