I needed a job, any job. I was in college and set to live in NYC’s Greenwich Village with two friends for the summer—without really thinking through the financial implications. I had to pay for food and rent, and nobody was going to help me.
I frantically read ads in The Village Voice, trying to find any job that I might have a shot at. As a major in printmaking and writing, I didn’t have the most marketable of skills. But I found an ad for a t-shirt silkscreen printer in Brooklyn. That, I thought, I could do.
Somehow, I talked myself into the job with the nicest hiring manager of all time. Since I knew how to silkscreen by hand, they put me on the 4-color hand-printing table with a wise old punk rock screenprinter who mentored me.
But I didn’t know how to print in a factory setting, and I was shocked at how hard it was. The t-shirts need to get put on palettes that fly one way, while the screens fly the other. In between spinning, you have to bring the screen down and print perfectly. I ended my first week covered head to toe in ink, the mark of a noob who entertained the entire factory floor.
A few months later, I had the hang of it, as well as a right arm the size of Popeye’s. And I found my niche—mixing ink colors by eye. I’d mix up huge buckets of ink, no formula, just my sense of color and old t-shirts to go by.
We printed all the t-shirts for Spike Lee’s store, 40 Acres and a Mule. One day, my assignment was to try multiple color variations on a design for the movie Malcom X. They were coveted one-of-a-kind shirts, and everyone in the factory wanted one. I had to keep a close eye on every single sample. Now I wish I had been enough of a rebel to keep one for myself.
One day a role opened up in the design department, and somehow I talked myself into that job as well. It was there that I learned how to use a computer through sheer determination.
The company bought a shiny new Mac, and nobody else knew how to use it or what to do with it. I was determined to be the one to figure it out. For days, I slept on a couch in the design studio (nobody asked me to, I was just obsessed), relentlessly teaching myself to design our catalog on the Mac. I made a million mistakes, but I didn’t give up and kept doing things over and over until I truly knew how. After the catalog was finally sent off to the printer, I was incredibly proud to hold the physical results of my ambition in my hands.
Eventually, I went back to school to finish my degree and moved on to other paths. But I remember everything about those days at Gravity Graphics so fondly. Like so many of life’s opportunities, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be in the eye of the ’90s storm of bold, design-driven streetwear.
I still remember walking to the subway past barbed wire fences and abandoned lots, then seeing our shirts for sale in the open-air market on Broadway next to Tower Records. That felt like proof. Not just that we made something, but that we made something people wanted to wear. Looking back, I’m proud to have been part of the story of peak Brooklyn, when Brooklyn meant something.
There’s one thing I carried with me from that time—grit. I learned that if you’re willing to sleep on a couch and fail a hundred times, you can teach yourself almost anything. And I learned that everyone has something to teach you, if only you take the time to listen and learn.