Estevan Oriol - The Last Laugh

Piece I did in June of 2008 - it never saw the pages of the magazine I was interning for, Tu Ciudad, due to it folding. Very real person, it was a pleasure meeting Estevan Oriol.


Opening a business often goes deeper than trying to make a dollar, especially in an area that you would not expect to see a fresh new line of clothing.
Upper Playground, Mister Cartoon, and Estevan Oriol celebrated the opening of a four-store retail experience in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles on May 31.
Crowds of people gathered to see what each store had to offer, and many stayed after browsing the stores to take in the surroundings.
The stores, located on 6th Street between South Main Street and South Los Angeles Street, begin with the San Francisco-based Upper Playground line. Inside, Upper Playground t-shirts sporting the designs of guest artists catch shoppers’ eyes, and not too far behind the displays is a special art exhibit in the store, Fifty24LA gallery. Fifty24LA houses the art of designers that collaborate with Upper Playground and other upcoming artists.
Exclusive Los Angeles-inspired designs are plentiful in the store, both for men and women, a must for any proud Angeleno.
Next door to Upper Playground are the connected stores of Mister Cartoon and Estevan Oriol called The Last Laugh. Cartoon’s shop contains an orange airbrushed motorcycle in the front window, and an airbrushed plane and tricycles sit inside.
The Last Laugh logo is creatively placed on the wall using his Lost Angels figurines, his Sidekick, and designer Nikes. For sale in the store are the line of t-shirts, shoes, and more. Guest appearance tattoo artists are expected to make their rounds in Cartoon’s shop, along with the star himself.
Making a right before the old school cash register will lead way to Oriol’s retail space. The black-walled room is decorated with 32 of Oriol’s photos on the wall. Each of the photos on the wall represents the designs of the t-shirts. In a black and white display are the t-shirts using the photos that grace the walls. Shoppers can check out some outstanding Los Angeles photographs, and then wear that art five minutes later, all while a projector plays a documentary featuring Oriol on the front wall.
The fourth store is a revolving retail area for friends and projects. Currently, it houses the works of Roland Sands and Tony Ward.
Oriol said the stores are a way to give back to the public, along with giving friends an opportunity to work despite mistakes in the past. Sitting down in a tattoo chair in Cartoon’s retail space, Oriol talks about an employee he has given a chance to work due to the fact that he just got out of three-year prison term. He points out that the employee would not have been given a shot at a regular retail store due to his tattooed-body or past.
If only the rest of the world took had the mentality of Oriol, there might be less Skid Rows in the cities to be nervous about.
I sat down with Oriol to talk about the store openings, along with what to expect in the near future:

First of all, congratulations on the store opening. Talk about the stores, and how did it all come together?
I’ve been in the clothing business since 1992 and I had a couple little clothing lines back then and my biggest one to this day has been Joker Brand clothing which we started in 1995 and it’s still going strong up until now, 2008. That’s a good 13 year run, which is hard to do if you’re in the fashion business, or clothing game, or street wear lines. We’ve seen a lot of people come and go.
Matt from Upper Playground hit me up to do a line on my t-shirts of my photos a couple years back and I was a little bit hesitant because I didn’t think people would want to buy my pictures on a t-shirt. I had come from people buying my pictures off of art shows, you know, in a gallery environment. But I really didn’t think people would be into buying them on t-shirts, and you know, they showed me that I was wrong. So here we are today the grand opening. We have four spots, a group of us do, [and] we just wanted to come into the community and just do it right. So we got Upper Playground in the first one, and they represent a bunch of artists like Jeremy Fish, David Choe, Sam Flores, me, Hebert Baglione … Ricky Powell.
I had done some things with them (Upper Playground), like I did a documentary with them called The Run Up and then I did a little shirt with them and then it started snowballing to where he (Revelli) said “lets just do a line for you.” So we did a line and it went good, and we ended up doing a couple more seasons and we’re in our fourth season. In his store you will see everybody’s that he works with, their clothes, except for mine. And there is an art gallery in there too.
And then the next store is Cartoon and myself, and it has Cartoon’s tattoo shop line, and then in my section it has my line which has shirts, candles, calendars, playing cards, hoodies, skateboards, just a little bit of everything. Now that I have a store I can grow the line into some other stuff, little knick-knacks you can buy.
The fourth space is a rotating store, like a pop-up store, and today it has Roland Sands, he’s like a master bike builder, he builds crazy Harleys. Just bikes period, he’s just badass. And also Tony Ward, who is like an iconic male model, he used to go out with Madonna; he has been in every campaign you can imagine from Dolce & Gabbana to Calvin Klein. He’s in there displaying his artwork and his clothes that he’s designing. It’s kind of like, to me, it kind of looks like a Mad Max type of line, Thunderdome, it’s kind of crazy. All these people we’re all friends, we just want to do our thing, and then give our friends a place to do whatever they want. Sometimes there will be a client that we’ll work with and they’ll want to do something there, you know like an art show, clothing shop for a month, they might just not want to open up a store, just do it for a month. We just give them that opportunity.

What made you choose the location for the stores?
We’re trying to bring up the community around here. We’re right here on Skid Row, so being on Skid Row, you know you see a lot of shit, you see a lot of poverty, a lot of the homeless problems in L.A., the drug and alcohol problem in L.A. It’s kind of like we wanted to bring something positive and something for hope down here in downtown. You just see all that negativity and all that shit all the time, we’ve been down here since 1996 before all the arty-farty people came in here, we were down here and we’ve seen downtown go through a lot of changes.
We were trying to do this a long time ago, just it wasn’t right for us at that time. Even now, it’s like a little bit nervous feelings about the economy the way it is, and there ain’t nothing around here really. We’re kind of like just hoping to build it up. But we didn’t get this far not taking risks, that’s what we are about, taking risks. We’re sticking to our game plan, like I said, we have been thinking about this for a couple years and we didn’t know the economy was going to take a shit, and everything was going to be messed up but we are sticking to our game plan like we do with everything else, and you see how that has done for us, so we’re cool with it, down to take the chance.

What about the Righteous Kill project, can you talk a little bit about that?
Cartoon was hit up through the e-mail to do a limited edition skateboard, so he took the meeting with them and ended up to where we got an opportunity to do an artistic limited-edition movie poster for the movie Righteous Kill [with] Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. But at the end of the day, man, I was so happy just to be sitting there taking a picture of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, those dudes I grew up watching all their movies when I was a kid: Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Cruising, and all those old school movies. And then, that I am there taking pictures of them, that is one of those times where I felt like I made it as an artist. Even at that point we weren’t sure if we were going to get to do the job.
And after they saw what we did with the pictures, and Cartoon drew the logo, and our other friend that works with us, Patrick Martinez, he did the layout. It came out sick, I’m proud of that piece of artwork and I love it. They’re going probably to do kind of like a pop-up store, I don’t know if they’re going to be selling anything there, it’s going to be more like they’re going to be playing the trailer and have some of the artwork on the walls. And I think they might be having some merchandise because we’ve been designing some, but I’m not too sure.

Is the store going to be open seven days a week for the public?
I would like to be open seven days a week because we will just have someone here. I would like to have a place where people could come in and trip out on our stuff, any day. It would be great if we could 24 hours a day, but you know, downtown closes when it gets dark. People get scared, and the tents come out, and people get nervous, everything changes around here when the sun goes down. It’s cool, we have fun, and we love it down here. There are a lot of characters; it always stays fresh over here. We could have copied everybody and went to Fairfax or Melrose, but it is like played out over there. One person goes there, like Supreme went there, and just everybody popped it up. We are just trying to stay over here and stay out of the way, but stay relevant in the game.

And your photographs; are they going to be periodically changed on the walls?
All those photos on the wall are photos of my designs on my t-shirts. So it’s kind of more like a museum of the designs. Some of the designs you don’t know what the picture is, you kind of trip out on it. It is kind of like you have to figure out which picture goes with which shirt, some of them are real obvious but some of them we threw a twist on them. Right now I have 60 designs and only 32 pictures are up there.

—Jon Castillo

Sites: The Last Laugh
Estevan Oriol