IN CONVERSATION: BRENDAN FOWLER | Fashion, Culture, Music, Blog

SOMEWARE: BLUE BIRDS FLY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRACE PICKERING
STYLING BY KRISSIE TORGERSON
HAIR BY CANDICE BIRNS
MAKEUP BY RACHEAL VANG
INTERVIEW BY ERIKA FLYNN

OC’s Erika Flynn sat down with artist and shirt-maker Brendan Fowler to talk about how one-size-fits-all brand Someware is creating an armature through long-sleeve tee’s.

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I’ve known Brendan since before I moved to New York. When Someware had already been born but was in it’s early blooming stages. Brendan Fowler and Cali Thornhill-Dewitt, both artists of multiple mediums, were now messing with a brand new one; shirts. I was given my first goody-bag of Someware shirts in a big Trader Joes tote after Brendan and I shot photos in their LA studio for their most recent collaboration with No Vacancy Inn; photos that would go on to end up all over the internet, including Vogue.com, much to my surprise. Someware has now gone from a passion project to a full time job for Brendan, but his positive attitude towards creating garments has remained steadily the same.

OC-friend and photographer Grace Pickering shot Nathaniel Santos and Melissa Lim fitted by Krissie Torgerson in Someware pieces available exclusively at our LA location. After our LA team shot in Grace’s Silverlake home, I chatted with Brendan over the phone from the opposite coast, about the realization from records to clothing that would eventually become Someware.

ERIKA FLYNN: Of course, I mean, I know you and I know your process, but I think you have such an interesting perception of clothing and design, so I just wanted to start with you sharing some of your philosophy behind Someware.

BRENDAN FOWLER: Well, Someware came out of a record thing. We were supposed to do a record for this band Purity, in LA, and in the interim it became doing a party too. And then it became the clothes thing, which came from the shirts. The idea of a one-size-fits-all, sort of armature for images and artworks by me and Cali to put on the same shirt. And also, for everyone to wear the same shirt and see how different people wear the shirts in different ways. Eventually we realized the shirt wasn’t big enough. No ones really too small for the shirt, but some people were too big for the shirt, so we ended up making a new shirt that’s bigger. That expanded us into doing cut-and-sew, and then we were like, let’s make other stuff so we did the dress which is sort of an all-sex garm, it’s kind of an apron-type thing. I like the word “all-sex” better than “unisex,” it seems a bit more optimistic to me.

EF: The dress is amazing, I loved seeing you guys branch into new garments outside of the shirts. But my favorite shirt so far has been the “Jenny” shirt. How did that come about?

BF: The Jenny thing kind of ties back to the records, and the party thing. It goes back to Someware being an armature for, like, hosting people, or hosting artworks.

EF: It’s like a publication through clothes.

BF: Yeah, I mean a record is pretty straight forward. Everyone knows you’re publishing this artwork from a sound, music person. And the Jenny shirt is a really rad example, to me, for what Someware can be. It’s really starting to become more about Cali and I collaborating with different people, and a new way to collaborate, so the Jenny thing was epic because she had made this artwork that was so special. It existed as a text piece, a sound work and a sculpture installation.

EF: This was the cyberpunk love story, right?

BF: Yes, exactly. It was about these time-crossed lovers, Neon and Wilder. And clothes are such a part of Jenny’s, I would call it her practice. They’re such a part of her life and her expression so we produced this shirt which has the written piece on it, which we reproduced in her handwriting. But it’s also sort of like a souvenir, like a merch kind-of shirt of this story, and then it also feels like a costume in a way, which essentially one of the characters in the story, future-past-lovers, would be wearing this shirt. So it’s like an art-clothes-set-piece that reminds me of a kid’s halloween costume. You know when you have the batman costume that says Batman on it? But you’re also already dressed like Batman?

EF: Yes.

BF: Does that make sense? To me, it’s kind of the most successful thing we’ve done in a way because her story is simultaneously a text piece, and a soundwork, and an installation and to get to produce this shirt for Jenny, the shirt is like a merch, but also an artwork, but also a costume piece.

EF: Well, it all started with the shirts. And then you made the dress, and the pants, and you first showed those, ever, at the show in Paris, right?

BF: Correct. And that’s when we first showed the new shape of shirt too, which is called the “New Body.”

EF: And that’s the bigger one?

BF: Yes, its the width of the entire roll of fabric folded in half, with one back-seam. The old shirts were organic and the new shirts are recycled. We’re still figuring out how to make stuff that’s not, you know, a negative apocalypse on the earth. Clothing production is really gnarly so we’re trying to figure out how to make stuff that’s actually positive. We’re figuring out what we think about the recycled or the organic thing. It’s rad right now, sometimes you can do either. So yeah, the new shirts and the dresses and the pants all showed in Paris for the first time. It was sort of like a performance. It looked like a runway though.

EF: It did, I mean, I only saw photos cause I didn’t get to go, but did you want it to look like a runway or did you want it look like a performance? You guys had never done a presentation before, so what was your vision for it?

BF: Cali and I were both in Paris at the same time, coincidentally, last summer. I was doing a project with Virgil for Off White and Cali was working on a couple other projects. We were both just tripping on the energy of Paris, and the social aspect of it, and kind of just having fun and the idea just came to us, you know, what if we did a show, or a presentation? We just started thinking of what it could be.

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.