Christian Audigier gave us Von Dutch, and later Ed Hardy the garish tattoo inspired fashion label which was once beyond red hot, which has now long been consigned to the fashion dustbin of history, and its wearing today possibly the most heinous fashion crime that a person could commit. But there was a time when it was the hippest badge you could aspire to, and its legacy in designer fashion cannot be underestimated.
Imagine if you will the blunt and gaudy iconography of the tattoo parlour’s boldest designs, the skull, the dagger, the heart, all plundered without apology. A scroll in three parts declares that “Love Kills Slowly.” And when you get close you realise that the image is covered in tiny, colour-matched rhinestones. The whole thing sits at the centre of a black T-shirt unmarked but for the big, looping script scrawled across the sternum that says: Ed Hardy.
And now three years after his death, the cultural legacy of Christian Audigier, the man behind Von Dutch and Ed Hardy, remains a central tenet of fashion branding. He proposed that fashion in the new millennium be (relatively) attainable. In making logo-drenched tees and perforated caps covetable, Audigier fashioned fresh markers of luxury. The logo—brash and outsized— became our hero.
Audigier was born in late 1950s Avignon, a French city most known for the seven popes who decamped there in the 14th century. For a boy obsessed with the Rolling Stones, the sexual lick of their guitar riffs loud in his ears, itʼs hard to imagine there being much appeal to the sandstone-coloured city. Perhaps it was that youthful dissonance and the cover of the Stones’ 1971 Sticky Fingers (and Glenn O’Brien’s blue jean-bundled bulge) that inspired his first known denim designs.
By 14, he had dropped out of school and was working at a shop called Jean Machine, and it was all in motion. Young Audigier moved between different brands, putting in time at Diesel and Fiorucci among others, before heading west. It was in America after all where his obsession, jeans, had been born.
His approach was aggressive and his shameless bid for celebrity acolytes, originated the early psychology of influencer marketing. Get people with platforms to wear your wares and ride the exponentially multiplying attention they get to your own ends.
When Britney Spears was at her height of fame, Audiger had her birth the Von Dutch trucker hat craze. So, hands on was he, that he chased her down on Melrose to give her one, and that she was wearing it when she split from Justin Timberlake.
Luckily for Audigier, when you die in fashion you never really die. You live forever as an idea that will be retrofitted just as you begin to be forgotten. In the age of Supreme, Vetements etc., the sparkly mega-branding of Ed Hardy is now the invisible reference on almost any mood board.
Let us know what your favourite Ed Hardy or Von Dutch item you loved to rock was, in the comments!