SLIDESHOW: Anti T-Shirts
When hipster-friendly clothing chain Urban Outfitters started selling shirts featuring a Christ-like cartoon and the words JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY, Mark Stiles and Jason LaCouture were pissed off. The shirts, released a few years ago, were everywhere — both on and off Northeastern’s campus, where the pair were undergraduates. And that was just one of the designs in Urban’s ever-expanding collection of so-called vintage threads.
There was EVERYONE LOVES A JEWISH GIRL, or … a VEGETARIAN, or a LESBIAN. BRUNETTES HAVE MORE FUN, or REDHEADS do. Were these personal fashion statements ingenious marketing? Without a doubt. Except that the shirts were hardly original when everyone started wearing them.
So Stiles and LaCouture took matters into their own hands and began printing their limited runs of graffiti-inspired T-shirts. They called their company theANTI. The antidote, perhaps, to all the uniformity out there. Their motivation: to create the kinds of shirts they wanted to wear, with local cultural references and streetwise beauty. In the three years since the company got off the ground, theANTI has branched out from LaCouture’s kitchen in the Fenway, where it began with a makeshift press and loose change. Today, it sells shirts on its Web site, antidesigns.com, and in local stores Underground Hip Hop, Nuggets Records, CD Spins, and L.A.B.Boston.
If this sounds like another Johnny-Cupcakes-vs.-the-behemoth story, think again. “We don’t want to be mainstream,” says Stiles. Instead, theANTI’s co-founders want their fledgling, self-financed company to be both locally focused and participatory. Anyone can submit a T-shirt design or vote for the best submissions on the company’s Web site, which are then printed and sold.
As part of its emphasis on all things local, theANTI has recruited seven local artists, all of whom earn commissions from the sale of their designs. And, in a nod to the company’s street-culture influences, it’s added a Google-generated map of legal graffiti walls across the US, plus a user-created list where one can post whatever he or she stands against. Think: “I’m anti labels,” “I’m anti B line,” “I’m anti pot turnerdowners.” A retail outlet on the scale of Urban Outfitters wouldn’t be able to pull it off.
Kitchen cabinet
This past August, theANTI relocated from LaCouture’s kitchen to a rented space in Norwood, shared with Stiles’s brother’s glass-blowing company, Luke Adams Handblown Glass. A small area, it’s filled with ovens, glass-blowing materials, and shelves of star-shaped ornaments, glass chili peppers, and heart-shaped paperweights. But just past a small office on the right stands a rickety wooden ladder that leads to a cramped area overlooking the entire space. This is theANTI’s printing area — not suitable for acrophobes — where sample designs line the back wall, above stacks of paint-stained silk screens and piles of T-shirts.
It’s tempting to write off theANTI as a part-time hobby, especially since both Stiles and LaCouture hold down full-time jobs as Web designers. But the business is actually part of an emerging trend: a growing number of small T-shirt companies are standing up to industry giants that have co-opted the statement-making allure of T-shirts and often charge hundreds of bucks for “unique” threads. These smaller companies, it can be said, have two main objectives: to be cheap and original.
Apparently, it’s working. Small T-shirt brands grew a combined 20 percent from March 2003 to April 2006, according to a 2006 Wall Street Journal article. Larger designer brands fell more than 12 percent during the same period of time.
Take Chicago-based Threadless T-shirt, which launched threadless.com seven years ago with a similar vote-for-the-best online model, albeit on a national level. Today, according to Threadless publicist Bob Nanna, the site has 500,000 registered users and receives some 100 to 150 submissions each day.
For all its relative success, though, theANTI didn’t set out to take down big-time T-shirt purveyors. When I meet up with Stiles, LaCouture, and a trio of designers — Courtney Garth, The Charles, and Maker (both of whom asked to be referred to by their designer names) — at Big City, in Allston, it’s obvious just how haphazardly their business began.
LaCouture was just a sophomore, and Stiles a freshman when they met six years ago at a rooftop party. Both had a rebellious artistic side. LaCouture recalls running into Stiles at midnight, while he was painting in the middle of the campus quad with chalk he had stolen from a classroom. This was when “the madness began,” writes LaCouture on theANTI’s Web site.
With no money to rent an apartment, and no desire to live at home in Norton, Stiles spent his college years couch-surfing at friends’ houses. He stored his belongings in free student lockers. And when he was 21, he was arrested for spray-painting his name on a bridge above a Worcester highway on Christmas Eve. “That was enough for me to stop,” he says.
