Monday, November 24, 2014

Evolution of the Stussy Logo




I haven't posted for a very long time. But I stumbled across how the Stussy logo came to be. It was created by Shawn Stussy and this is what he said in the Empire Ave interview:

ON THE STUSSY SCRIPT

Empire Ave: Your scripting is probably one of the most famous handwriting scripts getting around. Is it something that it just came to you, or was it something you’ve had to work on?

Shawn Stussy: Well, the beginning of the logo part was 1979. I always worked through the ‘70s for another shop, Russell Surfboards in Newport Beach called The Brotherhood. I was just a shaper. The logos were very ‘70s, the newer ones were Country Surfboards and Lightning Bolt. Before that was all of the ‘60s logos, were ovals and Dewey Weber and Greg Noll style graphics…

Empire: Yeah.

Shawn Stussy: Well it’s ’78, ’79, it’s Sex Pistols and The Clash. It hits America.

Empire: Punk.

Shawn Stussy: Yeah. So, I’m a punk guy. I’m going to start my own business and the last thing I want to do is make boards like what I thought were the old days. Even though they were guys i respected, I was like ‘fuck you, old guys’. Then I just wrote Stussy and broke away at the end of ’79 and made my first Stussy board. It was like, I didn’t want to be some hippie guy with a big moustache. Those were all my friends, but I remember right then McCoy came to America and McCoy had a big sticker for the time. And I was like oh man, these Aussie guys, if they can do it I can do it. The place I worked I would write ‘shape S Stussy’ on the stringer. And they were like “You fag, glory hog”. I’m like 22 or something and they were like “Dude, you egomaniac.” It was really like hippie guys, you know? And I’m like kind of young and I want my shit to start rolling. So I could just tell, wow, I got to move on here. That was how that happened. I just wrote Stussy…

Empire: Then it just evolved from there where it’s just became an iconic.

Shawn Stussy: Just when it went on that t-shirt at that show and then the guys went, “we’ll buy the t-shirts.” So it was not ever thought through very much. It just kind of happened.

Empire: Just happened, and is that still basically your handwriting now?

Shawn Stussy: Yeah, that was just my name. I wrote it like a couple hundred times with different pens on different kind of paper and just picked the best one.

You can read more of it by going to this website:
http://www.empireave.com/features/featured/shawn-stussy-interview/