Blue Collar Fashion White Gangster Fashion

Pro Club Tee feature for the Image magazine, issue 04.

This is part of Image Issue four, "Image Makers," a paean to Fifty.A.'s luminaries of fashion. In this upshot, we pay tribute to the people and brands pushing way culture in the urban center forward.

Back in those once-upon-a-fourth dimension days when everything felt right, there were me and my boys, the lot of us, posing hard for the camera. Our image offers testimony. The twelvemonth is 2003 and we are on the cusp of graduation, the residual of our lives at our feet. It's early on fall in Southern California, which means flick-blue skies and Friday night football games and weekend hangs at the Bridge. I'yard almost done with high schoolhouse and out of Fifty.A., well-nigh on the way to everything that happens after. But earlier I can get there, the ambrosia of the past arrives sweet and unexpected.

I concur the photograph tight, my thumb over information technology, and I return to a before place: those bright and unsettled years of the new millennium. At that place are nine of the states, grouped together just exterior the cafeteria windows, posturing similar we own the lunch chiliad, like we have it all. Almost everyone is here: Jonathan and JP and Courtney and Ian and Dimitri and Josh and Armand and Adarious and me. We flex with a fantastic innocence, non yet hardened in the way we pretend to be, our faces conveying baby-smooth toughness.

I find more photos like this — ones that talk, ones that ferry nostalgia of the days I sometimes struggle to retrieve, of the days that whisper in the crowded room of my retentivity. The photos spill, spill, spill with color and sound. I hear the chorus of my Los Angeles teenhood: the howl and crack of laughter beyond luncheon tables, the awkward courtship of young bodies in the hallways of Culver Urban center High, the rhythm of my dreams. These memories live somewhere in the earlier and in the later; they stretch a corking distance to reach me, to remind me. The memories are what I brand and have already been made by.

The more than I sit with them, the clearer they get. I begin to call back who I was then. I encounter us and everything we longed for. Nosotros were seeking an unbreakable absurd — nosotros wanted to capture it, to concord on to it for every bit long as we could, for every bit long as the freshness of our article of clothing would let. In retrospect, the most striking impression from the photograph is how we styled ourselves, adorned in well-baked white T-shirts. Nosotros wore them with uniform pride. Simply they weren't just any white T-shirts. There were rules to the game, of grade, ways to finesse a certain look and attitude. To achieve that, we armored ourselves in the locally branded T-shirt of choice — Pro Clubs.

Barrington Darius stands in front of a small plaza wearing a white Pro Club t-shirt, white shorts, socks, and shoes.

Inside Fifty.A.'due south way bureaucracy, a Pro Club T-shirt was par excellence; information technology reigned supreme. With its class-plumbing fixtures collar and celestial white coloring, the shirt gave the self — that sometimes static figuration of identity — poetic velocity. A Pro Club was a composition waiting to be inscribed — when draped every bit it was on the body, especially a body that in the calculus of the metropolis's codes was told it did non vest, the cocky was infinite. The self became a glorious figuration. You could be whomever. Pose notwithstanding. There was no limit. And so we did just that. We stunted. Nosotros practiced our blowing. We fabricated ourselves. Over and once more, nosotros made ourselves.

Pro Clubs began, officially, in 1986, with a man chasing reinvention. For years Young Geun Lee worked at IBM in an authoritative part, but he felt information technology was no longer enough. The 1980s flickered with dubiousness. Lee wanted more, dreamed of ameliorate. Anxious for new opportunities, he decided to exit South Korea for good. And and then it was decided: He sold his car and his dwelling and traveled to u.s., setting roots in Southern California.

Hardship was expected just Lee was steadfast in his goal. He hustled and made connections. Past fate or fortune, he fell into the local clothing concern. It was relatively simple piece of work at offset: He bought T-shirts directly from wholesalers and sold them to the local swap meet purveyors. Every bit business took off, Lee was able to buy a van and rent a modest warehouse off Vermont Avenue in Pico-Union. Shortly, concern came to him.

The brand that Pro Lodge would become was not without serendipity. It struck first in 1984, when Immature Geun married Casey, a boyfriend Korean migrant who'd been living in the U.Southward. since the '70s. It struck again in 1994. Later on the Due north American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) severed business that Lee had in United mexican states — revenue took a 20% hit — the template for Pro Gild was dreamed upwardly.

In capable easily, misfortune is a brilliant catalyst. Brian Lee, who today runs the marketing and due east-commerce for Pro Lodge, recounts the dilemma his male parent faced during those nascent days. "My father was like, 'What should I do?'" Brian says. The reply was in the form of a lone item of clothing: a practical, set up-to-habiliment white T-shirt.

Sartorially, Pro Club T-shirts are not similar anything else on the market. The expressive appeal is a pattern curiosity: from the spandex embedded into the collar — one of the secrets to its cozy, idyllic fit — to the philosophy behind cloth density ("thick enough so you can't meet through to the skin"). Shirts are dyed in a special alloy, Brian tells me, which he says gives them their luminous "snow white" coloring. "It'southward not a creamy white similar you meet elsewhere. Snowfall almost has a blue glow to it — that type of vibe."

Similar to those hazy, newborn days in Los Angeles, Young Geun hustled to perfect the white T-shirt, adjusting the formula equally his customers at the Slauson bandy run across routinely provided feedback. "It became the shirt that they loved," Brian says of his dad'southward conceptual feat. With connections across the Southland, from downtown L.A. to Torrance, Young Geun was able to identify his pristine, low-price T-shirt in bandy meets and independent wearable stores. This happened during Fifty.A.'s unsteady post-rebellion menses, during a moment when the city was even so tending to its deep wounds, which meant nothing was guaranteed. But the T-shirt now had irrefutable existent manor. Of a sudden, Pro Clubs were everywhere. Success was non far backside.

Today, the magic of a Pro Order is in its sense of calibration: Few affordable white T-shirts take such a thoughtful geometric cutting and skillful functionality. Aesthetically speaking, it is in a league of its own — miraculous, alchemical, singular. A Pro Club has no parallel. Add to that its utilitarian utilize — sizes run the gamut, from small to 5XL tall to 10X — which has given it the kind of charm and accessibility other manufacturers lack.

"We didn't do things similar you're supposed to. Nosotros didn't exercise marketing to go where we are. Information technology was all discussion-of-mouth," Brian says. "We served markets that other people didn't desire to. Nosotros gave them nuts — quality basics."

All cities — all regions — possess style. A urban center's identity, I've come to realize, is formed in the details we sometimes accept for granted: in the mundaneness of our everyday encounters, on the streets that we voyage down our entire lives. The same is truthful of what we wearable. Our dress speak stories; they tell us who nosotros are. In the daily dress of its people — which is to say, in the look of the commonage — there are tales of unease, joy and resilience. It may not seem obvious, only it remains so: In what we wear, in how we fashion ourselves, we unearth a urban center's gorgeous, sometimes forgotten history. Information technology utters. We mind.

Witness: The biting cold of Midwest winters equally Chicago OGs shield themselves in thick, sumptuous furs. For New Yorkers, Timberlands and Yankee fitteds remain a notorious, undying staple; they are the beat and bedrock of the city'south pulse. Scuff-free Air Force 1s are a stamp of regional pride for Southerners who will forever favor the baste and attitude of a gold proper noun plate, earlobes dotted in ice. And for a time, during the late '90s and aughts equally the sail of the city called for new hues of possibility, Pro Clubs suggested an architecture for selfhood for many young Angelenos. White tees came to correspond a local kind of popular art — with Lee's T-shirt at the forefront.

Stylist Charlie Brianna, who grew up off Slauson and Overhill, attended La Tijera Heart School during that time. The prevailing wardrobe among male classmates, she says, was a unifying trend. "The tees were actress-long — to the knees," she remembers. "If you lot had on a Pro Club yous were fly." Along with Dickies and hi-pinnacle Chucks, Pro Clubs represented an essential look of Blackness and Latino L.A. youth.

I remember us then; the fulfillment nosotros got in beingness seen in our Pro Clubs, how alive we felt as well. After school at the Fox Hills Mall. Saturdays at the Santa Monica Promenade. The texture of those before days, fresh in our white tees, is loud and palpable. It never mattered where 1 lived or how they got down because a Pro Gild was the common denominator. Nosotros wanted to be seen. We wanted to be heard.

Trends are mutable. The fun of manner is in how nosotros take it on, how we adapt wearing apparel to our bodies, wants and curiosities. "I wore them likewise," says Brianna, who garnished her look with hoop earrings. Pro Clubs, she added, were one of the few garments truly allegorical of West Coast aesthetics. "It was a uniform for the OGs of the West Coast. It's a huge function of L.A. culture. It was the go-to shirt that anybody did their customizing on. Before we knew about wholesale or going to screen printers, you would go to the Slauson bandy see, grab one, and take them airbrush on it or embroider it."

Brianna is now the personal stylist to rapper YG, for whom she buys a pack of Pro Clubs weekly. "The way he works is, he likes everything regular. With a Pro Club, for him, it'due south the quality and the cutting. You can clothes it up or down. It's ever gonna work."

As vital as adjustability is to the survival of a given entity — let'south be honest, no 1 endures the times without a little compromise — what has afforded the Pro Order delicious staying power is its adherence to tradition. "Newer brands endeavour to get fancy and do dissimilar things with the weight or threads of white tees, but if y'all go along it clean and simple, y'all tin't go incorrect," Brianna tells me. Brian Lee agrees. He says the essence of the T-shirt is in how information technology straddles high and low civilisation, how it tin fit into any world, satisfy all body types. "I like to call back nosotros're archetype," Lee says. "We're accessible but notwithstanding stylish."

The matter virtually iconography, especially as it pertains to fashion and personal manner, or even as it applies to a place and a people, is how symbols can sometimes feel exclusionary, as if they are not meant for the whole. That'southward not the example with Pro Clubs — they subscribe to no i gender, race, religion, sexuality. They speak to the mosaic of who nosotros are and who we have always been.

Pro Clubs were, and in many ways remain, the soundtrack to the city — everybody from Ice Cube and Dom Kennedy to the late Nipsey Hussle has rocked them. "Pro Lodge T-shirts, whiter than Anglo-Saxons / Brand it a 1X tall, crispy with the cotton mode," Kendrick Lamar raps on 2010'southward "For the Homies," an unofficial praise song for Pro Clubs. "That's fashion if you come where I'1000 from / Compton California, ane honey to the murder capital under the sun."

Adds Brianna of the shirt's all-embracing allure: "The OGs wore them. The gang bangers wore them. Artists wore them. We wore them. They're universal, everybody wants them. That's how it became an 50.A. staple. They work for everyone."

In a urban center historically plagued by racial strife and class divisions, unity can sometimes feel elusive, dangerously slippery. And yet Pro Clubs — the buttery resonance of them, their fundamental cadre — are all about how they unify. That is what I encounter well-nigh vividly as I look at photographs from my youth. I see united states and think about the ways we tried to make sense of our place in the world, armored in our striking white tees, ready for what was alee.

Across the years, SoCal streetwear brands have unquestionably defined and redefined cool — from Stüssy and OBEY to Fearfulness of God — and through it all, Pro Guild has endured with the kind of aptitude and foresight that is rare for legacy companies. Pro Club has remained the heartbeat and the soul, the middle to which that Angelenos continually gravitate.

And it'due south easy to come across why. Los Angeles is a urban center of transplants, of sprawl. I was born and raised in the city, was made by it, but if I accomplish dorsum far plenty, my story, like that of Immature Geun Lee and his family, and perhaps similar yours, begins elsewhere. My family migrated westward from Texas in the 1930s and settled near 117th and Central Artery. Over time we constitute condolement in adjacent corridors. The people, families and stories that make up 50.A.'south neighborhoods repeat mine — from Inglewood and Venice to View Park, Palms and Watts. We are all from someplace else but establish our way, made our way, here. And therein lies the essence of the Pro Order white tee: the insistence of the cocky. It substantiates — it symphonizes — the I among the we. We wear the shirt with eternal pride because information technology says, simply: Nosotros belong here, amid one another, home.

Jason Parham is the founder of literary periodical Spook and a senior writer at Wired, where he covers pop culture.