The Japanese brand WACKO MARIA has paid homage to one of the most important exponents of American graffiti art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who managed to bring this movement from the street to the art galleries.
A poet, musician and authentic graffiti prodigy in New York City in the late 1970s, Basquiat had refined his pictorial style of obsessive scribbles, symbols, elusive diagrams, images of masks and skulls and words apparently the result of chance.
“I don’t think about art while I work, I think about life,” he once stated in an interview, a Haitian father and mother of Puerto Rican descent, coexist in him convergences of African-American, African and Aztec cultural histories, along with classical themes and contemporary heroes such as athletes and musicians.
WACKO MARIA, for Spring/Summer 2020, presented three different Hawaiian shirts characterized by as many works by Basquiat, In Italian, 1983, Untitled, 1984, and Untitled (Three Kings).
In Italian, it is distinguished by details such as abstract portraits and irregularly written words; Untitled, sees a series of green faces and flames on a scribbled white background; Untitled (Three Kings) depicts three stickmans on a cream-coloured background.
The three shirts have the classic aloha cut with notched lapels and white buttons.
The Hawaiian shirt by Jean-Michel Basquiat x WACKO MARIA will be available from April 4th on the WACKO MARIA website for $325.
