RIO visits the showroom

Music is one of the driving forces behind the inspiration and design in Elvis Jesus. From a constant soundtrack of tunes playing at the office and tee names hinting at our favorite songs and musicians, to graphics translating epic bands into intriguing graphic designs, we full incorporate music into our EJ philosophy.

With that in mind, we find great pleasure in collaborating with musicians and artists, either working together to design a tee that reflects their aesthetic, or by featuring emerging artists wearing our latest Elvis Jesus collections. RIO, a Manchester rapper, is one of those burgeoning talents that we're thrilled to be collaborating with.

This week RIO stopped by our Elvis Jesus showroom to check out our Pre-SS13 collection and pick a few choice styles for his upcoming gig this weekend. A hardworking and driven musician, RIO chatted with us while he browsed through our couture collection of tees, choosing his favorites to take with him. Obviously a man of style, he told us much of his fashion influence comes from growing up around fashion designers, as he expertly mixed our tees with limited edition EJ jackets to find the perfect style mix.

It's always a pleasure to work with such a variety of talented people, and RIO is no exception. We can tell he's going to go far, and we look forward to many future collaborations with him. 

Check out some of RIO's latest work here.

Inspired: The Americans by Robert Frank

A big source of our inspiration here at Elvis Jesus comes from photography. Often we're looking at images of rebels from popular culture, concert images of Jimi Hendrix or stills from videos of Bob Dylan. Photographs capture a mood and tell a story, relaying a certain emotion and energy that we're looking to convey in our clothing. But sometimes we stumble upon images that are not of famous people, but instead are of everyday life, telling a story more real than the pop culture that we are daily exposed to.

One photographer who has captured our attention is Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer working in the 1950s. After emigrating to the US he created his most famous photographic series, The Americans, in which he spent two years traveling across the United States photographing people on the streets, capturing candid moments that stand as a testament to the heated social tensions that existed among the American people at that time.

Taking gritty shots from unusual angles, Frank captured all strata of the American populace, showing an outsider's view of such a vast and evolving nation.

Take a look at some of his famous shots to get a real, unadulterated look into America in the 1950's, right as the counterculture and social revolution started to make their debuts.

For more images from The Americans, look here.

 

Epic Embroidery from Takashi Iwasaki

Part of the allure of an Elvis Jesus tee is the ornate detail that we meticulously put into every tee that we design. Whether that's using alternative materials like safety pins or rivets, or featuring epic embroidery detail, we make sure that embellishment is a feature in our collections. In our continuous hunt to find new and inventive ways of incorporating embroidery we stumbled onto the artist Takashi Iwasaki.

Using embroidery as a means of illustration, the artist creates abstracted landscapes solely from embroidery thread, rich collisions of color and linear graphics creating hypnotic and entrancing images. He uses embroidery as a way to capture moments in time, to expose dreamscapes and capture and expose the visions within his mind.

Without any doubt, these embroidery pieces serve as a bold and intriguing inspiration four our own embellishment and embroidery work. To see more samples of his work, visit his website!

 

 

 

 

 

 

rubbish sculptures

Insulting? No.

Using only light and rubbish, Tim Noble and Sue Webster are able to create stunning shadow sculptures. Collecting household waste, rubbish, scrap metal and taxidermy animals, these artistic collaborators fuse together found materials into seemingly random formations and conglomerations. It is only when lit from a certain angle that you see the actual result, a perfectly formed shadow cast upon the wall, revealing the silhouettes of people or animals. Meticulously hand crafted, these works require an abstracted view of reality to create, as what you see in the physical structure is not what appears on the wall.

Music plays a heavy influence into their work, and they ask the same thing of their work that they ask of their musical choices: to push boundaries and expectations:

“I think anything that’s a bit of a rocket up the arse, anything that kicks against the routine, against the mundane things that close down your mind, is a refreshing and good thing. Punk did that very successfully . . . it offered a direct and instant means of producing products or things."

With an intensive eye towards alternative materials and transformation, Tim Noble and Sue Webster are pushing boundaries and raising eyebrows with their elaborate works.

 

 

Blu: An Artist We Love

Here at Elvis Jesus we're constantly looking towards art and culture to inspire and enlighten us. Often times we find ourselves taking to the streets, looking at street style or graffiti to find our next design idea. Today I wanted to bring you an incredible artist that pushes the boundaries of traditional boundaries of graffiti art. 

The artist Blu, living in Bolonga and working across most of Europe, paints massive murals using house paint and rollers with extensions, opting out of the tradition of spray paint as the graffiti painting medium of choice. Often creating gigantic human figures that dominate a wall or the side of a building, Blu frequently transforms the human shape by creating one form out of thousands of painted objects, such as bananas or smaller human beings.

Although I've seen his graffiti art for years, what really blew us away was the video MUTO, which he made in 2008. A stop-motion animated film using graffiti creatures moving across city streets and buildings, the video took a year to complete. Take a look at the video and some samples of his work. Definitely an awesome artist to get those mental gears turning in unusual ways.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Li Hongbo: Artist We Love

Here at Elvis Jesus we are constantly looking at sources of inspiration, cool new ideas and designs that push us to create new and innovative collections of clothing for you. Inspiration can come from anywhere, from something as simple as a cool piece of graffiti on the street, to a fine artist working within the walls of a gallery.

Today I wanted to show you an awesome artist who has just come to my attention, and whose sculptures make my mind melt in amazement. Li Hongbo, an artist working in Beijing, China, creates sculptures that, while at first appearing to be made of plaster, are in fact made from paper that makes complex and unexpected transformations.

Using thousands of layers of glued paper assembled in a similar fashion to Chinese gourds, which are traditional folded paper toys, these sculptures push the capabilities of a simple medium like paper. 

Check out the video to see how these sculptures move and transform, it really is mind-boggling!


Li Hongbo - Pure White Paper from Dominik Mersch Gallery on Vimeo.

For more information on the artist, look here.