We recently caught up with London based Streetwear label Second Son and got the lowdown on the brand…

Second Son formed from your previous brand Loki, tell us a bit about the origins of the brand, the backgrounds of the creators and the meaning behind the name?

Rufus: Loki was the Norse God of Mischief, which seemed to fit with our plan at the time of creating a brand that didn’t take itself too seriously and would highlight or poke fun at the vanities of the fashion world. Will was working at Bond and studying graphic design at St. Martins and I was working in the city doing project management and sales. Originally the idea was to just support Will and help with the business side of things – like most ‘creatives’ he’s not that interested in figures and spreadsheets - but then I got kicked out of my job and fancied a change. And we’d massively underestimated the amount of work required to run a clothing brand, so I joined the company full time. But then we came across another Loki making climbing wear in the States and so we made the difficult decision of changing the name just as things were starting to take off. I’d say finding a new name was possibly the hardest thing we’ve had to do. Virtually everything is trademarked somewhere in the world. So we eventually settled on Second Son because we wanted there to be a family connection and we’re both second sons and we liked the second sun pun of being reborn and starting again. I also liked the fact that it was a bit more innocuous than Loki – I’m a big fan of more subtle, maybe duff names like Tonite and Folk that don’t shout volumes about the brand, but that’s probably a reaction to growing up in the heydey of Spliffy and Dready.

 

Your SS09 range had a strong focus on occult and magical imagery, from hypnosis to Egyptology – what drew you to this as a source of inspiration and tell us about your forthcoming ranges?

Will: The bad guys always have the best outfits, like how Darth Vader resembled an evil robot ninja whereas Luke was just dressed like a medieval farmer. It’s the same thing with evil secret societies – they may be bent on taking over the world and sacrificing us all to their monstrous gods, but damn if they don’t have some dope graphics. I love the way that symbols like the all-seeing eye and the Masonic compass have these weird shady associations even if you’re often not sure what they actually mean. And then when you start looking into the symbolism it leads on to more mystical imagery, Egyptian symbols, alchemy, and so on. From that I got interested in the weirdness of sacred geometry and now I’m obsessed with shapes and colours instead, so that is (loosely) what we have coming up…

What celebrities and artists have been seen sporting your threads? Tell us about your target market/customer - how would you describe your fanbase and the attitude/ethos of the brand?

Rufus: This sounds a pretentious thing to say but if anything we’ve been anti-ethos from the start. We’ve never really branded our pieces heavily and we’ve always wanted people to buy our clothes on their merit not on the fact that they think they should be wearing the brand. Will got tired of people coming into Bond and asking for X, Y or Z brand that they’d never seen before but felt they should be buying, so we wanted to avoid that. Which creates a weird situation that we’re in now where you meet a fair amount of people who have never heard of the brand but they’ll know the designs and go ‘oh you’re the people that do that weather pattern design…’ So I think in terms of brand recognition we’ve not maximised our situation but that’s the brand – it’s English, so we’re a bit quieter and we hope people find us and buy based on quality and not hype.

Target market wise I’d say males between 15 and 35 who are into similar things to us: music, art, skating, going out drinking and chasing girls. We’re all towards the older part of that demographic which maybe shows in the product and our customers but that’s not intentional - it’s just natural we draw upon references that appeal more to our age group.

In terms of celebrities that support the brand, we were advised when we started Loki to give away merchandise to celebrities we liked. We tried doing this but we couldn’t really come up with that many and even then it’s unlikely they’re going to wear anything you get to them. So we wanted Vincent Cassel to be wearing Loki but it’s not likely that’s going to happen. So we gave up on that route and since then we’ve had a good few people come to us saying I like what you’re doing, how about some freebies. Which works much better because then you’re pretty sure they’re going to wear them at events etc. and not just when they’re washing their car. We’ve had a pretty wide range of mainly musicians wearing our stuff, from Calvin Harris to Damian from Fucked Up, and Professor Green to Rolo Tomassi, and we’ve just been asked to provide a couple of tees for a video shoot in New York which would be unbelievably good if it came off but I’ve probably just jinxed that so….

How and where do you draw influences from for your ranges? Would you say Second Son had a set aesthetic style which you follow, a recognisable ‘look’ or range of influences that were distinctive to you as a brand – or do your influences and styles change regularly?

 

Will: I do most of the designs so I suppose that gives it a vaguely cohesive look, but it tends to change depending on what I’m interested in at the time. I get overly obsessed with certain stuff, spend ages doing designs based around that and then try to come up with a theme I can cram them all into. Then we ditch all the designs that no one else will find funny, and that’s how we come up with a range. In terms of the aesthetic style, I think we naturally tend towards quite an English take on streetwear – either putting a more old-fashioned or traditional spin on modern styles, or the other way around. So on the one hand we have t-shirts with prints based on traditional Fairisle knitting patterns, and on the other we’re updating the classic deerstalker hat with some brighter colours and modern details. With the cut and sew stuff it’s generally a case of trying to make products that are discreet or smart enough to wear easily, but with enough unusual detailing to make them stand out. I suppose the main thing is that most of our designs have a concept behind them. Even the most immature ones - they just have a more immature concept. We’re not really a brand that’s into just putting out logo tees all the time.

With literally 100s of independent UK clothing brands and t-shirt labels springing up in the last few years it’s fair to say that you’re among the more successful and recognised – what do you feel it is about Second Son that sets you apart from the competition?

Rufus: That’s difficult to answer without sounding cocky. I think maybe that we’re a bit older than a lot of the people running these other brands, so possibly we’re more committed. This has never been just a little side-project for us; we’ve always been in it for the long haul. And we work very hard on other affiliated projects to keep Second Son growing, so Will designs for Carhartt, I freelance as a photographer and the two of us run the online retailer FreshCotton in the UK and write for Streetwear Today. And I think time has a big part to play in it. We’ve been going nearly four years now, and every season you add new customers and you grow, so I’d say that if we’re among the more recognised it’s because we’ve been out and about for longer.

I notice your Nostalgia t-shirt has the words “You’re feigning nostalgia for a decade you don’t remember”. With the trend towards vintage designs and inspiration in so much of today’s fashion do you feel that it’s beginning to lose its context or get played out?

Will: That design was a poster I did for an exhibition at The Three Threads, but we got a lot of requests to put it on a t-shirt as well. It was a reaction to all the people I was seeing in Shoreditch pretending to be nostalgically bringing back 80s styles when in fact they probably weren’t even born then. It’s weird how quickly our culture cannibalises itself now – I get the impression that certain styles make an ironic comeback before they’ve even properly gone out of fashion the first time round. It’s like those TV compilation programmes called “I remember 2005”. I remember it too, it was just now wasn’t it? That’s why the theme for that season was “The Past is So Hot Right Now”: it seems like anything over a season old is considered vintage nowadays, and meanwhile everyone was trying to appropriate older, preppier styles without putting any thought behind it. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

 I notice your Arrow t-shirt featured guest artist Gustaf Von Arbin – how important is collaboration in your work, do you have any future collaborations lined up and if you could work with any artist, designer or illustrator from history who would it be?

Will: Apart from that t-shirt we’ve done all the design work in-house so far, but we have a load more collabs in the pipeline now. We’ve got a t-shirt coming from Mark Ward (www.markwardstudio.com) and we’re currently plotting a collaborative range with our friend Alex Nash (www.nashmoney.com). Then we’re also working on a project with the brand Durkl from Washington DC, and we’ve also done some shoe colourways with Adidas for the London Streetfest event in October.

If I could work with any artist from history it would probably be Hieronymus Bosch or whoever oversaw all the classic old Penguin and Pelican book covers from the 60s. And I’d love to do a t-shirt with that guy Boris Vallejo who did those tacky fantasy paintings with muscly dudes killing giant alien demon spiders on mountaintops while semi-naked chicks with breast armour and axes hug his legs.

Alongside your t-shirts, you also have a range of woven shirts and denim jeans. Are there any plans to extend the range and bring out more accessories, clothing and merchandise?

Rufus: Definitely. T-shirts are the easiest piece to start with because you can make mistakes and they don’t cost you much money, and they’re effectively just adverts for your brand. The cut and sew pieces are much more a labour of love and it’s a very frustrating yet ultimately rewarding process. We’ve got two winter shirts that we’ve just dropped, which are very thick overshirts in classic English deadstock materials that we managed to get hold of. I think these are the two pieces that we’re most proud of to date and that’s really exciting to see how people are responding. After that we’re currently working on belts, some shoe ideas, knitwear, chinos, some old school caps and hopefully even some sunglasses. Obviously they won’t all come at once because we’d like to take our time and get them right, but we certainly have plans to extend the range.

To what extent do music and art have as an influence on your work? I notice you’ve started featuring your favourite playlists from Spotify on your blog…

Rufus: I think the two go hand in hand. To me streetwear has always been fashion for people who are lucky enough to not have to wear a suit everyday. So it feeds off the elements of your life that you encounter as you go about your everyday – whether that’s going to work, college or the local skatepark. Your personal take on it is made up of the music you listen to on your way there, and the way you get there, whether that be by skateboard, bmx or fixed gear. Obviously art plays a big part in the conception or inspiration of much of what we do, whether it be conscious or subconscious, but in terms of the end product I find the relationship with music much stronger. To me, it’s all about getting ready to go out; you choose a t-shirt to fit your mood the same way you choose an MP3 to while away the bus journey and prepare you for the night ahead.

 

For people out there interested in starting up a clothing range what would be your advice?

Rufus: Do an internship at a bigger company – something like Carhartt where you can learn the processes and decide whether it’s really what you want to do. It’s great to be your own boss and to see people in the street wearing your products but it is tough and without serious financial investment you’re going to be working very hard for little or no money for a good while.

Will: I think it’s a good idea to have some experience in all sides of the industry. I found it really useful working in a streetwear shop when we started because it made me look at what people liked to buy and were willing to pay for, and we try to look at that side of things with whatever we make: it’s not much use making an incredible belt out of beautiful materials if it’s too expensive for anyone to buy it.

 

If there was something you could change about the current UK streetwear market what would it be?

Rufus: Number one for London: bring back Bond. There’s a real void there now. Not just in terms of the shop but the whole family around it and I think there’s many people who really miss Saturday nights sat on the bench.

For the UK as a whole, a good streetwear tradeshow would be useful.

I guess this is obvious and unrealistic but it would be great if there were more shops that made big orders and paid for them on time. But in this current climate that doesn’t look like it’ll be happening and maybe there isn’t even the demand for more shops, maybe streetwear isn’t in demand as it once was, which isn’t good for us as a business but is always good for the consumer who wants something that isn’t ubiquitous.

Tell us about your stockists and where people can get your garments…

 Rufus: Our list of stockists is constantly changing so it’s probably best to check our website. We’ll shortly be launching our own webstore which will be for clearing end of season stock and any mid-season exclusives we want to drop. It’s something we’ve decided to do and it’s obviously not massively popular with some of our stockists but I think that people understand that in the current climate we’ve got to do certain things to make the brand a success and if they truly support us they’ll bear with it.

What projects are you currently working on and what can we expect from you in the next 6 – 12 months?

 Rufus: Our new website is a big project for us, then there’s a sticker campaign with Don’t Panic that’s going to be quite funny I think. Then we’re doing a fashion show at Streetfest in Shoreditch along with Adidas in October – I’m a bit nervous about that but I’m confident we can do something different to a bog standard catwalk show. We just did the second Reset event which went really well – there’ll be a third coming I guess, we’ve got a couple of new styles of jeans coming, plus chinos, a couple of collabs in the pipeline, some club nights and an artist series of t-shirts, and a project with Burton on customised snowboarding helmets. So all in all, pretty busy I guess.

For more info on Second Son check out their website www.second-son.co.uk and catch some footage of them at the recent Reset event here.

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