Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin
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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.
The journeyman tattooer
Ed Hardy: From art to infamy and back again - CNN
Ed Hardy: From art to infamy and back again.
Posted: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]
He’ll stop in occasionally to the Tattoo shop for some pointers to artists and their clients. Having given 40 years to tattooing, Hardy seems happy to be working with paint, brush, and print rather than ink, machine, and needle. World renowned tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy has long been retired, but his influence on the tattoo world remains burning brightly in the Bay Area and beyond. The brainchild of fashion icon Christian Audigier, Ed Hardy is considered the original "tattoo fashion" brand. Christian was the guiding spirit of the brand and worked obsessively to build it into a worldwide licensing behemoth that required daily design direction on a seasonal basis.
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I love the traditional stuff, but it's kind of like classic Americana tattooing, I appreciate it for the strength of continuing the thing, but the ones that were able to switch it around like Jerry and Joe Lieber, and some of these other guys, it just adds new life to it. Noted critic of Japanese fine art and longtime friend of Hardy, Sherry Fowler, said in interview ahead of the de Young exhibition that despite fame as a tattoo artist and brand name, Hardy simply loved art. “He is so passionate,” Fowler said. Whereas most active tattooing designs in that era were picked off a wall before being inked into skin, Don Ed Hardy tattoos were a more collaborative effort with customers and a more alternative art endeavor. “My intention was to turn it into a bespoke thing where people could come in with their ideas,” he said in 2019, ahead of an exhibition of his fine art curated by the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Reclaiming this sensibility in 2022, the millennial fashion brand has launched a brand new collection that serves as a reminder of its trailblazing history as well as paying homage to the designs which shot Ed Hardy to fame in the first place. Returning to its roots, the capsule contains selections of cropped tops, trucker caps, mesh pieces and mini-dresses — all of which boast a vintage-inspired reboot.
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(In keeping with the times, he explains that he considered fine art as elitist, and tattooing as a “forgotten American folk art” with potential for a revival.) Hardy’s goal was to expand the expressive potential of the medium and introduce it to audiences beyond its marginalized status and insular subculture. Late in the 2000’s, with the clothing line booming and his son Douglas Hardy returning from Minnesota to tattoo at the Tattoo City tattoo parlor, Hardy retired from tattoo to again focus on art, much of which has been exhibited in fine arts museums. In the 1960s, a US city the size of San Francisco or Seattle might have just a single tattoo shop, and Los Angeles suburbs like Santa Monica or Orange County a single tattoo artist. They lacked the facilities, tattoo apprenticeship, look, and personality of parlors like Ed Hardy’s Tattoo City we find in modern tattooing. Hardy fell in love with tattoos during a time in which the tattoo community was not accepted by wider society.
Retirement and Return to Fine Arts
LACMA might be a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly it’s not a very good one. Govan and Wynn Resorts co-founder Elaine Wynn sit on both the Vegas museum and LACMA boards. Govan does not expect any conflicts of interest to arise, and points out that many arts leaders occupy multiple board seats across the city and the country. Wynn, who is a LACMA board co-chair, has already given LACMA $50 million — one of the largest single gifts in LACMA’s history — Govan notes, adding that he doesn’t know how much more the L.A. Las Vegas, with a metro area population of nearly 3 million, is one of the largest cities in the country without an art museum. So it was with great fanfare that the city revealed in December that it had approved an “exclusive negotiating agreement” with the Las Vegas Museum of Art to continue work on plans for a proposed 90,000-square-foot, three-story building in Symphony Park.
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Was her with the cap Von Dutch, was him with the cap Von Dutch,” Audigier said. To add to this, Audigier, in his aggressive and shameless bid for celebrity acolytes, originated the early psychology of influencer marketing. Get people with platforms to wear your wares, and ride the exponentially multiplying attention they get to your own ends. When Hardy wrote down his own version of the Ed Hardy years in his memoir, I was still experiencing shell shock from an image of an Ed Hardy model in L.A. Fashion Week 2007 who looks like Waluigi if he got drunk in Atlantic City and let the locals dress him up for a night out. This is why the Ed Hardy brand's reputation went from must-have to untouchable in the span of mere months.
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Once panned by the fashion establishment as the unfortunate byproduct of tabloid celebrity culture, the hat would return riding the locks of another darling the fashion establishment first reviled only to reticently accept and then revere. By 14, he had dropped out of school and was working at a shop called Jean Machine, and it was all in motion. Young Audigier moved between different brands, putting in time at Diesel and Fiorucci among others, before heading west. As the resurrection of the Ed Hardy brand is set in motion by the Regina George of fashion herself, I thought it only appropriate to set the record straight about the man behind that infamous signature. I realized recently that I have no idea what Ed Hardy, the man, looks like, even though I could pick out anything by Ed Hardy the brand from a mile away (his swoopy signature, the tigers, koi fish, and "M O M" tattoo fare on so many trucker hats and tanks). Sailor Jerry was hard to impress, but he took the passionate young Ed Hardy under his wing, teaching and encouraging him.
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It's like anything, tattooing can be cool but a lot of it can be schlock, and that's the way it will always be. It's just more sophisticated schlock for the most part these days - the ability of the people, the sophistication of the people and working with the tools has been greatly enhanced. In 2003, several of Hardy’s tattoo designs formed the basis of the namesake global fashion line that became an international phenomenon. The licensing of his brand afforded Hardy the financial freedom to retreat from active tattooing and spend more time creating art in various media.
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Welcome to the world of Ed Hardy - where art, fashion, and rebellion collide in a dynamic explosion of colours and design that define contemporary style. The brand transcends beyond clothing; it's a movement, a lifestyle, and a statement of individuality.At the core of Ed Hardy, is the legendary tattoo artist, Don Ed Hardy who at the age of 10, recognised the unique force of tattoo art. Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s California pop culture, Hardy went on to earn an art school degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. He then learned to tattoo by apprenticing himself to master artists such as Phil Sparrow (the official tattoo artist of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club). Ed Hardy's iconic status is a testament to its enduring popularity and relevance in today's fashion landscape. While fashion trends come and go, Ed Hardy remains a constant, capturing the imagination and inspiring self-expression in people of all ages and backgrounds.
In 2007, he created hand-painted porcelain in traditional Japanese forms as well as a series of unique wall-hung porcelains that he calls Ghosts. A selection will be included in the exhibition alongside Eyecons, a series of resin-coated paintings on panels, disks, and “boogie boards” that he created at Trillium Graphics (Brisbane, CA) in 2008. Rose, a jacquard tapestry (Magnolia Editions) from 2015, and recent paintings and drawings bring the exhibition up to date. In 1974 Hardy opened Realistic Tattoo in San Francisco, a private studio where he undertook unique tattoo commissions tailored to his clients’ wishes and needs. A large selection of preparatory drawings developed for private clients will be shown, including back and chest pieces and full-body tattoos. By 1980 he had built an international reputation, and in 1986 decided to take a break from tattooing and return to drawing and painting in Honolulu, where he had moved.
Luckily, the brand and the man are different entities, and Ed Hardy himself is still working and exhibiting his art worldwide. By the 1990s, thanks to Hardy, tattoos were no longer for sailors and degenerates.
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.
I spent seven years as Design Director at Ed Hardy generating apparel and accessory designs as part of the design team that built the brand to be one of the largest success stories in fashion history. In 2013 I was part of an executive team that guided and positioned the brand for purchase by Iconix Brand Group. Audigier was born in late 1950s Avignon, a French city most known for the seven popes who decamped there in the 14th century. For a boy obsessed with the Rolling Stones, the sexual lick of their guitar riffs loud in his ears, it’s hard to imagine there being much appeal to the sandstone-colored city. Perhaps it was that youthful dissonance and the cover of the Stones’ 1971 Sticky Fingers (and Glenn O’Brien’s blue jean-bundled bulge) that inspired his first known denim designs.
When did you first see horimono in the flesh, as opposed to in photo books? Well, it wasn't till I went to Japan, because Japanese tattooing was still completely insular. Y’know, Horihide reached out and actually my great teacher Horiyoshi Nidaime, his father really reached out to Western tattooers.
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