THE STORY BEHIND GRAPHIC TEES

A celebration of our favourite graphics in store, for anyone, like us, who's a sucker for a graphic, print or pattern. We wanted to find out a bit more about where the graphics came from and what they represent, so we chatted to our friends at the brands to find out.

HGBB collaborated with Korean artist Junfourteen on a series of tees showcasing tasty traditional Korean dishes. The tees echo the brands spirit of collaboration and cultural diversity, Tobias told us "The inspiration behind the t-shirts was to introduce Scandinavian and European people to Korean culture. We chose to do this through food, as there are many traditions in gathering and drinking soju in Korea."

PAT GUZIK has a long term partnership with Polish illustrator Mateusz Kołek, who is pictured at work, in the cover image for this post. Together they creates a labyrinth of symbols that form the prints, patterns and embroidery throughout her collection.  Mateusz explained the symbolism of the 'Star Picker' (L) and Fire Flower (R) tees from the current collection "Star Picker is about breeding your power animal to reach the stars. Despite the dramatic circumstances and unpleasant glances. Fire Flower is about travelling into the unknown; you will return with something completely different from what you expected. Is it a flower, fire? It might be an eyeopening experience."

The artwork for MAKE's Rat King tee - by Casey Raymond - is based on a natural phenomena and depicts 'A group of narcissistic rodent like animals bound by the vile goo of political gain'. In the fantastic words of Sam from MAKE "All the men in the image are famed for their racism but are also umbilically linked in their efforts to increase social unrest and segregation in an effort to further their own misguided political far right ideologies." Featured on the tee you'll find Tony Blair, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Robert Kilroy Silk, Morrisey, Rupert Murdoch, and of course, Boris Johnson.

With most ULLAC Oy's stuff, the inspiration comes from memories and mis-remembered things. This is a combination of two. Chris told us "The first is from a mis-remembering of Freddy Krueger's sweater. I was sketching Freddy and I remembered his stripy jumper being black and red (it’s actually red and green). But I loved the scribbled stripes so we magnified them and created the rotary print to get the pattern. The second memory is from my 8th birthday I got a massive lavender / black stripy T (I got Thriller, Bad and a Casio watch that year too) I loved it so much, so this is kind of a recreation using the Freddy Scribble Stripes."