If you’ve been skating around North Austin over the past couple years, you’ve probably seen someone riding around with a coffee mug painted on their grip tape, and if your tastes are anything like ours, you probably thought that shit was pretty fucking rad! However, you most likely haven’t seen too many in recent months. That’s because VILE//LENT, as a company, is no longer painting grip for the moment, due to some pretty big changes that occurred in my personal life.
When I started V//L, I was living with my parents. This came with the added benefits of having a large amount of disposable income, as well as having plenty of space in our garage to paint. When my parents decided to move overseas last year, those things also changed. These changes were pretty sudden, and my methods of coping with them weren’t very productive. I started drinking heavily, and eventually ended up with a DWI. This definitely didn’t help my budget, and it left me without a car as well.
Now living in an apartment, and with funds a bit tighter than before, I decide to invest my time into rapping, and I used my pen and voice as my creative tools, instead of a spray can and grip tape. If you dig what V//L stands for, you might find some of my tracks to your liking (click here to check out my Soundcloud). VILE//LENT went through a hiatus and transformation which it is finally starting to come back from. I made the decision to discontinue the grip tape for the time being, and instead rebrand V//L as a streetwear brand. This was really the plan all along, but fate forced my hand in regards to timing.
As our first move since the switch, we released our “New Generation of Old Souls” shirts, which picture a cocoon on the front, and a Monarch butterfly on the back. This particular shirt is very special to me because it’s technically a collaborative design between my dad and I, and even though we came up with the design before the big move, and before I knew its ramifications, it heralded magnificently the transformation that the company and myself would go through.
Despite how personally significant the new shirts are, they also serve a universally greater purpose. As with our last run of shirts, the “New Generation of Old Souls” shirts are printed on 100% organic cotton. This basically means that the cotton grown to make the shirts was produced in a way that doesn’t damage the land, or any of the surrounding communities, with the harmful pesticides used to grow most cotton today. But beyond the cotton, we also wanted to thank the beautiful Monarch butterfly for the lessons it has imparted to us, by donating any profits we make off the shirts to La Cruz Habitat Protection Project’s Forest for Monarchs program. This project helps to build artificial forests in Mexico for loggers to cut down, so that they will leave the forests that the butterflies use as their breeding ground, untouched.
So, if you were wondering why you haven’t been seeing many coffee mugs at the skate park recently, I hope I was able to put your mind at ease. If all keeps going well, you’ll soon start seeing them again, they’ll just be on shirts instead of grip tape! Oh, and for anyone who was wondering, I also took the DWI as a learning experience, and have since stopped drinking entirely, which has cleared up more time for music and VILE//LENT! YAY!
