FUCT
Long before there was Banksy, there was Fuct. Founded in 1990, the streetwear and skate label helped define the look of the Nineties with its repurposing of iconic images and figures—a Planet of the Apes primate smoking a bong; the Ford logo, retyped as “Fuct;” a set of Rolling Stones lips and tongue, adorned with a hit of acid—onto t-shirts, skateboards, and canvases. This fall, Rizzoli will release a graphic retrospective, a sort of monograph of the brand’s work, authored by its founder, artist Eric Bonetti, as well as the journalist Gary Warnett and the filmmaker and curator Aaron Rose. As Nineties fashion is cited in more and more runway collections, as streetwear and skateboarding’s influence becomes increasingly incalculable, as college kids from Pasadena to Pennsylvania sport “Comme des Fuck Down” baseball hats, it’s the right time to look back at a brand that helped establish the age’s dress and the notion of graphic, transgressive fashion.
Fuct is out now from Rizzoli.
John Ortved, our contributing features editor, lives between his homes in New York City and Toronto and contributes to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, McSweeneys, The New York Times, New York, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. His Twitter, @jortved, is occasionally funny.