Who owns ed hardy clothing line

He is a far cry from the ego-obsessed party dude of my imagination, and the fact that we have no idea what he looks like, it turns out, was by design. The real Ed Hardy's usual attire is "a button-down shirt and gray cardigan," not a hoodie with his name on it. The real Ed Hardy is really fucking cool. Don Ed Hardy, as he's sometimes known in real life aka not on T-shirts is a surf bum slash art prodigy who sold his first gallery piece when he was still in high school, and later attended the San Francisco Art Institute.

He is an artiste, a trailblazer of both postmodern art and tattooing, a contemporary of greats like Warhol, de Kooning, and a dozen others you studied in art history class. The press-shy artist who did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story wrote that he once worked at the post office with Jerry Garcia's brother, rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed at a bar, and ran in the same circle as Jefferson Airplane.

When Hardy wrote down his own version of the Ed Hardy years in his memoir nearly eight years ago, I was still experiencing the shell shock from this image of an Ed Hardy model in L.

Fashion Week who looks like Waluigi if he got drunk in Atlantic City and let the locals dress him up for a night out. But here's what onlookers like me missed: Hardy discloses in his memoir that he was watching the brand's rise and fall play out from afar, likewise aghast at Audigier's push, push, push, his hunger, always, for more — more licenses, more designs, and more collaborations in addition to the rumored Gosselin collab, it was reported by E!

While Hardy admits that he was not Christian's biggest fan when the two were first introduced, even he couldn't have foreseen the way in which Audigier would meld the brand to his liking so that five years later, Ed Hardy's imagery would become indistinguishable from Audigier himself — a whole personality in T-shirt form.

He signed over the licensing rights anyway, naive of what was to come. He would later remember the decision to go into business with Audigier regretfully, writing, "I had entered into the original deal so stupidly, without any legal advice," leaving Christian in control of a majority of the brand's fortune. The case was eventually settled, but the damage was already done. With the Ed Hardy revival on the horizon, there's something comforting to those of us who survived the Ed Hardy apocalypse of the late aughts in getting Hardy's perspective on the once-in-a-lifetime rise of the brand under Christian's control.

He seems to have been understandably embarrassed by the commercialization of his work, his art that was the result of decades of training and studying under the few tattoo masters in the U. Hardy respected his influences, from the military tattoos he saw in his youth to the tattoo traditions of Japanese culture, many of which inspired his most recognizable images.

Christian, who at one point attempted to superimpose a portrait of Che Guevera onto a Hardy original, did not. He lived like the Sun King. His staff was liveried, the women wore French maid's outfits. Everybody spoke French. He was ridiculous, but after more than a billion dollars in Ed Hardy sales in five years, he could afford to be whatever degree of ridiculous he wanted.

In a interview with Forbes , four years after Audigier's death, Hardy added, "It's not like I hated [Christian] or thought I was prostituting myself I had no illusions.

I can grandstand. I can add all the historical or philosophical meanderings about tattooing and that can be part of it. But they're tattoos. This isn't sacred. After Hardy bought back his master license in in a joint venture with Iconix which produces Jay Z's Rocawear, Joe Boxer, Candies , the brand was stagnant for a few years, still in recovery after ending its toxic relationship with Gosselin. But in , Kevin Christiana, a former Project Runway contestant who has previously collaborated with Adam Levine and Steven Tyler on "rock n' roll-inspired" collections, took over as creative director of the Ed Hardy brand.

And to Christiana, Hardy is more than just a name. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

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Hardy explains Audigier was connected in Hollywood, so his line became a virtual overnight success. Some of them were not great, inspiring people in the pop culture world. I want to say one of them was this guy, Jon Gosselin? I was aware of about ten percent of what was happening. It was really surreal," he confessed.