The Pyrex Hoodie or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hype
The year is 2012, and life is simple. Riccardo Tisci is making waves in menswear with his dramatic, romantic Givenchy collections. An enigmatic brand called Hood By Air led by Shayne Oliver was on the cusp of launching towards the mainstream through stunning runway presentations and legendary parties. Kanye West was in album mode, and a young rapper from Harlem named A$AP Rocky was buzzing with his latest fashion cult classic single “Goldie”. It was also a time where fashion is nowhere near what it is today. The usual big publications had an absolute stranglehold on coverage of “real fashion” due to both the set routes most designers took to present a collection, as well as the infancy of social media being used as a tool for the industry. At the time, it seemed like unless you were an established brand or in with Anna, your work would be dismissed almost instantly. However, there was a growing movement that was emerging from the most niche corners of the internet, something that is much more recognizable to modern “fashion enthusiasts” now than it was then: the Hypebeast. To spare some time I won’t explain what that is because if you don’t already know, why are you reading this right now?
Let’s backtrack and talk about the man behind the hoodie behind this essay, Virgil Abloh. Now famous for being the head of Louis Vuitton men’s, Off White, collaborations with Nike, controversies involving alleged plagiarism, the “$50 donation”, come on you know the guy. But there was a time over half a decade before he would send Playboi Carti down a rainbow runway in Paris, where Virgil was more known as Kanye’s creative director. Having just done work on the monumental Watch The Throne album, Virgil and other orbiting satellites in the world of IG posts of laptops in airport security bins slowly started introducing a brand called PYREX VISION into the hypebeast zeitgeist. At first, not too many people knew what the fuck it was, but with more and more celebrities (Kanye, Kendrick, Rihanna, Rocky, to name a few) wearing it, the hype for the brand grew and grew. This is the first piece of magic in the story of this brand that I want to focus on, the use of celebrities, cool friends, etc as living models in a pre-influencer world of fashion. You have to keep in mind that at the time, there weren’t brands shelling out 5–6 figures for a sponsored Instagram post, no 20 year old multi-hyphenate entrepreneurs with shopify links, and most importantly, no real semblance of the true impact of social media as a marketing tool. When Pyrex was on the rise, it absolutely exploded amongst the online fashion/streetwear community. Sites like kanyetothe (RIP), tumblr, hypebeast forums (RIP), 4chan’s /fa/ board, and the Four Pins comment section (RIP) were ablaze discussing the clothes, where to get them, and who was wearing them. The brand was bootlegged, replicated, and memed to oblivion before it ever fully released to the public.
In a time where the term influencer was still getting spellchecked, Virgil had the forethought to use the marketing strategy that is now the industry standard: let Fashion Internet’s favorite people wear your stuff, and the demand will come naturally. There were very few press runs for the brand initially, and most of the “marketing” was done through paparazzi photos of Rocky leaving the Mercer hotel, or a late night Been Trill fashion week DJ set. That is until the debut collection dropped via RSVP Gallery, a store Abloh co-founded, once again keeping the brand almost entirely in-house. This feeling of exclusivity was laser precise for making the pieces desirable, and it worked perfectly. Now to be fair, dressing celebrities in clothing is nothing new, but this time it felt different. This wasn’t Audrey Hepburn in an unattainably lavish dress, it was people you might run into in Soho, [REDACTED] tumblr stars, up-and-coming rappers, all in hoodies and flannels. The recognizing of the “Hypebeast” as not just a group of niche internet nerds, but rather the future of how all consumers will operate was years ahead of its time. This was also where the scrutiny started. With price points of $250 for Champion shorts and $550 for Polo Rugby flannels, the typical fashion outlets were shocked and appalled at the transparency of his “scamming”. The collections sparked outrage and ire from people fresh off of reviewing a Givenchy show which saw multiple high end sweatshirts being sent down the runway. To stop this from being a longform time capsule of 2012 let me abridge the history, get right to the hoodie, and emphasize that yes, that was the point.
We can start this analysis of the hoodie by the most famous part of it, the back graphic.
PYREX and 23 in a massive screen-printed athletic font adorned the back of the hoodies, tees, and flannels in a sports jersey style layout. This brings us to the first pillar of the design. Virgil has been quoted saying that the inspiration of the brand was “High school experiences, Pusha-T drug raps, Champion gym uniforms, Caravaggio obsessions. Michael Jordan and black kids with white tendencies”. I believe that there’s more to it than he led the blogs and websites to think. The stereotypes of what “black success” was were still being perpetuated by the powers-that-be in full force at the time of this hoodie’s release: Rap, selling drugs, sports. This back graphic takes all 3 and not only blows them up to scale in the literal sense, but doing so on hoodies brings to mind the then semi-secret world only known by true enthusiasts, old Polo collectors, and nerds like me, Streetwear.
Streetwear was the blanket term coined for “low-end” fashion worn on the street, casual sportswear, skateboard brands, and the like. What seems to be lost to the sands of time and Supreme x LV collabs however, is that Streetwear was at the start and has always been primarily shaped and moved by black culture. At the time, the Vogues of the world wouldn’t dare touch a Supreme lookbook, but that was gradually becoming what people wanted, because their favorite musicians (all rappers by the way) were wearing it. The short version of this change can really be summed up by a quote from Kanye in his 2013 interview following Yeezus.
“What I’m saying is we’re making products with chitlins. T-SHIRTS! That’s the most we can make! T-shirts. We could have our best perspective on t-shirts. But if it’s anything else, your Truman Show boat is hitting the wall.”
High fashion was still at its most gatekept, its most exclusive, and above all, its whitest when Pyrex first hit the scene. By charging hundreds for a Champion hoodie, it wasn’t so much an act of trying to pull a fast one on the consumer, (the brand of hoodie was right there on the sleeve!) but rather a larger statement to the higher ups who determined what was and wasn’t “Fashion”. This hoodie, this marketing experiment, was in fact high fashion, but at the same time it was also streetwear, and they were closer in relation than the publications would have you believe. Tees and hoodies were slowly creeping onto the runway in higher prevalence thanks to Givenchy and HBA, but those were deemed “high fashion” because critics said so. The Pyrex hoodie takes the idea of what high fashion is and upends it entirely. It asks, “What draws the line between a $600 Givenchy hoodie and a $500 Champion hoodie? Is it the person making it? Where and how it’s presented? Who is wearing it?” all through the simple act of pricing and marketing. Virgil took the tropes that were so stigmatized and forced onto an entire race and put them on a billboard that you can wear around, while also making a statement through the garment itself. And that’s just the back half.
To talk about the front of the hoodie, we need some art history help. The front graphic is the famous painting “The Entombment of Christ” by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, again blown up to a massive size. The importance of this painting as a graphic doesn’t lie with the subject of the painting itself, but rather the artist. Caravaggio was infamous for his lifestyle when he wasn’t creating stunning commissions for the Italian elites, usually hanging around the streets and taverns of Rome with alleged criminals and other people that Italian high society deemed “unsavory”. Does this sound familiar yet? The choice to use not only a famous piece of European art as a graphic on a piece of Streetwear, but specifically Caravaggio, was more than deliberate. Caravaggio’s paintings were famous for their use of Chiaroscuro, or the technique of using high contrast between dark and light to create heavy emphasis in the composition. What better representation of the sterile old guard of “white” high fashion clashing with the supposed lesser-than “black” streetwear could there be? Both the fashion and art worlds are notoriously Eurocentric, and by plastering a famous Italian painting as if it were a logo on the front of an article of clothing deemed primarily for “thugs” and “gangsters”, it creates a new context for the work entirely. It flips the elitist idea of what art and fashion are “supposed” to be, and uses the graphic language of Streetwear to translate it. Virgil once said that Marcel Duchamp is his “lawyer” (which funnily enough he took from a book of the same name) and it is no less true here. Duchamp was a pioneer of what he called “Readymade Art” in which common objects like a bike wheel, a urinal, and more were placed on plinths and deemed art because the artist said so. This is one of the key themes in what makes the language of Streetwear so special. It’s satirical and authentic at the same time, taking things like logo flips and photo tees and turning them into “higher” versions of what they once were. By treating a world famous piece of European art like a readymade graphic, it’s an act of ironic protest and genuine clothing design all at once, presented in a package that was marketed using a method years ahead of its time. It might not have been the most well sold or well liked thing Virgil has made, but in my opinion, it made the most noise.
