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Written by Knight Ridder
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Wednesday, 26 April 2006 |
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A guy who owns a bunch of tattoo stores met a guy who designs jeans.
The two hit it off and decided to go into business together.
The result?
A new line of premium jeans decorated with the same artwork — skulls, flowers and a busty, big-haired woman named Rosie — used by tattoo artists at Detroit-area Inkslingers parlors.
Sold under the label Inkslingers USA, the men’s and women’s jeans, T-shirts and jackets are arriving in about 300 stores across the nation.
“People get tattoos to express themselves,” says designer Joe Faris, 39, who created his first piece of clothing when he was 13 or 14, has worked for Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, urban wear company Pelle Pelle, and now has his headquarters in a suite of offices above a collision shop in Royal Oak, Mich.
The jeans, says Mike Jeziak, who is 55, lives in Roseville, Mich., and founded the Inkslingers tattoo parlor chain, are “a way for someone to express themselves with what they like without having to put it on their skin.”
Both men hope they’ve come up with a Detroit original that combines the area’s working class, industrial edge with a certain glamour the rest of the world will want to wear.
The pair met at a clothing show in Las Vegas in August 2004.
Faris was there to show off jeans he was manufacturing.
Jeziak was there to find someone who could put tattoo designs from the extensive Inkslingers catalog onto clothing.
They talked, struck a deal, and set out to make Inkslingers jeans.
Faris had relationships with fabric makers in China, so he went there to buy denim.
After a lot of research and a few failed experiments, the lab in China came up with a denim wash he liked _ the jeans weren’t too light or too dark. “The idea is to make every item look very unique and that it’s aged and worn and was a very authentic feel to it,” he says. | Only registered users can write comments.
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