How Ed Hardy Invented 21st-Century Fashion

Table Of Content

• HED completes Drawbridge Realty Via Del Campo II Scientific Workplace and R&D Facility in San Diego, CA
• Does Ed Hardy Still Tattoo?
• Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin
• The journeyman tattooer
• Commentary: LACMA finally is getting its satellite space. Regrettably, it’s in another state
• Review: Ed Ruscha show wowed in New York. Why it’s even better in L.A.

“For many years my tattoo style was also based on intense study of Asian art traditions, particularly Japan’s ukiyoe culture of the 18th and 19th centuries.” Hardy wrote in his artistic statement about Japanese tattooing. These days most people read the words Ed Hardy and think of a gaudy fashion brand that peaked around 2010. Those with a love for tattoo history recognize the power and passion for the art form Don Ed Hardy represents. I got my undergraduate degree in printmaking, and tattooing was just another medium, and it was a medium I wanted to develop - that's how I saw it. It's not like I was going to divorce my life from my art sensibility and my art historical sense. From all accounts, Don Ed Hardy remains sprightly at 75 and still enjoys creating cool alternative art.

HED completes Drawbridge Realty Via Del Campo II Scientific Workplace and R&D Facility in San Diego, CA

“Sailor Jerry was the first one that broke through with color, to research pigments,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006. Hardy took the classical American flash tattoo of mentor Norman ‘Sailor Jerry Collins’ and fellow San Francisco legend Lyle Tuttle – then applied his artistic bona fides to create charismatic custom tattoo art fusing the best of east and west. The Ed Hardy Collection was made up of men's and women's apparel groups that spanned every category of clothing and accessories production.

Does Ed Hardy Still Tattoo?

This is also why, when Gen Z icon Addison Rae popped up on the wires wearing a hot pink Ed Hardy T-shirt dress, I began to fret. Given her inexplicable reach, I worried that the teens might follow in her platform-thong-clad footsteps — that an Ed Hardy resurrection was nigh. That Big Gosselin Energy was clawing its way back from the French Riviera. "Morons dehumanized it," said Hardy, who sued Audigier in 2009, eventually settling out of court.

Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin

Also catapulting into the present, washed denim jackets and jeans make a comeback — sporting the same tattoo-style lettering as they did during the brand’s inception. I was trying to do that even when I was tattooing military in San Diego; my first shop in Vancouver in 1968, I featured dragons and all that kind of stuff. I was trying to do bigger work on sailors, and start getting people that were collectors, and started getting people that want to come in every pay and get a small piece. So, people liked it - people like things that are exotic – and by and large they get tattooed with things that are exotic to them. I seem to go into default things; the standard dragon and tiger, and the western tattoo themes of what I learnt to draw when I was ten. I still have all this flash that I did in pencil and crayon when I was a little kid.

Christian Audigier Death- Ed Hardy Designer, Von Dutch - Refinery29

Christian Audigier Death- Ed Hardy Designer, Von Dutch.

Posted: Fri, 10 Jul 2015 07:00:00 GMT [source]

In 2004 as Hardy approached retirement, French marketer and tastemaker Christian Audigier, fresh of success with the Von Dutch brand, came calling about doing business in high end casual fashion. “I was first mesmerized by the world of tattooing at the age of ten and began obsessively drawing tattoo flash then,” Hardy stated on his website. Hardy ushered in a new era of tattoo art during the boom of the 1970s and 80s that resulted in a seismic cultural shift that meant more widespread acceptance from wider society. Send me exclusive offers, unique gift ideas, and personalized tips for shopping and selling on Etsy.

Well, it helped a great deal, because I came into tattooing from a fine art background, and was aware of tattooing as a little kid, that's what I wanted to do. Hardy experienced a long learning curve in the course of working at tattoo studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, and Honolulu as he attempted to develop technical expertise and hone a personal style. An impressive selection of his tattoo “flash” (sample tattoo designs) from those years (1967 – 1971) will show his versions of standard “old school” tattoos as well as designs that melded Western imagery with the Japanese subject matter that he’d been introduced to by Sailor Jerry, a mentor tattooist in Honolulu . Hardy also studied with a Japanese master tattooist in 1972 in Gifu, Japan, and several preparatory drawings for tattoos developed there will be shown. This scenario led to Hardy’s greatest commercial success, but one which came at a price to his time in the tattoo parlor and lifetime of achievement as renowned tattoo artist.

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

Don't think that the more ink you get in your skin, the more your IQ drops, it's not a totally antisocial thing. I think a lot of people are antisocial, it's just that education part is really big, and that, I am really happy to see. Hardy returned to printmaking in 1992, and early etchings created at presses in Chicago and San Francisco reveal a simple style akin to the “flash” in his tattoo repertoire. Later prints — particularly those done with Mullowney Printing (Nara, Japan, and San Francisco), Shark’s Ink (Boulder, Colorado), and Magnolia Editions (Oakland) — are larger, colorful, and more ebullient. Hardy describes them as a mix of “the grotesque, humorous, subtle, and flamboyant.” A large group, representative of this period and selected from Hardy’s 2017 gift to the Fine Arts Museums, will be included in the exhibition. Hardy often tried to play down his influence on the development of tattooing as an art form.

You see someone who is covered in tattoos, and it's like; don't expect people to accept you for the beautiful person that you are inside, they are going to judge you for your tattoos. Each generation goes through that, where they resent the people that come after them and that's only normal. The main one that taught me print making was Gordon Cook, and was again, a blue collar guy, and a great intellectual with a deep art historical sense, and a really profoundly subtle artist. He had great hopes for me, but he urged me not to get caught in the academic system, but when I turned to tattooing, he really felt that I was devaluing him, and his aesthetic, which was extremely eccentric. Printmakers are very eccentric people, and the four years we worked together were really like a father/son thing, and he thought I was just throwing it over.

Christian Audigier dies at 57; fashion marketer popularized Ed Hardy, Von Dutch - Los Angeles Times

Christian Audigier dies at 57; fashion marketer popularized Ed Hardy, Von Dutch.

Posted: Fri, 10 Jul 2015 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Audigier, not Hardy, was the man to blame for the crippling fear of rhinestones I experienced as a teen. In his very public separation from the "Kate" of Jon and Kate + 8, Gosselin was painted as the villain, an irresponsible burnout who walked headfirst into a midlife crisis right before our very eyes. He had set off into the French Riviera sunset to party with Hailey Glassman, a young twenty-something who just happened to be the daughter of Kate's tummy tuck doctor. The pair was spotted canoodling and also partying — aboard the yacht of Ed Hardy clothing designer Christian Audigier, no less. This time around, however, Park notes that there’s a “glamour and sleekness that underpins it all, along with a more kaleidoscopic approach to color that looks beyond an Emily the Strange-esque monochrome.

As opposed to many other tattooists in the mid-late 20th century – usually hard-bitten men with a thirst for excitement and a military background – Hardy opted for the tattoo industry instead of art school, university and a life of academia. The Ed Hardy aesthetic we know today is a fusion of traditional Americana tattoos and the ukioye style of woodblock printing that was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in Japan. But tattoo wasn't the medium Hardy envisioned for himself when he was a printmaking student at the San Francisco Art Institute. After he graduated in 1967, having studied under the foremost experts in printing, etching, painting, and sculpting on the West Coast, Hardy was offered a full scholarship to attend an MFA program at Yale. In an alternate universe, Don Ed Hardy's name might be shuffled among East Coast-based legends of the late twentieth century — Basquiat, Haring, Pollock — but Hardy declined the offer. Instead, he stayed predominantly on the West Coast in his early career, with stints tattooing in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco before decamping to Hawaii, where he mentored under the infamous Sailor Jerry, and later, Japan.

When I got back to doing my art, which my move to Hawaii allowed (I came here in '86), I thought, ‘Maybe I can have time for my personal art’, and I just avoided anything that would remotely be like a tattoo image, ‘cos it was like, 'Oh no, no, then it's like what I do for a living'. But after a year, or a year and a half, I realised that that is just stupid, and (tattoo iconography) is part of my primary visual vocabulary. I do a lot of that stuff; I mix in a lot of classic Americana tattoo designs, and mix everything up, and I do a lot of work that has abstract elements. His specialization in intaglio printmaking, with its “speed of line, rhythm, variety, and density of structure” prepared him well for the career that followed. He turned down a graduate fellowship offer from Yale University and decided instead to begin tattooing professionally.

Hardy’s status in the Bay area – both as an artist and cultural icon – was such that in 1999, then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown nominated Hardy to serve on the city’s Cultural Arts Commission an almost unheard of feat for a tattooist to achieve. Despite Hardy’s knowledge and interest and fine art, the symbolism he found in the tattooed servicemen of his childhood and the blue-collar work ethic were features of the tattoo industry he found irresistible. Read on to learn more about Don Ed Hardy, his life, and commitment tattooing and to art. You live forever as an idea that will be retrofitted just as you begin to be forgotten.

When Hardy returned to San Francisco after a year, the old sailor kept in touch, sending letters and designs. According to his website, Sailor Jerry stipulated in his will that upon his death, his shop would go either to Rollo Banks or Ed Hardy. Banks ended up taking over the shop, but Hardy set up his own, Realistic Tattoo, which made history. He’s also courting that luxury consumer, too, by elevating the brand’s signature streetwear through its line By Appointment Only, a name that pays homage to the fact Hardy founded the first by-appointment-only tattoo shop. These higher-end capsule collections that come in an edition of 50 are where some of Ed Hardy’s classic rhinestones, special washes, paint splatters, and bleach come back into play. He was a master at pulling celebrities together, bringing a story together,” Christiana explains.