Revisit: The Shawn Stussy Interview

this interview originally appeared in issue #30, 2011. It was done by jason crombie with photography by Jeremy & Claire Weiss.

In the early to mid 90’s, Stussy was without a doubt the largest street-wear brand in the world.

You can look that up on your Googy-boo-boo if you don’t believe me, but it’s true. I personally experienced the Stussy leviathan firsthand when I worked at the local surf/skate shop as a kid. Without exaggerating, I sold somewhere in the vicinity of two-hundred-million Stussy beach pants in the twelve-months worth of Saturdays I slaved at Jedediah Dickstein’s Street Stylez Emporium; so imagine my surprise when I found that the man behind the monster is, with all due respect- a beach bum. Shawn Stussy is kind of like Spicoli but Swiss: he say’s “Man” and “Dude” a lot, but he also has his shit locked down like a precision timepiece. I flew out to LA and met with Shawn at his studio to discuss his humble beginnings shaping boards, his loathing of the ubiquitous Stussy beach pant, and his latest adventure: The S Double project.

I have to say; I’m super stoked to meet you, Shawn.

Yeah! Likewise man.

It’s kind of full-circle for me.

How?

Well, when I was in high school I worked at a surf/skate store on the weekends, and I used to sell tons of your pants.

Which ones?

The baggy ones from the early 90’s.

Oh, with the elastic? Those weird old ones?

Yeah. Kids used to wear them in grey because they were passable as school uniform.

We used to call them “beach pants”. I sold so many of those; I couldn’t even stop making them! Man, I hated them.

Well, I’m not asking for a kickback or anything, but I want you to know I must have sold about fifty thousand dollars worth of those things.

It’s funny you say that, because my friend opened a surf shop in Fresno and every year he’d buy five hundred pairs of those pants because they were legal uniform for the kids at school! They were weird pants. They had like the fly, right? Like the fly you’d have on a pair of boxer shorts?

I think so, yeah… I just remember they were baggy and elasticized at the waist.

I hated those pants.

We should talk about how you got started with all this. How did Stussy kick off? You were shaping surfboards, I believe.

Yeah. I’ve shaped surfboards since I was about thirteen, and that’s all I’ve ever really done as a “job”, you know?

When was that?

I probably started shaping around 67-68.

That long ago?

Yeah.

Wow.

I was born in like 1954.

No way.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah, I’m an old dude.

Well you look pretty good, if you don’t mind me saying.

Thanks, man. I don’t know; the miles are on the inside, I guess. Anyway, I was hanging around Huntington pier, Huntington Beach, the summer that long boards turned short, y’know? It was the transition from logs -old-style tanks- to little Barry Kanaiaupuni mini-guns. Boom! Like that. And that was the year I turned thirteen; I was just learning to surf when boards got shorter, and I started shaping that same summer.

You started on your sister’s old surfboard, right?

Yeah. My sister had a longboard from a few years before, like in the mid-sixties when everybody surfed and the Gidgetmovies came out?

Yeah.

So, my sister and her girlfriends all bought used longboards to ride for a moment, and then it got put up along side the house, y’know? So I took hers and cut it off in front of the fin and reshaped the foam, stripped the glass off…

Where? In the garage?

No, like on a picnic bench. I’d shape one half and then turn it around. Then I learned how to glass it… I hung around the back of Plastic Fantastic; they had this little factory down a third street alley on Huntington Beach. I was the thirteen year-old kid looking in the window, peeking through the crack in the door, watching the guy shape, then looking at all the shit in the dumpster, y’know? Probably the same stuff kids do now. Anyway, I shaped a few that year in ninth grade, and then the next summer I had done enough that I caught somebody’s eye and got a job.

Who’d you work for?

I worked for a guy named Chuck Dent.

The Chuck Dent?

Yeah. It was kind of an amazing period. Huntington Beach was like Surf-Central. The mid-to-late 60’s was the second round of guys who went to the North Shore, all the guys that came from Laguna Beach and Huntington and La Jolla and Malibu… Not Flippy Hoffman, Greg Nolan or all those guys, but the next round; Herbie Fletcher kind of era, y’know?

Yeah, yeah.      

So a lot of the main guys on the North Shore would come and hang out in Huntington because there was a big contest in the summertime. It was kind of a little happening thing that’s hard to explain… It was a little hub of activity when there wasn’t a lot of it.

You know what’s really weird?

What?

Growing up with your brand, I’d always assumed it came from a more urban place. I mean, “Stussy” looks like a tag; I had no idea your background was in surfing.

Oh yeah. All through the 70’s I worked shaping boards for other people. In the winters I went up to (Mt) Mammoth and taught skiing, and then I’d come down and shape in the summer. Then in the winter of ’79-’80 there was a little changing of the guard: twin-fins were happening, it was going from single-fin to twin-fin. So that was another big equipment change going on, y’know; single-fin to multi-fin boards. And at the same time we were just coming off the late 70’s: The Clash, the Sex Pistols, right? Punk had happened, and that was why Stussy was written that way. All the companies at the time had real 60’s-70’s lookin’ logos, and that was like the old people’s imagery for me, so it was sort of a rebellious thing to just write “Stussy”.

With a big Sharpie.

Yeah, yeah. I just wrote it a hundred times and picked the best one. It wasn’t contained in like an oval or a square or a triangle, know what I mean? It was like, “Fuck you, old man.”

Did you get the idea to write it like that from graffiti?

Well, there wasn’t really graffiti back then; this was pre-graffiti. I mean, maybe hardcore people were doing graffiti in the late 70’s, but that was more of an 80’s thing, with hip-hop and everything. People were doing graffiti but it wasn’t on my radar.

It’s a really attractive logo. I remember kids used to write it on their schoolbooks and shit. They’d write your name on their pencil case.

Yeah, that’s pretty weird.

How did you go from shaping boards and signing them “Stussy”, to making t-shirts and stuff? What was the leap there?

Well, the surfboard thing was like a “starving artist” situation. It was my art, like sculpting. Al Merrick was shaping six boards a day and I just thought that was sacrilege, y’know? Those guys were like contractors, construction workers to me: “Cool. I’ll shape six-a-day and get my money” Y’know? And I was like, headphones on, big doobie, you know, listening to Bob Marley, probably, and I went in and did my one-a-day.

Cool.

So, for me it was more like… building formula one motors or something.

Right.

I just tried to keep it really performance and exclusive… or maybe I was lazy or something, I don’t know.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it was probably because you’re a perfectionist? I mean, this has got to be the tidiest workspace I’ve ever seen in my life.

Man, I don’t know. It was just more of like an art thing for me, y’know?

Right.

So I was always just hanging on by a thread of course, and as I got reasonably good at it, twin-fins hit stride in 1980 and I started making them for the better surfers; people like Martin Potter and all those guys from South Africa, that whole crowd, Mike Thompson, Mark Price… And through them came that whole kind of pro-tour thing, all those guys would come through Laguna Beach because of the South African contingency. So I started making a bunch of boards for good surfers, which you don’t get paid for.

You didn’t get paid for those boards?

Well, you know, not really. But I was in heaven. I was making boards, struggling financially, but in heaven creatively.

Then what happened?

Well, then these trade shows start happening in the early 80’s, you know, like the ASR show (Action Sports Retailer)?

Yeah, I’ve been to one of those.

Well, this was the first one, and the two guys who are putting it on are from Laguna Beach, and that’s where I’m making my boards- in Laguna Canyon. So they’re like, “Oh Dude, we got this new show! You gotta be in it! It’s perfect for you. We can give you a booth…” So I went there with maybe eight or ten boards, and my friend and I thought, oh, we’re going to be at this trade show- we need a uniform. So I printed just that Stussy logo on a black t-shirt with white ink, you know, like an Alva ad, or like CBGBs or Zildgian or something. So I made a couple of these t-shirts just for ourselves and wore them at the trade show, and in those two or three days sold maybe twenty-five surfboards, but every guy that walked up to our stall was like, “Dude, how much are those t-shirts?” And I’m like, “What? What’d you mean? They’re not for sale. I just made them for the show!” And they’re like, “Oh, I’ll take twenty-four of them” and then another guy would take eighteen or thirty-six or something.

What?!

Yeah, and at the end of the three days I left with orders for about a thousand t-shirts!

No shit?

Yeah! And I was like, ok, that’s pretty simple. I just gotta go over to the screen printer and he makes the shirts and shit!

Amazing,

Yeah, so that was the first step. It happened really slowly over an eight to ten year period. And at that same time, everybody was wearing those little shorty-short-short OP cord shorts, you know?

Oh yeah, yeah, they’re coming back.

Well, back then we were starting wear big Adidas sneakers and stuff, it’s like 84-85 and you’re starting to hear a little bit of hip-hop coming out of New York City; Run DMC with shell-toe Adidas on, y’know, so I’m keeping my eye on all that. All of a sudden you’re happy wearing chunky sneakers and your kinda punky shirt…

Right.

And you needed some shorts in between. So I would go to the Army Surplus store, buy World War 2 Air force kakis, and my mom would cut them off and hem them, long, you know. They probably didn’t even get down to the knee, but at the time they felt like bermudas; they were really long.

Wait, were they like fatigues?

No, no. Like kaki chinos. No cargo, no combat deal.

Gotcha.       

So we go to the next show, we have those on, and the same people are goin’, “Dude, we’re rockin’ your t-shirts, how about those shorts?” So I went and cleaned out all the Army Surplus stores in California, got all those pants, hemmed them, and then, eventually, the stash dried out. I bought them all and sold them all.

You sold out of the shorts?

Yeah. So my mom and my aunt- who’d always sewn- took my favorite pair of these shorts and picked them a part and made a pattern off them.

So, super humble beginnings with all of this.

Oh yeah, I had no idea what I was doing.

It was sort of an accident.

Yeah. It’s not like now where everybody sets out to build a brand. “My dream is to have a t-shirt company.” You know? It was so not that. It was a different world back then.

So the clothing company was peripheral to your true calling: shaping boards.

Yeah, it was just a side deal.

When did you realize the side deal was enormous?

By 1990 it was kind of rolling. It was like, “Ok. Let’s make another shirt” and “What about cargo pockets? What about some pants? Wouldn’t that be cool?” Man, do you remember how narrow those pants were at the bottom?

The beach pants?

Yeah.

Yeah, but you had to have them; they were part of the skate uniform. It was either that or Shred Threads.

I made them but I never wore them. We made them every year and I’d go, “Fuck, we gotta drop these.” Every season I’d be like, ok, beach pants are off! Then all the reps, the sales people would go, “What’re you talkin’ about? We can sell X amount of those!”

A lot of people in my town would have been devastated had you ditched the beach pants.

They were pretty whack though.

I dug them at the time.

Yeah, but after a while, after a few years, man. But then again, it was a moneymaker, you know? So what do you do?

Major moneymaker; I moved twenty billion units myself.

Man, I hated those pants.

So what happened next- Stussy blew right up and eventually you sold your half of the company to your partner, Frank Sinatra Jnr.

I didn’t really sell it, I just kinda took my money off the table and left. I just scooped up my chips and took off.

And that was it?

Yeah.

Why? Did you want to spend more time with your family or… what was it?

It was just kind of full-circle, you know? I’m a project guy, and the project felt like it had gone full-circle. It was like… I don’t want to do this my whole life. It was fun during all the set-up and stuff, but then it ended up being like seventy-five people working there, and that’s not me. I’m like the creative guy in the garage, y’know? I mean, it was good, yeah, but I was like, “ok, next! What’s next?”

So tell me about S Double, what’s the deal?

It’s just a way to see if it would be fun to reengage, that’s all. I’ve had a bunch of years away; I’m not hungry… It’s not a big aggressive push; it’s the exact opposite.

What does “S Double” mean?

My nickname from my wife was always S Double; you know, ‘cause Shawn Stussy? In 1989 or 1990 there was this group called EPMD…

Oh yeah; Erick and…

Erick and Parrish Making Dollars.

Right!

And Erick in his rhymes would always say like, “I’m the E-double-R-I-C-K” So my new girlfriend at the time- who’s now my wife- would call me the S Double. You know how you get little nicknames like that?

Yeah, totally. I wish I had a cooler one, though. My chick calls me “Baby Dick-head”. Does it feel good to be getting back into the rag trade?

Yeah, it’s half fun and half…normal.

You mean it feels like before with Stussy?

Well, no. The whole Stussy thing, the clothing part, was just more of a job. I just did that so I could go surfing and go to Hawaii. It wasn’t some big life-calling thing, y’know? I don’t put too much emphasis on it. It was just a phase. As you get older, you realize you have these chunks in your life, and that was a twenty-year chunk, you know? So what’s next?

What were you doing between Stussy and S Double? Surfing and shaping and stuff?

Yeah, yeah, and raising my kids, traveling, building homes, landscaping…

Landscaping?

Yeah, when you build a place you have to do the landscaping. That’s the part I dig the most- the gardening.

No pun intended.

But the S Double thing is just like, “If you do it again, how would you do it?”

And you don’t do very big runs of the stuff.

No, no. It’s just a garage thing; what ever happens, happens.