Stripped Down Design at Take Off Clothing

July 17, 2008

I got an email from Raymond Koo of Take Off Clothing yesterday looking for a quick shout, I’ve noticed his work featured at a few other review sites which kind of knocked the wind out of my sails, I don’t like to repeat news unless I can get a new angle on it, but I genuinely appreciate what the guy is doing, so here we go.

Koo is a t-shirt designer based in Australia and has eight t-shirts in his collection, but he’s playing with some pretty snazzy t-shirt colours so we can forgive him (for now). Yes I would like to see a greater range of designs, but you can already see the artistic direction Koo’s taking. I’m sure that his range will build over the coming months, a slow burner with strong potential as far as I can see, give him time and I am sure this collection will stand true.

I’m not overly keen on the site design to tell the truth, it’s always a balance when a designer wants to showcase and sell, be it t-shirts or any visual product for that matter. However you do get a real eyeful of his designs here, you can see exactly what you’re getting, and know almost immediately how Raymond’s mind works. Enormous product images confront you from the second you arrive at TakeOffClothes.au and although I’d rather step straight into the shop, the ‘front of house’ does set the stage for something unique.

I’d say that this t-shirt designer is a keen follower of Marcel Duchamp’s ideologies and art practice, Duchamp was a practicising Post-Modern artist before Modernism (post or otherwise) was even conceived! The first recognisable Duchampian trait of Koo would be his love of ‘The Found Object’, or as Duchamp would’ve said ”objet trouvé” - everyday items plucked from their contextually familiar surroundings and exhibited in a gallery to displace critique, rather than engender a historical debate of genre or methodology. In essence, Found Art (and in it’s latest incarnations Art Brut and Outsider Art) allows us to focus on that which we choose to ignore rather than that which we would normally fetishsize, a unity of functional and aesthetic solution from the Modernist’s dictum ‘Form Follows Function’.

To pluck an object from the street and present it for critique has always been seen as a way of goading traditionalists and creating subversion in the Art forum. Duchamp ended his brief affair with the DADA movement in 1917 when he exhibited a urinal at New York’s Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition that year, his work was hidden from public view and he consequently resigned from the board of members.

Koo offers some of these same inclinations in his t-shirt designs. The fetishism of function over form, the use ‘hot colours’ to emphasise the blandness of ‘the everyday’, combined with an elemental style and sense of composition, subjectively removing commonplace objects from their usual perceptual and environmental context and supplanting them in the world of fashion.

I did want to feature Koo’s “Iron Burn” T-Shirt next, unfortunately the site seems to be composed of frames so it’s near impossible to cite product links, which won’t do Koo any favours for any future plans he may have for publicity and marketing of his t-shirts.

Iron Burn is as down-to-earth as you can get, you can take this one of two ways, if I saw this at a local seaside store down here I’d think corny one-liner. But once you put the work in context with the rest of the collection, you can see what Koo is trying to do here. He’s implicitly sticking to his guns when it comes to what I’d say was an Abstract Expressionist philosophy, sure it looks nothing like a Jackson Pollock, but it’s as truthful.

Pollock proposed an alternative to pictorial illusion, or in other words, paint is just paint, it’s not an idyllic landscape or a sumptuous portrait, it’s just marks and daubs on a canvas. I’d like to see Koo carve a similar niche in the t-shirt art. I’m only featuring designs here that support my argument, there are exceptions, I won’t include his slogan t-shirts or Five Beetles as for me they stray from the point.

When I was studying (if you can call it that) Conceptual Arts at university, my best mate at the time Mark Harrowsmith (hey where are you these days Mark?), produced a Final Degree show with the same ethos, he’d literally stencil objects via a slide projector onto enormous canvases and let their highly recognisable shapes spill over the edge, leaving him with vast abstract compositions that he’d then proceed to paint as silhouette. They looked great, and it took time to recognise each of the chosen subjects, even though they were as commonplace as household tools or kitchen utensils.

For me Koo has managed to extend this remit to it’s natural conclusion, I’d like to see him go further - for instance, actually burn a t-shirt with an iron, scan and trace the image in the colours that nature provides, a burn is black and brown, a burn diffuses and bleeds, a scar upon the material itself. Although I do appreciate the fact that he seems to have printed the iron burn to scale, I can imagine Koo becoming a master of accidental imagery, allowing the laws of chaos to intervene in his design process.

Run Over Me continues the theme I’ve been expounding, natural treatment, a textural acknowledgement of cause and effect, and how fascinating the visual results often are. I remember as a kid desperately wanting my own leather biker’s jacket, a few friends had them, none of us were bikers, we just liked the style (for about two minutes), eventually one of them offered me his jacket for a knockdown price, but it was still stiff and clean and shiny, even though he’d been wearing to every festival or gathering he could find. Then his older brother recommended he tie to the back of his dirt bike and let him drag it around the heath for an hour. He agreed and what came back was a beauty, rough and scuffed, mottled colours, cracks and creases all over. it looked great, in fact it looked so good my mate didn’t want to sell it anymore.

Again I love the idea of Run Over Me, but essentially to give it that edge, to raise the stakes and separate this work from the rabble, Koo needs to consider the treatment over the concept, make it look real, rubber streaks and smears, it’s always black and t-shirts ruck, so it would never stretch across in a perfect line but rather ‘judder’. Still i like it, I just want to see Koo take this idea far further. He’s seriously on the edge of doing something completely and utterly new to the market, if his collection can provide a context, if Koo can avoid whilst focusing on natural process and the aftermath in his overall design treatment.

If Koo was an artist exhibiting at a gallery or a couture designer showcasing conceptual pieces on the catwalk, I’d like to see him make a chainmail t-shirt created from nothing other than zips. Perhaps some of these titles could do with a little work as well, rather than ‘Zips‘ I’d be tempted to name it ‘Teeth’ which has some interesting connotations. I’ve always found the construction of the humble zip fascinating, and the difficulty in repairing them a disturbingly humbling experience. The technology of the zip seems so simple, but in fact it has to be one of the most ignored classics in design history, you can’t get much more form and function than you can from a zipper. However many alternatives are offered; fly-buttons, Velcro (gawd help us), clips, snaps, what have you, the zip takes a lot of beating. I’m once again tempted by the idea of Koo merely painting a object with ink and imprinting it on the t-shirt. Each product would be an individually created unique object unlike any before or after, I’d say that’s a step up from limited editions or signatures, a selling point if you like.

Run Over Me needs a life-size tyre print, and Zips needs life-size zips, long ones, zips that wrap completely around the body front and back. Koo should stick to his guns and avoid illusion, keep it real Raymond and you might find you’ve just created yourself a new genre, ‘Outsider Fashion’, it has a good ring to it, in fact it would be a great domain name too! Although I quite like the name Take Off Clothes, slightly reminiscent of Duchamp’s fascination with naked people, as in his work ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even‘, I think that Koo will find his market isn’t generic, it’s specific to a movement, a genre of art and society learning to reject the surface image so heavily appropriated by the media in favour of something more honest and true-to-life. However unpalatable the result, humanity is returning to the plain and dowdy truth of our dishevelled nature as it stands in tatters at the brink of a collapse in Modernity.

I have the perfect marketing idea for Raymond or anyone trying to break into the t-shirt industry. Virgin Media are supporting a worthy charity that has raised millions of dollars for youth homelessness at Strip2Clothe.com - they feature user-submitted videos (don’t worry you keep your underwear on), however they use these videos (distributed by YouTube.com and Virgin’s mobile network) to promote this charitable cause online and offline, so well worth a visit. Raymond, put on all your t-shirts and film yourself taking them off, send in the video to S2C and not only will you be helping charity, you could find yourself drawing in a lot more publicity than any t-shirt reviewer could provide, and what’s more for every 5 viewers your video receives Virgin will contribute more new clothing to charity.