Dave at the SSUR headquarters.
Meeting up with guys like Dave of SSUR really gives you a reminder that there is a hell of a lot more beneath the “this t-shirt matches these sneakers” -phenomenon that seems to define the oversaturated stylistic vaudeville going on with 80% of the independent clothing market today.
SSUR is one those few brands that have kept shit at their own levels for a long time now. Getting dead tired of his daytime job at the Wall Street, the founder Ruslan Karablin (Russ for his friends, as the brand name backwards) moved on to do his thing with art & design in the late 80’s and got involved with clothing short afterwards (with the partner Beluga). So the Soviet born, Coney Island raised Karablin has spread his provoking political brainstorm mixed with widely recognizable pop culture imagery (like The Planet of the Apes) in solo exhibitions, in the streets and on prints on shirts for almost 20 years now. After this long-term presence in both fields, SSUR is currently a definitive key player when it comes to curating shows (e.g. the streetwear section in the latest Magic tradeshow), producing high profile collaborations, running the most distinctive store space in NYC or just like, you know, succesfully handling four different lines at the same time, namely SSUR, Rebel Ape, Natural Born (with Kevin Lyons) and The Cut (co-designed by J-$).
As an educational (and promotional) tool, Dave handed me this documentary dvd by Boost Mobile X Retail Mafia (consisting of alife, aNYthing, The J.Money Collection, Frank151, situationormal and SSUR). Streetwear brands are (in)famous for countless collaboration projects with other similar brands in the same field (putting each others’ logos together on t-shirts, that is), but this project at hand was one of the first where some of top streetwear brands daringly extended the collaboration possibilities by teaming up with a company that would not instantly be connected to the “street culture scene”. The project was a success for both parties: the mobile company got their street creds with highly regarded customizations of their phone covers while the streetwear brands made their mark outside their usual customer base. These kind of projects between independent & “authentic” clothing brands and bigger corporations have recently grown to a level of a small trend reaching from high fashion items and pocket knives all the way to Nascars (!).
Of course the dvd isn’t exactly the newsflash of today, but it still gives an intriguing insight to what’s been happening in Downtown NYC in the past years through the words of Jest, A-Ron, Mike & Steve Albon, Jaime Story, Russ Karablin and Greg Johnsen. View a 3 min. snippet of the documentary here.
Thanks again Dave for your time and your wise words.
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