It just started coming down to, we were making all these new things, you know, the pants and the dresses and the new shirts and they were all about how different people could wear them or use them differently. So for the show, my wife Andrea [Longacre-White] who is a style warrior—
EF: My style icon.
BF: My style icon, too. She styled it for us, which was really rad, we got to collaborate with her. We collaborated with Chloe and Flannery from Odwalla 1221, we collaborated with all the people who walked in the show. It was all about this very reduced thing. There’s a shirt silhouette, a pant silhouette, and a dress silhouette and it was about seeing those 3 simple elements styled a lot of different ways. Oh, and we had the belts too.
EF: I’m reading this book right now, about like, “creative living” and whatever, but there’s this whole chapter about ideas, and how we don’t really possess them but they kind of come to us and meet with us and we have the option to work with the idea, or collab, if you will. It’s really interesting actually, but when the idea for Someware happened, was it like you and Cali were totally in sync about it?
BF: We hashed it out, really. Cali and I had both done record labels before and I was dabbling in creating a new publishing format, and Cali was trying to end his record label that he had been doing for a long time, which ironically the last release from that was going to be a record by me. So he was trying to get out a record and I was trying out this new record format thing, and then the Purity conversation happened, and then we had the conversation of, “Well, what else?” It’s really a collaboration between Cali and I, honestly. We’ve been friends for awhile, and we’re similar in the good ways, and different in the good ways. It’s interesting the ideas that get through, and what lands. We also both love collaborating with people, and we like collaborating with the same people, so it’s kind of this cool venn diagram moment.
EF: Do you think a lot of your ideas or inspiration comes from collaboration, or come from conversations or interactions with different people?
BF: We’ve done things that are really just artworks by either of us. Like we’ve definitely had Cali shirts and Brenden shirts. We do a lot of photograph shirts, where I’ll be like “Hey Cali, send me a bunch of pictures that you just shot,” and then I do all the computer design stuff and lay it out. Then we have the collaboration stuff, like Jenny’s is a great example. Or we did the GHE20G0TH1K shirt. The thing that’s neat is since we’re on this garment format, you see everything put through that same filter. Like a Someware shirt looks like a Someware shirt, no matter the color, the artwork, or whatever’s on it.
EF: It’s very definitive. Like I saw someone in the street the other day, I was walking to work, I was in Chinatown, and I saw this guy in a yellow Someware shirt and I nearly stopped him in the street cause I automatically felt like I needed to talk to him.
BF: That’s so rad! That’s a thing that Cali and I both really appreciate about doing the clothes thing, the tribal thing. That’s the best. We love our people, and you’re our people so the idea of you rolling up on a person, even if he doesn’t know us or know what Someware is, he’s in the little tribe.
EF: He’s in the family now.
BF: He’s in the family, he’s in the tribe. But me and Cali both grew up in different subcultures where, like, if you saw someone wearing a shirt of the punk band that you liked it was like, “Whoa, this person is into that band I like,” or skateboarding was such a subculture—
EF: Well yeah, it used to be where if you got a shirt at a concert or something, it meant you were 100% at that show, seeing that band and if you saw someone else with that, you could talk to them about it. Now, everything is so mass produced that anyone could just be wearing a shirt that says ACDC or Led Zepplin or whatever—
BF: One hundred percent and they could have never heard a ACDC or Led Zepplin song, or they bought it at the grocery store, I mean I think they probably sell ACDC shirts at Whole Foods now.
EF: Definitely. That’s why it’s cool that when you see someone in a Someware shirt, you want to talk to them cause you automatically feel like you have something in common with this person. It’s awesome, you guys brought back that sense of community again.
BF: I hope so! That, for me, would be a really nice thing that people would feel that way.
EF: You did, which is amazing. How do you feel about Instagram?
BF: I feel a lot of feelings about Instagram.
EF: Me too, I’m curious.
BF: I will say that, to me, categorically, and this is probably the case for a lot of people so this is by no means a radical thought, but it’s enabled me, and I think Cali too, to have these businesses. I fully was making art and operating in a more industrial complex economy, and Instagram made me feel like it was possible to feel functional to sell Someware. We have some really great relationships with some awesome magazines and publications, but we also get a lot of dialogue just from Instagram. A lot of people do. It’s crazy cause I used to write for magazines for years, I edited a magazine, I grew up around magazines, I love magazines, I have nothing but love for magazines. But the gatekeeper aspect of magazines is becoming irrelevant and that has had a lot to do with the access of social media. Someone in any country, or town in the midwest, or middle America can have a popping Instagram, or magazine, and a view on the fashion industry that they couldn’t have before. And I don’t know, it makes me really excited.