Almost Right
Or: how I built the same brand three times before I got it right.
I was standing in the back of a metal show, furious about the merch.
Not furious in a general sense, but in the specific way you get furious when you love something but it keeps refusing to look and feel the way you want. The music was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, the t-shirts were not.
I loved metal. I just didn’t look like I did, and I had absolutely no interest in starting. (And I clearly have a history of not quite fitting in with the larger population I’m in.)
What I wanted was simple, which is how you know it wasn’t.
I wanted metal tees in soft, high quality cotton, not the shit that’ll rip after two washes and feels like sandpaper on your skin, all the while choking you because the neckline isn’t sewn properly.
I wanted a sweatshirt that was embroidered with a subtle tone-on-tone graphic, not a garish neon skull with rainbows shooting out of its eyes.
I wanted gothic, but not in the way that particular group of kids in high school were gothic — you know the ones — not Hot Topic goth, but not quite Rick Owens goth either. And god forbid a long black Neo from The Matrix trench (why was that a thing?!).
I wanted heavy and also, somehow, beautiful. I just didn’t have the language for it yet. Everything I looked for was just boring. Or, completely the opposite: too gritty, too post-apocalyptic.
All images are linked on my Cosmos collection here
So I did what any reasonable person with fifteen years of brand experience, a fine art background, and a deeply inconvenient need to control every aesthetic decision in her immediate vicinity would do: I built it myself.