Pioneering Streetwear Brand Slam Jam Opens 30-Year Archive In Ferrara

 
 

Founded by Luca Benini in 1989, Slam Jam was born to serve the underground long before the term “streetwear” existed, becoming the first Italian importer of then unknown brands such as Stussy. From its HQ in Ferrara, far from the European fashion establishment, Slam Jam has honed a unique and highly distinctive style guided by art, music and clubbing, connecting tribes of like-minded people across the world. From the rural outskirts of Ferrara, in the last 30 years Slam Jam has become a globally renowned cultural institution, its name on urban subculture clothing and goods a seal of guarantee.

For the first time since its establishment over 30 years ago, Slam Jam, is opening the doors of its archive with an exclusive project devised by Nationhood. The project comprises a new location in Slam Jam’s headquarters in Ferrara, and a consultable online atlas stemming from an experimental publishing plan focused on the brand’s cultural heritage. Formerly the private collection of Slam Jam founder, Luca Benini, this ultra-refined pastiche of eighties-to-the-present-day underground culture is now a new cultural resource with its own digital platform, a long list of publishing products, and various offline off-shoot activities hinging around visual art and culture. Nationhood has designed an infinite scroll, a digital flow that unites different contents in a sequence of images which is a collision of Lo-Fi cinema and “eBay aesthetics” visual brutalism. The upshot is a new digital device collecting the anthropology of the look and underground subcultures of which Luca Benini was a founding presence: from clubbing on the Riviera Romagnola, London and early ‘90s New York, to the international hip-hop scene and Japan‘s noughties fashion neo-avant-garde. Once again, Nationhood takes the idea of the archive apart and talks of how customs are the cultural custodian of the contemporary world. And so it has designed a hyper-photographic atlas mixed with soundscapes from the around 10,000 vinyls in the collection, offering up the archive in a visual stream that confirms the potential lyricism of chaos and cyberspace as the symbolic place of a new digital romanticism.

Take A Look Inside The Studio And Read Our Interview Of FUCT Founder And Artist Erik Brunetti On His New Artist Book

Looking like a cross between a rogue border patrol agent and a cowboy dandy, Erik Brunetti is the founder and fearless leader of one of the most iconic American street wear brands. The brand’s name alone, FUCT, harkens a kind of dissidence and lassitude belonging to that doomed generation that came before the digital dark ages and the millennials struggling to survive in its cold pixelated miasma. While street wear brands like and Supreme and Stussy opted for safety in numbers, the FUCT brand, which was conceived in Brunetti's Venice Beach bedroom in 1991, remains uniquely intact and connected to its DIY roots. Starting off as a graffiti artist in New York City, FUCT became a kind of extension of Brunetti’s seditious ideals. Just recently, Brunetti teamed up with Paperwork NYC to publish a book of new drawings. Entitled Astral America, the book is an ode to post truth with a smattering of India ink renderings of drones, US military propaganda, pop iconography and psychologically damning, accusatory, and anti-consumerist slogans aimed squarely at the gluttony of American culture. We got a chance chat with Brunetti about the book, the current state of FUCT and why it’s not cool to justify war with hashtags. Click here to read the full interview.