The 1st Collection runs on four recurring images: a snake, a lion, an angel, and an eye with the sun at its centre. They were not chosen because mythology looks good on a shirt. Each one holds down a different part of the same idea, and together they make a vocabulary rather than a set of graphics.
The snake sheds. On the Vintage Snake Tee it is coiled through white roses on a washed slate blue body, and the point of it is not menace — it is the moult. A snake outgrows its skin, the skin has to go, and for a while afterwards the animal is soft and exposed and better off. Most people arrive at a version of that. You keep a habit, a job, a way of talking about yourself, long past the point where it still fits. The snake is the least sentimental way to say that leaving something behind is growth rather than loss. The roses are there because things come up out of cold ground.
The lion leads by example. The Fitted Lion Tee carries the densest composition in the collection: a lion held inside a drawn frame, vertical type running down the side, a banner reading LEAD WITH EXAMPLE, and the full tagline underneath. That banner is the whole argument. The lion is not roaring at anyone. Courage that has to announce itself is usually performing. The version worth wearing is the one people notice in how you behave when nothing is riding on it. The body is umber, the warmest colour in the line, and that is deliberate.
The angel rises out of the storm. On the Oversized Angel T-Shirt a classical statue sits inside a pink cloud, gothic lettering above it, an outlined script reading Out of the Storm. The statue matters. It is stone, it is old, and it is the kind of figure that gets carved after the difficult thing has already happened. Rising is not the same as being rescued. The storm is still in the picture — it is under the figure rather than over it, which is the only difference that ever really counts.
The eye with the sun at its centre is the mark itself. It appears in gold on the back of the Oversized Logo Tee, and again in a harder, tech-graffiti register on Suns Out Hustles On. An eye that watches is usually a warning in visual shorthand. This one has the sun inside it, so it reads the other way: attention that is warm rather than surveillant. Something is keeping watch and it is on your side. It is the closest the brand comes to stating its own definition in a single image.
Read in order they are a sequence rather than a set. Shed what has stopped fitting. Lead without volume. Come up out of the weather. Keep the warmth in view.
None of these are new symbols. They have been carried for a very long time by people who needed them, in paintings and on flags and in stories that outlived whoever first told them. The collection is only where they happen to be standing at the moment. If you want to follow one of them specifically, the shop can be browsed by symbol.
Written by Apricity. More on where all of this comes from in Our Story.