‘The Dunlop TV ad was an incident where the stars all came together at the same point. I was working with a creative team from an ad agency Tom Carty and Walter Campbell — and they trusted me completely. I’d just come off making a terrible British Airways commercial which really went completely wrong, so I said to them, and their client — “If you want me to do this for you then you have to back off and let me do my thing otherwise I won’t be able to give you what you really want.” And they all did. Originally that script was “Open on a big frying pan with a car driving round the frying pan and it’s got these tyres.” That was what their idea was. And we completely changed it and got something out on TV that if it ran next week, it would be as radical as it was then.’
Tony Kaye
Advertising has now become an integral part of the street culture, as a lot of the new campaigns are what’s called ‘guerrilla’ — stuff that actually happens in the street, events that people can interact with and not merely watch. Advertising has become harder and harder to spot within the urban environment. Brands are hosting events, exhibitions, star-maker competitions, websites, publishing magazines, all of which appear to be non-branded, but are actually just vehicles for an energy drink, sneakers, or a pair of jeans, often using imagery, techniques and other ideas lifted directly from the sub-culture of the street. Sony executed a campaign where they used street artists in Berlin to advertise their PSP, much to the scorn of the Berlin public who worked out what was going on (they were being sold to by a huge corporation) immediately as the ‘street art’ went up. It didn’t matter how good the street art was, it was dismissed as it was just advertising.
But that said, advertising is part of the day-to-day whether we like it or not. There are direct lines of influence between street culture and advertising, but more recently it has been a one-way street with street culture (including its online presence) being absorbed, regurgitated and then spat out as advertising. This will change as society is always hungry for the ‘new’ and in the not-too-distant future it will be the turn of advertising to carry this torch.
The purest attitude and motives go into the creation of their constantly amazing clothing range and other amazing products and projects. Alife is the strongest brand that’s come out of the New York bombing movement. Alife started out as a creative space on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. They chose this spot as 1) it was affordable and 2) it was an area that people from all the other boroughs of Manhattan would not be opposed to coming to. Coming out of bombing you have to think about this shit! I sat down with Rob Cristofaro the founder of Alife.
‘I used to write graffiti and I decided to start this new thing — workshop, retail space — I guess it was a store but never had any experience doing any of that shit. Me and a few other dudes were like “we’re gonna start something” as there wasn’t anything going on. We started the plans in 1998 and by ‘99 we found the space and opened up shop in the Lower East Side, Orchard Street, which was basically at the time affordable rent as nobody was really down there. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing and were just like “fuck it, let’s just try this new jump-off and see where it goes.“’
Once they opened the space, Alife became their new tag and their mission was to get the name out there in any way possible: stickers, T-shirts, magazines, the same shit as usual; self-promotion is all bombing really, with no budget. They don’t pay for advertising and everything is hand done, independent street promotion. That’s not to say that if they had a big budget to go do some serious marketing, they would be going large on billboards, as I’m sure they’d still retain that no-budget attitude.
‘That’s the graffiti way — it’s like, “king, shit, fuck everybody else; fuck all crews, we’re by ourselves, no respect for really anybody else out here,” and that’s our shit: We’re gonna king New York. Alife was based on the street and before we opened our space we put the word out to the graffiti community — who were the only people we were in touch with — that we were opening a platform, a workshop, a creative space, and we wanted them to be involved. We had a meeting before we opened the store with 50-60 people. These were all the creative people before the shit became what it is. This was people like Espo, Reese, Kaws, the people that were graffiti writers but ready to take it to the next level and at the time there was no other venue for it.’
At this time there wasn’t any commercial side to the graffiti movement, and Alife has been based on the art side of things from the beginning. Back then they didn’t make clothing, they didn’t do footwear — just a space for art, and after they had made enough noise from that, did they think about producing clothing and everything else that they do now.
‘Everything that we’ve done has been a learning experience from having no experience of owning a business to running businesses and independently promoting all the shit that we do. And then having big corporations come and, like, mimic the shit that we’re doing but with big fucking budgets. Once in a while there is some interesting shit that goes on out there, and the people that evolve and are not following any shit, any trend — that’s the kind of people we like to involve ourselves with. Where I see us going is hopefully the money is going to get bigger and with the bigger budget do more powerful, widely seen things for the public. Using the clothing and the footwear to bring the money in to do the shit that we really like to do — the creative shit.’
Wherever Alife is going you can be sure of one thing: that Alife will continue to create and produce art clothing whatever, with a real connection to the streets from which it came — New York City streets, and that is the one place that is King of street culture.
Back in the 1980s when graffiti was just crossing over into the New York downtown art scene, somewhere in Bristol, some kid called Robin was going to school and having fun. Years later, mirroring the past (just like the old-school New York graffiti ‘writers’), Banksy began his career as a graffiti writer and attempted to get up on every wall of the borough of Easton, where he was from. The Banksy juggernaut began rolling with his first ever exhibition, which was held in a block of council flats. He sold four canvases to the band Massive Attack. He then progressed to using stencils, as it was a lot quicker to apply and created a harder impact, something that has always been important for his work. A well hard impact! And the resulting attention to detail is one reason why Banksy is responsible for the popularity of street art right now. He is the undisputed leader of the movement and his work is by far the wittiest, most accessible of any artist of the last 50 years. This is because everyone gets it. He gets up somewhere and the resulting piece makes the front page of newspapers all over the world because the work is beautiful, topical, cheeky and extremely accessible.
Although Banksy hails from Bristol, his artistic home is the streets of London (and later LA, New York, New Orleans, Bamako and the West Bank) for it was here that he built up his name with his stunts such as installing his illegal 25-ton statue opposite the Law Courts, or stickering police cars with ‘Legal Graffiti Zone’ written on them. Shows from Shoreditch to Mayfair showcased his unique brand of street art. Banksy is undoubtedly responsible