Richardson brings its provocative mix of streetwear to West 3rd Street in L.A.
Richardson, an under-the-radar, envelope-pushing streetwear label with a single brick-and-mortar store in New York City, officially opened door No. 2 in Los Angeles last week, filling a 700-square-foot space on West 3rd Street with a mix of irreverent, though-provoking and occasionally decency-offending apparel, accessories, home goods and art.
The clothing line is an offshoot of Andrew Richardson’s eponymous and sporadically published art, sex and culture magazine that debuted in 1998 and has released eight issues to date (the last, printed in September 2015, featured model-turned-businesswoman Blac Chyna on the cover). The 50-year-old creative director and designer, whose resume includes stints styling for brands (Valentino and Calvin Klein, among them) and fashion photographer Steven Meisel (he worked with Meisel on Madonna’s 1992 coffee-table book “Sex”), explains that branching into clothing came almost by happenstance.
“I’d been friends with Supreme’s James Jebbia for years,” Richardson said during a recent interview in his new shop, “and at one point he said, ‘Why not do some T-shirts?’ So we took Richardson [magazine] artwork, did something like four T-shirts, and that was it.”
That was back in 2003. Over the years, the ideas percolated, and the collection grew, sometimes alongside the magazine and sometimes apart from it. Today, it’s a full-blown two-seasons-a-year streetwear collection that includes T-shirts, button-front shirts, sweatpants, sweatshirts, denim, footwear, light outerwear pieces and accessories.
The unifying theme, in the authority-tweaking tradition of subversive streetwear the world over, is the appropriating, parodying and skewering of familiar logos and brands. This starts with the Richardson brand logo itself, a glyph that looks like the result of a drunken hookup between the Lululemon logo and the registered trademark symbol and seems to appear in some form or another on most of the offerings. Brands up for the skewering include toilet-maker American Standard (frequenters of urinals may appreciate the black fly detail embroidered on the right sleeve of the sweatshirt), Rothschild & Co. financial advisers (the five arrows tweaked to eight, representing the eight published issues of the magazine) and the Beverly Hills Hotel (a Richardson riff on the hotel’s iconic striped pool towels).
According to Richardson, the brand’s L.A. outpost, like most of his endeavors, evolved organically. “We manufacture everything in L.A.,” he said. “All my fabric is knit out here. My denim is from here. And I’d been coming to L.A. more and more over the last 2 1/2 years supervising production. And then it dawned on me that we should do a pop-up.”
That pop-up idea eventually coalesced into a permanent space that would find a home in a former upholstery shop on 3rd Street, just east of Crescent Heights and a salad fork’s toss across the street from Sweetgreen. Thanks to the kind of spare white walls, polished concrete floor and minimalist look found in L.A.’s other high-end streetwear boutiques, it might be fair to assume the sweatshirts, bomber jackets, bucket hats and T-shirts stocked therein are similarly standard issue.
In so far as the logo hijacking and nose thumbing at authority, maybe. But Richardson’s versions of classic silhouettes have some surprises in store when examined up close. A modern riff on a classic car club jacket with an Olympia Le-Tan designed patch on the back, for example, turns out to be made of 15-ounce hand-woven Harris tweed from Scotland (“It’s ridiculously expensive,” Richardson said with a shrug. “I don’t know why we did that.”), lined in silk and priced at $734. What appear to be run-of-the-mill collegiate hoodies ($238) and crewneck sweatshirts ($198) use an unusually hefty 16-ounce French terry. And the names on the front — “Wisconsin,” “Illinois” and “Nebraska,” among them — aren’t rendered in the instantly familiar arc of screenprinted school names but in the fuzzy chenille letters more common to a letterman’s jacket and in purposefully non-collegiate color combinations. “I wanted it to be like a sweatshirt I saw someone wearing once but was misremembering,” Richardson explained. “That way I was sort of making it my own.”
Another example of the brand’s subversive faux-nostalgia can be seen in the T-shirt created to celebrate the new store: the name “Richardson Hardware” and the store’s address and phone number screenprinted on the back in the blocky commercial font familiar to a ’50s-era billboard, and “Richardson Hardware Mid City” printed on the front over the left breast. It’s what Richardson calls a “burner T-shirt” (as in the kind of cheap T-shirt you wouldn’t feel bad disposing of after a wearing or two). “We first designed one for the New York store when we opened and we just can’t make enough of them,” he said.
A warning to the easily offended: Like the publication it’s an offshoot of, the store is filled with a fair amount of stuff a shopper may find objectionable. There are, for example, plenty of T-shirts and sweatshirts printed with images of nudity, most of it plucked from the pages of past Richardson magazines. A rack in the back of the store displays vintage erotic magazines and books, and the walls are currently home to an exhibition of G.B. Jones pencil-sketch illustrations.
But for those who don’t mind a heaping helping of next-level, L.A.-made streetwear with a side of the provocative (like, say, an unapologetically phallic handmade porcelain incense burner), a trip to the “hardware store” will likely be well worth the visit.
Richardson L.A., 8044 ½ W. 3rd St., Los Angeles. www.richardsonshop.com
For more musings on all things fashion and style, follow me @ARTschorn.
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