Who Profits From Merch?
Streetwear brands are utilizing images of prominent AfricanAmerican figures on apparel, but what’s actually paying homage and what’s exploitive?
When Guillermo Andrade, the designer behind streetwear brand 424, sat down with buyers from Barneys New York, they asked him which artist he wanted to collaborate with the most. He immediately said Tupac, and because the multihyphenate entertainer is no longer alive, everyone in the room had a bit of a laugh. But a few weeks later, Andrade received a call from the team at Barneys saying they could make it happen — sort of. Because of Barneys’ relationship with Bravado, which has the global apparel rights for Tupac, Andrade could collaborate directly with the late rapper’s estate to conceive a collection that would be sold exclusively at the department store.
“I was more excited than anything else,” said Andrade, who grew up in Guatemala and moved to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant in 2010. “For a person with my background and where I come from, the possibility to be associated with the Tupac estate was a big crazy win on a personal level.”
Andrade met with Bravado and they connected him with Tupac’s estate. He recalled them as a warm group made up of Tupac’s friends and family who wanted to protect his image and honor his legacy. They let Andrade try on Tupac’s jewelry and study his beloved hockey jerseys and custom-made pieces by Gianni Versace. He presented his sketches to Tupac’s aunt, Gloria Cox, who approved of the work. She told Andrade they reminded her of Tupac’s own sketches — before he died he was working on a clothing line with his then girlfriend Kidada Jones.
A portion of the collection was released at a thedrop@barneys event in Los
Angeles last year. Andrade designed graphic T-shirts intersecting 424 with a raised fist and “2Pac,” a leather trucker jacket and matching pants informed by Tupac’s love of the rich, sumptuous fabric, and shirts with Versace-esque scarf prints.
Andrade’s collection didn’t use any photographs of Tupac, but with the rise of merch and streetwear, the fashion industry’s continued obsession with the Nineties, and designers’ political awakenings, more and more brands are using images of important black and brown personalities on apparel. It’s not a new thing — the streetwear line PNB Nation did this often during the Nineties — but as of late it’s been more pronounced.
Kith recently released a “Poetic
Justice” capsule that features an image of Tupac from the 1993 movie — Kith worked directly with Sony Pictures and Tupac’s estate declined to say whether or not it was involved in this collaboration. This month, R13 released a Notorious B.I.G. collection. And, in December, Supreme dropped a Marvin Gaye T- shirt — over the years Supreme has displayed everyone from Sade to Michael Jackson to the actual Supremes on its boxy T- shirts. Even Fashion Nova is selling tops with images of Aaliyah, Jay-Z and Biggie, while emerging streetwear brand Strange Fruit places mug shots of Huey P. Newton and Snoop Dogg on track pants.
But who should be making money from clothing covered with black or brown artists?
In 2017, when Kendall and Kylie
Jenner promoted a line of band T-shirts that placed their faces over pictures of Tupac, Biggie, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne and others, the public got a glimpse of how merchandise bearing images of artists — specifically dead ones — works.
In order to sell a piece of clothing featuring a photo of Tupac, for example, the company must acquire a license that covers likeness rights, which are owned by the estate, and copyrights, which are typically owned by the photographer. While copyrights are instituted globally, postmortem likeness rights vary from state to state. The Jenners neglected to go through any of these channels so they were sent cease and desist letters and sued by various parties. They eventually pulled the shirts and settled with all involved entities out of court.
Jeff Jampol, the president of Jampol Artist Management, an agency that manages the estates of artists including Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Jim Morrison, was one of the parties that sued the Jenner sisters. Jampol still seems aggrieved by the act: “The dirt under Jim Morrison’s fingernail can wipe the floor with their credibility,” he said over the phone. But he also offered that it’s his job is to introduce his clients to a younger demographic or a new fan base, who probably follow the Jenner sisters on Instagram.
“I’m trying to figure out what that magic is about my client and I have to present that in ways that are credible and authentic to people who are 11 to 30 years old,” said Jampol, who noted that streetwear has been a vehicle for that. “Older fans have the album. They have the T-shirt. They went to the concert. I’m looking for new fans.”
This also seems to be Bravado’s strategy with the Tupac apparel collaborations. Before her death, Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur granted executor rights for the estate to Tom Whalley, a veteran record executive who signed Tupac to Interscope Records — Whalley declined to be interviewed. Over the past few years, Bravado has created cobranded Tupac apparel with 424, Trapstar, VFiles, Marvel and Vlone. The Vlone tie-up was probably its most ambitious effort to date since it paired a pop-up shop of merchandise next to Sweet Chick, a chicken-andwaffles spot on the Lower East Side that was converted to Powamekka Cafe, a restaurant Tupac envisioned and sketched while in jail.
Jampol views apparel collaborations as a legacy exercise first, a marketing one second and a revenue generating one last.
“I’m not looking at how much money can I make. I’m looking at how a T-shirt will feed into 20 or 30 different other ►