Helskini, Finland, CTRL began its journey as a skateboarding company back in 1994, but in the last five years it has moved smoothly into the fashion world. The roots are still in skateboarding and street culture, but now the main focus is clothing, for both men and women.
‘The biggest motivation for the gentle switch to the fashion world came from the fact that by owning a fashion label you get the most attention from the best looking girls, basically.’
And now they also get to decide what their friends should wear. All this leads to a lot of networking and travelling around the world; lots of tradeshows and secret drunken gatherings. CTRL is now sold in 33 countries around the world. But this is just the start! I hung out with Freeman, the designer/art director and asked him how his work has evolved.
‘Graphic design-wise my work has gotten more mellow. It started as a vivid, colourful and disturbed mega blast and slowly got easier and easier. I’m trying to put more effort behind the design, meaning that in the beginning I was satisfied with something that just looked cool to me; now it has to mean something as well, conceptual thinking is key, I guess. And in general my way of working has changed a lot more into being a clothing designer more than a graphic designer — my way of working of combining those two, though, but compared to early days it was mostly just working with deckgraphics or T-shirt graphics, but now I have whole clothing lines to think about, cut, sew and everything.’
I was curious to know how Freeman saw fashion/streetwear influencing the urban landscape.
‘Living in Helsinki, I can only say that the rise of fashion/streetwear brands has done a lot of good to the urban landscape, meaning that in general people dress better than before. It wasn’t such a big thing, you see in Helsinki dressing up isn’t obvious, especially if compared to our neighbouring country capital Stockholm, where dressing up and being aware of the latest trends has always been a huge thing. But on the other hand there the trend consciousness is on such a level that it almost looks like people are wearing uniforms, everybody looks the same. And I guess this is happening in many cities around the world. But in general it’s not really the streetwear brands that dictate the way fashion is going, but the skaters and everything that is around skateboarding, and therefore skate brands are always on top of the pyramid.’
One of the most exciting and ingenious elements of street culture is culture jamming. Culture jamming is what people turn to when they have had enough of the more popular forms of mainstream culture — shopping, movies, the media, advertising. It is a healthy reaction to the propaganda and bullshit that is fed to us 24/7 through the media, and is manifested in street action (hijacking advertising or shop fronts), media action (using Internet and traditional media to raise awareness) and events I can’t even categorize (using a giant projector to beam out anti-consumer messages on to a building). It could be a protest about how big business rides over the lives of humans in the cause to make even more money, or the way that a lot of advertising billboards are actually illegal. On the road writing this book, I spent time with two serious culture-jammers, Okat from areyougeneneric.org and Jordan Seiler, who’s the mastermind behind the New York Street Advertising Takeover.
areyougeneric.org, the US-based website has been ‘Giving brand-America the finger since 2001’ and links the protest with creativity. Areyougeneric is a group of artists that seeks to protest, to question and to disprove. Its nemeses are unethical corporations, censorship, the biased media, hypocrisy, excessive advertising and plain stupidity. Its heroes are art, discussion, independent thought and creation.
‘At first the site was nothing more than a place for us to show off a culture jam or two (such as stickering the front of certain fashion magazines that are totally controlled by their advertisers) that we pulled off. It has now evolved to be much more than that. It’s become a resource library of street-art photos from all over the world. It also houses our catalogue of clothing and print art intended to critique and reclaim our social and mental environments.
‘Our shirts promote a concept, not a name (not even our own), and are intended to provide an alternative to big business and small thinking. The shirts have no label, no logo, and are printed on sweatshop-free tees. We’ve also shared all our culture jams in the public domain and are constantly supporting and encouraging others to pursue their concepts in the public arena.’
As I helped Okat sticker up a shop that was being converted into yet another Starbucks, I asked him to define street culture.
‘In the most simple terms, I define street culture with the word “raw”. The street is where everything is born, where it lies before the mainstream gets its hands on it and refines it to something tolerable. Street culture embraces the unfinished, the pure, the work that was improvised without the intention of ever getting noticed and that is why it so beautiful’
The first of Jordan Seiler’s seriously ambitious New York Street Advertising Takeovers (NYSAT) took place on 27 April 2009, when over 120 illegal billboards throughout the city of New York were white washed by dozens of volunteers and then turned into works of art. NYSAT was a reaction to the hundreds of illegal billboards that are not registered with the city. Even though these adverts are illegal, the violators are rarely, if ever, prosecuted by the City of New York, allowing the billboard companies to make some serious money by cluttering the outdoor space of NYC with some seriously shit adverts. Jordan tells me what it’s all about.
‘Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communication. By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared environment. Private property laws protect the communications made by outdoor advertising while systematically preventing public use of that space. In an effort to illuminate these issues, I illegally reclaim outdoor advertising space for public ideas and visual forms. Through bold acts of civil disobedience I hope to air my grievances in the court of public opinion and witness our communities regain control of the spaces they occupy.’
How has your work evolved?
‘Today I try to make work that not only uses outdoor advertising space but also announces itself as doing so. This means if I am making personal work, I use tactics that allowmy work to stand out from inside the advertising frame. Things like giving physicality where one expects two-dimensional prints, being quiet when someone would expect images to be loud, breaking the frame, and always trying to create honest personal interactions that are so rare in commercial messages. As well the work has embraced a sense of activism and the organization of events has become a part of my art.’