Purchase

I told myself after the write up about my Life Is Unfair sweater that I’d start writing a Substack for all of my drops. That was honestly a really lofty pursuit that just straight up wasn’t going to happen. I spent 4 or 5 consecutive days writing that first article and I’m super proud of it. I feel like I knocked it out of the park if I’m being so for real, but it set a precedent (in my head) that a post on here needed to be really grand and researched and conclusive and a bunch of other things that are great excuses to not share information about the things that I make and the things that I love, and where they intersect with each other.

When I think about it for too long, I get really in my head about the merit of explaining the things I make and love. It’s like putting out a reason for their existence opens up the possibility of breaking apart the specialness within the thing. It’s especially funny to me that I’m saying that about a sweater that is literally a company’s logo, but that’s sort of where the point, contradicting of itself, comes from. Without my intense love and history with this company I wouldn’t have bothered making the sweater. I’m only describing the platform itself when I say this and not the management and choices of its operating officers. The people in charge have made some utterly insane and lowkey evil choices before. This wiki article covers their most insane choice, to run a campaign to stalk and harass a husband and wife who were critical of the company on their blog. I actually don’t even know how to tie this together with my point, but felt like it needed to be mentioned. If making a sweater with their logo wasn’t taunting them enough, being critical of them on top of it is surely playing with fire. Anyways.

My History With eBay

For the past few years I’ve been saying my longest lasting relationships are with both eBay and YouTube. Since my discovery of them I have never in my life gone without them. I owe huge swaths of who I am today to both of them, but for the sake of brevity and continuity for the point of all this (selling eBay sweaters) we’re just going to talk about eBay in this.

My two earliest memories of eBay are tied together in my mind and I’m really not certain which came first or which years they actually happened.

• The first memory is somewhere around my 9th or 10th birthday. It’s the earliest birthday I can distinctly remember what my gift was. I had begged my parents for a cellphone, as if I had anywhere to be or anyone to call/text, but the people on YouTube had Sidekicks and my brother had a Blackberry (which I only recently learned he bought himself on eBay with money earned shoveling horse poop at our neighbor’s ranch) so I had to have one too. On my birthday my dad handed me a thick stack of paper stapled together in the top corner. It was a print out of all of the eBay listings for cellphones within whatever price range he’d decided was acceptable for a 10 year old’s first phone. I don’t even remember what the phone I chose was, but that print out packet has stuck with me my whole life.

• The second memory is being in the front seat of my dads car while he was driving the two of us home. It was dark out and I think we were in one of the canyons surrounding the LA area. His Blackberry got a notification and he grabbed it and started hitting buttons. At that age my little sisters and I would all make a really big fuss when he’d 1) use his phone while driving or 2) not wear his seatbelt, so I remember bugging him about it and asking what he was doing. “Sniping an eBay auction” was his reply. I obviously asked what sniping meant, and he explained that he waits to bid on auctions until there’s only a few seconds left. At that point, he throws in a bid of slightly higher increment than everyone else to make sure he is the last and highest bidder. If the print out packet has stuck with me my whole life, this moment is straight up engraved in my brain. To this day I’ve only ever put non sniping bids on things I figure no one else will want that I also would forget about if I don’t lock it in right at that moment.

After these two experiences I started spending a lot of time on eBay. I had no money to buy anything, but there was something about that site that constantly brought me back in. I think it might have been because everything was attainable there. Not to purchase (my mom would have taken away my computer if I asked her to buy any of the things I was searching for: airsoft guns, lighters, pocket knives, to name a few. Real 10 year old boyslop items) but to view all in one place.

Looking back on it, I find my early years on the internet to be so funny. I loved so many things that would have been so easy to research and read about if I had only possessed the knowledge and tact to google them and read peoples blogs. (I undoubtably was googling them, but I have very little recognition of taking those google searches anywhere. eBay stands out so much more to me, but maybe thats confirmation bias). Instead, I for some reason defaulted to searching those things up on eBay and using the listings as my sources of information. I would make up what I thought everything I was seeing meant. A listing of a lighter I hadn’t seen on the first page of my search for the word “lighter”? It’s super rare of course. Maybe its because I was old enough to have my own computer, but young enough to not understand that there was endless information held on other sites.

I used my dads account for all of my eBay needs through my early teen years. I would send him a listing, ask him to lowball, and give him cash if he won. It was mostly stuff like film cameras and vintage Tommy Hilfiger shirts, never more than $10 a piece.

The First Purchases of my OWN

When I was 17 I opened a bank account and the first things I did with it was join PayPal and make my own eBay account. When I started writing this I looked backed at my purchase history year by year in the app and saw my first three personal eBay purchases. They’re honestly pretty goated and still on brand for who I am today, but more so they are a reminder that I’ve always used eBay the same way. When I found something interesting and wanted to explore it myself, I would search it on eBay, the same as when I was a little kid. Now at this older age, it became a jumping off point to finding the things I’d love.

1. Canon PowerShot SD 1000 Digital ELPH, purchased April 1st 2017

My best friend had started shooting photos on the first model of digital Ricoh GR from 2005 and his images were blowing my mind. I had already become sick of paying for film and was ready to jump ship to an old digital camera too. I remember thinking since I couldn’t afford the $100 that the Ricoh went for (RIP those prices), something from another brand of similar release year with comparable sensor specs would probably be fine. I ended up finding THE GEM of the Canon Powershot line up by searching “canon powershot” on eBay and scrolling until one looked cool. They’ve come heavily into trend in the past few years and for good reason. The body is fully metal and beautifully squared off, it’s absolutely tiny, has a built in optical viewfinder, and a 7.1mp CCD sensor that looks so creamy and dreamy at low ISO’s and really gritty and noisy at high ISO’s. These were so unbelievably under the radar at the time. I learned a lot about capturing interesting images from this camera and don’t think I would shoot my work the way I do today without the years I spent with it in my pocket.

In 2018, after getting a Ricoh GR of my own, I converted the Canon to only shoot photos in the infrared color spectrum. I’ve come to regret that. I love the infrared images I made at the time, but both street photography and infrared photography feel like a fad that I’m far over now and I just miss the creamy low ISO images I used to get. Maybe I’ll buy another, but at 10x the price I paid less than 10 years ago I’d be bitter about it.

2. APC Petit Standard Raw Denim, purchased April 25th 2017

   

This was my first time sniping on my own. I remember distinctly that as soon as I sent the bid my heart started racing and my face went flush as I waited to see if I was the highest bidder. I was. What arrived was not what I wanted. No one told me (I didn’t pay attention or even check measurements) that APC as a whole, let alone, the Petit models were slim fitting AND low rise. I had been seeing raw denim on Reddit and Heddels and took that interest straight to eBay without looking into fit/materials/brands elsewhere.

I tried them on once or twice and eventually gave them to my mom. It took me trying 5 pairs from all the usual suspects: APC, Uniqlo, Naked and Famous, Japan Blue, Levi’s (with only the Uniqlos not coming from eBay) to finally land on what I would consider my perfect denim.

I had no idea at the time, but all of these purchases were an attempt to solve a problem I had with the previous pair. The APC pants were tiny, the Naked and Famous were straight leg but too light weight, the Japan Blue were heavy enough in weight but too slim, the Student Levi’s were actually just an epic fail and didn’t fit, the Levi’s 501 Shrink to fit were perfect (at the time).

Without those 3 years of denim purchases, I never would have landed on what became my truly unbelievably perfect in every single way Lyle McGraw jeans that I wear everyday without fail.

3. TEFLON LOW SHANK FOOT FOR LEATHER VINYL PLASTIC GOODS, purchased July 25th 2017

This was my first introduction into using specialized tools for specific jobs. I had wanted to make handbags from marine vinyl after watching hours upon hours of upholstery videos on YouTube. I learned that the proper foot on a sewing machine could make the difference between usable stitches and total hogwash. The teflon foot makes it so that the surface making contact with your project is slick enough that the sturdy and sticky materials can move through without getting caught up by friction.

From then on I knew any tool I needed for my current obsessive hobbies could be found on eBay. I’m at a point now where I’ve mostly amassed the tools I use on a daily basis and haven’t had to buy anything in a while. I compiled a handful of important tool purchases in the image below. These serve as almost direct markers of my path from some kid messing around to the adult I am making the things I make today.

There’s a longer story here about how falling in love with sewing brought me to New York, falling out of love with sewing brought me to making rugs, and finally falling out of love with making rugs brought me to knitting. I reckon that at this point I’ll never fall out of love with knitting, thankfully (if anyone is interested I am willing to write out my whole career timeline, but I mostly cover it in this hypebeast article).

I think the point I’m trying to get at here is that while these first 3 purchases aren’t anything insane, they do serve as a time capsule of who I was and what I was into during those formative years that have become a foundation for who I am today. At 17 I was already approaching all my hobbies and interests in what is now at 26 my baseline for everything. So much of my direction in life has come from my eBay searches.

To this day I gain more insight and direction about knitwear from having “handmade knit sweater” saved as a search term than I do from reading my knitting books (that I’ve mostly collected from eBay, of course).

Anyways, this feels like its lacking the conciseness and heavy hit I really thought it would have. I don’t think I’ve even come close to summing up what eBay means to me, but thats ok. Maybe that whole thing I said in the beginning about losing the specialness of something by explaining it is true here. If I could boil down my feelings about eBay to just a few sentences then maybe it isn’t that special to me. Or, I’m just not a great writer and am having trouble forcing myself to sit and write this instead of knitting.

If I don’t finish this and send it out right now, I probably never will and that’s honestly LAME of me. It’s a fucking Substack, not a publishing house funded memoir, and the only person who actually gives a hoot is me. To that end, I’m finishing this off with the two most ridiculous purchases on my whole account.

Questionable Purchases

DO NOT ORDER THE EBAY KRATOM. I REPEAT, DO NOT ORDER THE EBAY KRATOM. DO NOT TOUCH THE KRATOM AT ALL.

I have to say from the bottom of my heart that I have never bought followers for my own Instagram account, but I must admit that I did buy my girlfriends little sister followers for her slime account. I also bought followers for the most lowkey friend in our friend group, and told them it must be because they were on the Brazilian explore page (they quickly privated their account and individually blocked each follower I gave them).

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Malcolm in the Middle

Malcolm in the Middle is one of the first shows I remember finishing and immediately rewatching. I had watched it air live (at least the last season) but was too young to think deeper about it than;

• How it was funny

• That the older boys were really cool

• That I liked the music

It wouldn’t be until the end of 2024 when I started maybe my 15th rewatch that I would be old enough to recognize its impact on me. I hadn’t watched the show in at least 3 years at that point, for no particular reason. I can’t remember why I decided to watch it again but I, unfortunately, feel like it might have been a clip I saw on reels.

As a side bar I have been so hopelessly addicted to reels lately and I think restarting Malcolm in the Middle has been a help in stopping that. It feels way nicer to do an hour of pausing episodes of the show to look at/google their outfits (see my new Instagram account archiving articles of clothing I find and buy from the show) than it does to find a clip of a random episode in a reel on my 600th swipe. I need to drop the reels and get back to actively consuming instead of just being fed.

I started Season 1 Episode 1 and with They Might Be Giants’ “Boss of Me” blasting I started to think about how the title cards, specifically the font, looked familiar in a way I couldn't put my finger on. I’m in no way a font nerd so it was really bugging me that I knew it, but didn't know it. After a few episodes it clicked that it looked so much like the Stüssy script. I figured I couldn’t be the only one who sees the similarity and my google of "Malcolm in the middle Stüssy” brought me the answer that inspired this whole project.

The Stüssy Script and FunkyFresh

I think nearly everyone existing in the world I do will at least recognize the above hand writing to some extent. I don’t think I need to explain the impact and continued legacy of Stüssy on streetwear, nor do I think I am smart enough to write something like that. What I do want to talk about is where the Stüssy script originally comes from. The story is out there and fairly widely known so I feel like I can be brief here and spend more time talking about the Malcolm in the Middle font. I should probably say some things about my sweater at some point too.

Anyways Stüssy was founded in the 80’s when Shawn Stüssy was shaping surfboards. Most people telling the story say he just scribbled the signature of his name on the boards he shaped and then eventually threw that signature on shirts for a trade show. I think this displays the story a little too casually though. He definitely wasn’t writing his name in order to start a clothing brand, but he certainly had his own style and care for his craft. I found an interview where he says “Yeah, that was just my name. I wrote it like a couple hundred times with different pens on different kind(s) of paper and just picked the best one” Honestly this interview tells the story really well and focuses on the surf culture more than a lot of the others I’ve seen. Read that and then come back here if you wish. The TLDR of it is that he used his name signature on shirts for a trade show, accidentally sold way more shirts than surfboards at the show, and realized how much more profitable doing clothes was compared to hand shaping surfboards.

FontsInUse, which indexes fonts and their media usage immediately gave me my answer of the connection between Stüssy and Malcolm in the Middle. The titles and credits look like the Stüssy script because they SORT OF are.

The show uses a font called “FunkyFresh” which was created by a then hobbyist type designer, Scott Yoshinaga in 1994. I reached out to Yoshinaga in hopes of interviewing him deeper on why and how he made the font as well as to ask what he’s up to now, but haven’t heard back. The following information on the font comes from both FontsInUse and tweets of Yoshinaga’s I’ve dug up.

On creating the font (that would come to consume all my thoughts for a year) Yoshinaga has said in a tweet “I did the original on typing paper, then ran it through the xerox machine a few times then scanned it into paths.” It was released as a free Shareware file and has now been floating around for 31 years at the time of writing this. In another tweet he mentions “I made a few fonts back when I was a college student. I also made Grunge, Crud and Sassy. Those were the days.”

Maybe Yoshinaga has made more fonts than the 4 we’ve discussed so far, but he’s not credited to any others on any font distribution websites. With that said I want to quickly point out just how much impact on culture these fonts from a niche hobbyist designer have had.

• Sassy (released in 1993) was the hardest font of Yoshinaga’s to find. It’s not indexed on FontsInUse beyond acknowledging that it exists, but a community forum post on dafont led me to the only example I’ve seen. In 2006 Sassy was used on the cover art for “Long Way 2 Go” off of Cassie’s self titled debut album.

  

• Grunge (originally released in 1993 then rereleased with errors fixed by Dan Schwartz in an unknown year) is the only font I haven’t been able to find any commercial use for, but I did find the original catalog where you could order it via floppy disk for $45 in 1995. It was distributed by Plazm, who are a magazine that once included font distribution in their portfolio and are now a creative agency. They also developed the font MTVPE to be used all over MTV in the coming years.

• Crud (released in 1996) was used in two other pretty big pop culture settings. First appearing on the cover of “Turn the Radio Off” the second album from Reel Big Fish released in 1996. The second appearance being on the cover art for the single “Year 2000” by Pimp My Ride’s very own X to the Z Xzibit. (I know very well he’s much more than the guy from pimp my ride).

In re-reading this right before posting it I cant help, but draw the connection between Stüssy and Yoshinaga’s development and legacy of their projects. Both creators made something (sort of the same thing really lol) without putting much weight to it. Stüssy followed the path of success started by that script signature and eventually came to be one of the parents of streetwear. Yoshinaga made a few fonts that, given all available information, were just for love of the game. Regardless of his intent with them though, his fonts have both directly and indirectly left their marks in pop culture. There’s something to be said about how Stüssy’s writing inspired Yoshinaga to make a font which then inspired me to make a sweater. We don’t have close to enough time here to get into the whole Stüssy basically forming James Jebbia leading him to found Supreme which in a way would trickle down and inspire me to make clothes. All thats for another day and another write up anyways I think.

The “Life is Unfair” Sweater

The show and the brand I’d already known and loved, but the font is a new addition. It feels like the font embodies the same sort of ethos I’ve had with my work since the beginning. I’ve been slowly coming to realize that I feel like I have been losing that a bit (probably only behind the scenes and in my own mind, not in a tangible way). I got my start from making things inspired by what I loved and don't feel like I’ve given myself the room to do that for the last while. Whether or not I hear back from Yoshinaga about his actual inspiration to make the font, its obvious that it at least has to come from an appreciation of the Stüssy script and wanting to translate that into his own language.

Once I saw the connection between Malcolm in the Middle, Stüssy, and FunkyFresh I kind of knew right away that I’d make something involving the 3 of them. 3 is the number I repeat in my head all day and pattern recognize the most (and amount of times I used to have to touch the banister before going up the stairs before I got my OCD under control) so it was easy to take these 3 connections as a sign.

I originally thought to do the most obvious answer of just “Malcolm in the Middle” in FunkyFresh on a sweater, but that felt far too on the nose for something already so referential. Not to mention the actual title card places the “in the” inside of the filled in O of Malcolm, which I'd only be able to achieve through embroidery on the finished garment. I’m not against embellishing after the fact, but I definitely prefer to do everything actually knit directly into my pieces.

I still felt like I had to do something with the idea and after scrapping the self titled sweater it felt like my second idea should have been my first the whole time. The tagline of the show said at the end of the opening credits song. Life is Unfair. I don't think they ever actually say the phrase directly on screen, but it’s the overarching theme of the whole show. Whether by their own doings or just by the nature of the world, every character has to face the unfairness in nearly every episode.

I really liked how referential it would be to knit a sweater that vaguely looks like something Stüssy would do, but not directly on the merit of Stüssy itself. Instead it feels like Stüssy through this backward looping connection of a massive piece of pop culture media mixed with an early internet fan project all painted over in my fiber based design language. Am I over intellectualizing this? Maybe.

Had Stüssy ever made anything like this I wouldn’t have bothered. My fear from the start of the project was it feeling too Stüssy. I thankfully think I landed on a thing that feels uniquely mine.

I think my favorite example of this Life is Unfair idea in the show is in Season 2 Episode 1, the traffic jam episode. Each character really experiences the theme in different ways throughout it.

• Hal lets an aggressive driver pass him on a family roadtrip and shortly after they get to a traffic jam where the road is blocked off. The driver who passed Hal died in a car accident causing the jam and he immediately starts facing his own mortality. He realizes that if he had done anything differently he could have been in the accident. Hal feels guilty that it wasn’t himself and his arc concludes with him saving the life of a pigeon thats stuck in a 6 pack ring, feeling like he’s balanced out the karma of himself getting to live. The pigeon is immediately eaten by a dog Lois let out of a hot truck. Life is Unfair

• Lois is upset with the police officers for not moving a single police car over to let people pass. She needs to get home to Dewey who she assumes is with the sitter. She argues with police and construction workers, tries to operate a crane herself, and finally, to feel some sense of control of the situation, she breaks the window of a truck with a dog locked inside. The dog is vicious. Life is Unfair

• Reese tries to get ice cream from an ice cream truck, but the driver refuses to sell any of the kids ice cream in traffic. Life is Unfair (Reese does lowkey go genius mode and get everyone the ice cream in the end though, Life is Unfair doesn’t always mean something bad)

• Malcolm falls in love with a girl named Jessica he hangs out with all day, only to find out she lives in Canada. Life is Unfair. As the family is driving away from the jam Jessica reaches out of the car window to hand Malcolm a note with her phone number. The dog Lois let out of the truck comes running past and eats the note. Life is Unfair

• Dewey was supposed to be home with a babysitter because he has an ear infection and can’t go to the waterpark the family is roadtripping to (Life is Unfair), but he danced too hard with her and she had to go to hospital so he starts wandering around and accidentally takes a whimsical trip meeting a lot of wild characters. Life is Unfair

• Francis just ate a bunch of Peeps (called Quacks in the show). Life is not really that unfair for him this episode.

I think part of what's so nostalgic for me about the show is that it feels like home. They filmed it all around the greater LA area which is where I spent my whole life before moving to New York. They don’t ever tell you where the show is meant to take place, but people have made their guesses from passing images of Oklahoma license plates or Dewey misremembering Craig telling him that he could become President of Idaho. I think this reddit post has the best actual answer. Take it as you want, it looks like California because it is California, but lore wise its probably Austin or San Antonia Texas. It doesn’t really matter and is just me side tracking, but this is MY sweater release blog post and I can go on about theorized locations of my favorite TV show if I want to. All this is just to say that the nostalgia hits extra hard for me realizing I spent a lot of time skating around the greater LA area in places that look just like all of their filming locations.

I need to end this with a heavy emphasis that I was working on this before the Malcolm in the Middle revival was announced. Shoutout Erik Per Sullivan (Dewey) for saying no to being in the reboot because he doesn’t consider himself an actor and he’s busy working on his Master’s at Harvard. Dewey type of move for real to leave the family and seek higher education. Anyways please buy the sweater.