Wardrobe Deep Dive

My Very Interesting Sweatpants 

"RipNDip Bouquet Sweatpants"
Designed in California, made in China. 

​The brand RipNDip was formally created in 2009 by Ryan O'Connor in Orlando, Florida. Before its formal creation Ryan was an avid skater and went to a skate camp in Pennsylvania where he was creating shirts with the phrase "RIP N DIP" on them and selling them to the other kids at camp - this caused him to be kicked from the camp because he was selling more of his tops than the camp could sell of their official merchandise. ​

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Now that Ryan wasn't filling his time with skating, he poured himself into designing and making more clothing. His father saw his dedication and gifted him $500 to start his business and with this he bought the materials to screenprint and sweaters from Goodwill. With this he started to gain enough of a following to do pop up stores. 

In 2014 Ryan created his character "Lord Nermal", a cat with his middle fingers up. Five months later while doing a pop up at Fairfax Avenue, Ryan put up a Lord Nermal sticker that looked as though it was flipping off the nearby Supreme store; pictures of this then went viral and RipNDip has been rocketing ever since because of their comedic approach to fashion, "The company's success has been in it's humour - sometimes a little crude - amid a sea of seriousness" (Kari Hamanaka for WWD.com) 

Above is the before mentioned "Lord Nermal" and to the right is the funny tag in these sweatpants 

I purchased these pants from the RipNDip website a while ago and if I remember correctly they were around £60 which I don't quite think makes them considered high fashion but they're up there. I don't wear them nearly as much as I should considering what I payed for them but they're a fun item to bust out to wear to something casual that you want to be a little dressed up for. 

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Lecture Notes 

For our first lecture Nick gave us an interesting insight into something I don't really think about - the history of clothing and more specifically jeans as the timeline of Levi's jeans is along the same time as the history of illustration. I don't tend to think of a piece of clothing being a piece of art with its own history but obviously it is and it has been really interesting looking more at Levi's and also into RipNDip.