Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin

Table Of Content

• The journeyman tattooer
• Commentary: LACMA finally is getting its satellite space. Regrettably, it’s in another state
• NEW 2024 Design! Woman in Flowers Unisex Black T-shirt
• Vintage Original Don Ed Hardy Skull Design Love Kills Slowly Black Tumbler 16oz
• Review: Ed Ruscha show wowed in New York. Why it’s even better in L.A.

I spent seven years as Design Director at Ed Hardy generating apparel and accessory designs as part of the design team that built the brand to be one of the largest success stories in fashion history. In 2013 I was part of an executive team that guided and positioned the brand for purchase by Iconix Brand Group. 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, it’s hard to imagine there being much appeal to the sandstone-colored 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.

The journeyman tattooer

In 2002, Audigier was at the Magic trade show in Las Vegas when he was hired to design a line of denim with the newly licensed work of Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard. (That Howard was a known racist stopped no one.) Audigier told Friedman that Britney birthed the hat craze. That he chased her down on Melrose to give her one and that she was wearing it when she split from Justin Timberlake. “They was on People magazine, both of them, with the page cracking, you know.

Commentary: LACMA finally is getting its satellite space. Regrettably, it’s in another state

He’ll stop in occasionally to the Tattoo shop for some pointers to artists and their clients. Having given 40 years to tattooing, Hardy seems happy to be working with paint, brush, and print rather than ink, machine, and needle. World renowned tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy has long been retired, but his influence on the tattoo world remains burning brightly in the Bay Area and beyond. The brainchild of fashion icon Christian Audigier, Ed Hardy is considered the original "tattoo fashion" brand. Christian was the guiding spirit of the brand and worked obsessively to build it into a worldwide licensing behemoth that required daily design direction on a seasonal basis.

NEW 2024 Design! Woman in Flowers Unisex Black T-shirt

LACMA might be a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly it’s not a very good one. Govan and Wynn Resorts co-founder Elaine Wynn sit on both the Vegas museum and LACMA boards. Govan does not expect any conflicts of interest to arise, and points out that many arts leaders occupy multiple board seats across the city and the country. Wynn, who is a LACMA board co-chair, has already given LACMA $50 million — one of the largest single gifts in LACMA’s history — Govan notes, adding that he doesn’t know how much more the L.A. Las Vegas, with a metro area population of nearly 3 million, is one of the largest cities in the country without an art museum. So it was with great fanfare that the city revealed in December that it had approved an “exclusive negotiating agreement” with the Las Vegas Museum of Art to continue work on plans for a proposed 90,000-square-foot, three-story building in Symphony Park.

Vintage Original Don Ed Hardy Skull Design Love Kills Slowly Black Tumbler 16oz

It's like anything, tattooing can be cool but a lot of it can be schlock, and that's the way it will always be. It's just more sophisticated schlock for the most part these days - the ability of the people, the sophistication of the people and working with the tools has been greatly enhanced. In 2003, several of Hardy’s tattoo designs formed the basis of the namesake global fashion line that became an international phenomenon. The licensing of his brand afforded Hardy the financial freedom to retreat from active tattooing and spend more time creating art in various media.

When did you first see horimono in the flesh, as opposed to in photo books? Well, it wasn't till I went to Japan, because Japanese tattooing was still completely insular. Y’know, Horihide reached out and actually my great teacher Horiyoshi Nidaime, his father really reached out to Western tattooers.

Does Ed Hardy Still Tattoo?

Was her with the cap Von Dutch, was him with the cap Von Dutch,” Audigier said. To add to this, Audigier, in his aggressive and 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 Hardy wrote down his own version of the Ed Hardy years in his memoir, I was still experiencing shell shock from an image of an Ed Hardy model in L.A. Fashion Week 2007 who looks like Waluigi if he got drunk in Atlantic City and let the locals dress him up for a night out. This is why the Ed Hardy brand's reputation went from must-have to untouchable in the span of mere months.

Ed Hardy - the godfather of modern tattoo

He used to write to Charlie Wagner in NY, who was one of the most famous American tattooers because he was featured in national media, he tattooed on Bowery…he was a terrible tattooer, but he was very with it. Don Ed Hardy was pictured in the local newspaper, barely a teen, tattooing neighborhood boys on their arms and chests with black wax markers for his version of a first tattoo. He’d seen sailors and soldiers return to coastal Costa Mesa, California, and was drawn to their collection of skin art souvenirs. Hardy grew up in post-war Newport Beach, California, which he described as "totally white and fascist," in his 2019 interview with Forbes.

Christian Audigier: Emperor Du Fromage - GQ

Christian Audigier: Emperor Du Fromage.

Posted: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Review: Ed Ruscha show wowed in New York. Why it’s even better in L.A.

But he led the pack for everyone, he really broke the ground, and he was in touch with traditional Japanese tattoo artists. Don Ed Hardy, as he's sometimes known in real life (aka not on T-shirts) is a surf bum slash art prodigy who sold his first gallery piece when he was still in high school, and later attended the San Francisco Art Institute. He is an artiste, a trailblazer of both postmodern art and tattooing, a contemporary of greats like Warhol, de Kooning, and a dozen others you studied in art history class. The press-shy artist (who did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story) wrote that he once worked at the post office with Jerry Garcia's brother, rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed at a bar, and ran in the same circle as Jefferson Airplane. The new artist's first port of call, as it were, was the shop of Norman Collins — better known as "Sailor Jerry" — of Honolulu, Hawaii. According to the official Sailor Jerry website, the legendary master tattoo artist started his career in the 1920s, and by the late 60s, he was a gruff, pipe-smoking licensed sea captain with a stunningly original oeuvre.

(In keeping with the times, he explains that he considered fine art as elitist, and tattooing as a “forgotten American folk art” with potential for a revival.) Hardy’s goal was to expand the expressive potential of the medium and introduce it to audiences beyond its marginalized status and insular subculture. Late in the 2000’s, with the clothing line booming and his son Douglas Hardy returning from Minnesota to tattoo at the Tattoo City tattoo parlor, Hardy retired from tattoo to again focus on art, much of which has been exhibited in fine arts museums. In the 1960s, a US city the size of San Francisco or Seattle might have just a single tattoo shop, and Los Angeles suburbs like Santa Monica or Orange County a single tattoo artist. They lacked the facilities, tattoo apprenticeship, look, and personality of parlors like Ed Hardy’s Tattoo City we find in modern tattooing. Hardy fell in love with tattoos during a time in which the tattoo community was not accepted by wider society.

Luckily, the brand and the man are different entities, and Ed Hardy himself is still working and exhibiting his art worldwide. By the 1990s, thanks to Hardy, tattoos were no longer for sailors and degenerates.

Hardy discovered then that he could utilize imagery that he had developed as a tattoo artist in compositions that were large and complex. Brushes and pens on paper and canvas presented a challenging departure from tightly controlled tattoo work. The process was nevertheless liberating, and during this time Hardy created a large body of work and exhibited frequently at galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It might be a stretch to extend the same courtesy we've afforded teen starlets to a brand, but I have no problem extending an apology to Don Ed Hardy himself. Revisiting his work as it rides the current wave of pop-punk popularity powered by Gen Z, who were infants in the days when Hot Topic was anything other than a euphemism for a washed-up MySpace brat, has opened my eyes to Don Ed Hardy's world. "'This guy is at ground zero of everything wrong with contemporary culture,'" Hardy recalls telling a friend of his first impression of Audigier in his 2013 book. He would later remember the decision to go into business with Audigier regretfully, writing, "I had entered into the original deal so stupidly, without any legal advice," leaving Audigier in control of a majority of the brand's fortune. Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.

In 2007, he created hand-painted porcelain in traditional Japanese forms as well as a series of unique wall-hung porcelains that he calls Ghosts. A selection will be included in the exhibition alongside Eyecons, a series of resin-coated paintings on panels, disks, and “boogie boards” that he created at Trillium Graphics (Brisbane, CA) in 2008. Rose, a jacquard tapestry (Magnolia Editions) from 2015, and recent paintings and drawings bring the exhibition up to date. In 1974 Hardy opened Realistic Tattoo in San Francisco, a private studio where he undertook unique tattoo commissions tailored to his clients’ wishes and needs. A large selection of preparatory drawings developed for private clients will be shown, including back and chest pieces and full-body tattoos. By 1980 he had built an international reputation, and in 1986 decided to take a break from tattooing and return to drawing and painting in Honolulu, where he had moved.

Once panned by the fashion establishment as the unfortunate byproduct of tabloid celebrity culture, the hat would return riding the locks of another darling the fashion establishment first reviled only to reticently accept and then revere. 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. As the resurrection of the Ed Hardy brand is set in motion by the Regina George of fashion herself, I thought it only appropriate to set the record straight about the man behind that infamous signature. I realized recently that I have no idea what Ed Hardy, the man, looks like, even though I could pick out anything by Ed Hardy the brand from a mile away (his swoopy signature, the tigers, koi fish, and "M O M" tattoo fare on so many trucker hats and tanks). Sailor Jerry was hard to impress, but he took the passionate young Ed Hardy under his wing, teaching and encouraging him.

“My paintings, drawings and prints are partially inspired by primary images from traditional American tattooing of the first half of the twentieth century,” Hardy says in his artist statement. But he confesses that despite being a seasoned industry pro, he was still hesitant about the prospect of bringing back Ed Hardy apparel. When Mark Levy, the president of Revise Clothing, first asked if he’d be up for the task of creative director, Christiana tells NYLON, “I hesitated and I cringed, like, really? ” But both quickly realized the brand’s untapped potential and that they were just the tattooed guys for the job.