American Apparel makes nice shirts, don't get it twisted. The problem is, American Apparel blanks are ubiquitous to the point of detriment. Your band's t-shirts are printed on AA, your dodgeball team's shirts are printed on AA, your damn pool cleaners business shirts are printed on AA. They're everywhere. They're places I don't want to be and places I vow Avo Goth will never tread.
This being the case we decided to venture outside of Dov's empire to create our 2nd Avocado Goth shirt. The first place I looked was Alternative Apparel, AA's long-time co[y-cat competitors. Competitors is a stretch. If these 2 manufacturers were basketball teams American would be the Globetrotters and Alternative would be the Washington Generals. Just Alternative Apparel's catalog made me puke a little, so so bad. the models are bad, the graphics are bad, the whole things just reeks of clueless, like, without a clue not the rad movie with a then chubby Brittany Murphy (RIP)
Aside from the omni-presence of these 2 companies I also believe that the silhouette of the t-shirts them selves are less and less relevant everyday. American Apparel has made small technical adjustments to move away from the days of tight-ass t-shirts and side-swept hair-do's of the early 21st century suburban teen masses, but for the most part their basic wholesale blank tees still scream "MALLCORE" and that's just not what we are. Our personal closets are like museums of t-shirts throughout the ages. We wear boxy t-shirts from the 1980's, we love the dumped out sleeves popular in the 90's, these are shapes that represent our shit, these are the shapes i desperately needed.
what to do, what to do...with my time machine weeks from completion and our capacity to create our own cut and sew blank tees a tiny bit out of our reach i turned to the streets of our beloved DTLA for the answer.
I began feverishly visiting every bargain garment vendor between Broadway and Alameda, snatching up every dead stock t-shirt in their possession. Often times these penny-shop owners were literally opening boxes from their basements and selling me 3 or 4 pieces from stock that has been sitting stagnant for years. I'm sure that these vendors never expected to unload this merchandise.
Piece by piece we amassed a collection of dead stock blank t-shirts that represented every trend in cut and fabric composition that occurred in the last 20 years.
It was DIY, it was an adventure and it was exactly what Avocado Goth means.
Once I had acquired 100 pieces, no more than 5 or 10 alike, i shoved them into my laundry hamper and drug them to the 60 bus, en route to Rusty, Jay and the boys at Ultimate Graphics, just over the river in East Los.
Ultimate is the best. Any other screen printer probably would have thought I was retarded, some weirdo with a hamper full of old t-shirts showing up in there office with an illustration of 1930's Mickey Mouse catching brain and throwing up the "hang loose" hand sign. Instead they not only took us seriously, but worked with us, switching ink and printing method with every new fabrication and t-shirt type that came out of the hamper.
What resulted is art worthy of Brian Skiff's original drawing and worthy of the Avocado Goth moniker. We're NOT a t-shirt line and this is not simply a t-shirt. its weird and its wearable and not for everyone. But we're not RVCA, we're not street wear, we're rainbow goths and we're gonna do us 'till we're pregnant with our own babies.
James Chance, just because...
