Pleasures and Shorty’s, The Collab Of A Lifetime
Photos by Andrew Peters.
Models: Ava Caliri, Ivan Monteiro, and Malcom Amin.
Shorty’s, the hardware/backpack/board/accessory/miscellaneous brand that gave us a shirt with a secret ‘fuck you’, Muska (pretty much), and scientifically-efficient noseslides, and whose ads bestowed countless young men their very first boner, has collaborated with one of the most exciting and well-respected streetwear brands out there, PLEASURES, and it is the collection of a lifetime.
So good, in fact, that we asked our boy, the one and only, Andrew Peters, to photograph the new collection out on the streets of Los Angeles.
(I’d like to point out that this bench has arm rests and therefore this crooked grind must have been popped out of rather than rolled out of, and for that, respect)
If you haven’t yet read our interview with David Flores, the OG art director and the man behind Shorty’s’ rebirthing via PLEASURES collab, you need to click on this portion of the sentence right now. In that interview, David discusses the legacy of the brand and its unfailing image as an OG, a skate brand that miraculously and legitimately never fell off, and how his energy is now refocused on establishing Shorty’s as the brand that it once was; by the homies, for the love, and of the streets.
In that interview, you’ll also notice David’s reluctance to collaborate with just anyone, which is a bit of a rarity these days. Certain brands, which will not be named despite my intrinsic desire to talk shit about skateboarding wherever possible (a right that I think I’ve earned for being a decades-long (pretty much) skater over thirty (almost)), would not survive were it not for their endless collaboration with other distant brands which begs the question, ‘are you cool or are your friends cool?’
In the case of Shorty’s x PLEASURES, they both are. They are two well-respected brands coming together to make something fucking cool, and their selectivity about collaboration only reinforces that assertion. They don’t fuck around, and neither does the collection.
In that interview I also told a story about how when I was thirteen, I was living a delinquent skater’s lifestyle; stealing, graffiti, kickflips (rarely but most assuredly rocket), and gathering at richer friends’ homes to play GTA and watch whatever skate video we could manage to pirate. We were eager to soak in whatever bit of skateboarding history and culture possible, which is exactly how I discovered Shorty’s, Muska, and my favorite shirt, the one that can be pinched to say, ‘fuck you’. This would prove a useful tool in high school and when McDonalds employees demanded I vacate the premises, and now, as an adult, I am happy and satisfied to see PLEASURES’ influence on my forgotten classic. It is a positive influence, and more optimistic, but as legitimate and arguably as horny as Shorty’s was known to be. The ‘fuck you,’ is now, ‘fuck me’. Well done, both.
The collaboration that you are currently looking at in these gorgeous fucking photos (shot by, with, and around us, most notably in these photos taken in the back of our LA office’s resident hunk, Ollie’s surf/camper van) include boards, shorts, shirts, sweaters, polo’s, pants, hats, jersey’s, fucking towels, and all which way kinds of accessories, all of which will be readily available, right here.
