Spotlight: Tommy Hilfiger’s Surf Shack
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Photo Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
Tom Wolfe created a dichotomy between people who were either “on the bus” or off the rolling circus in his 1968 novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The work chronicled Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters who traveled east from California in the famed Day-Glo painted vehicle called Furthur while refreshing themselves with copious amounts of punch. The phrase became a shorthand description for an individual’s relationship to the counterculture—you were either on the bus or you weren’t. Fast-forward almost 50 years to the digital age and another phrase sparked by the book, “drinking the Kool-Aid,” is more likely to be used in reference to Google employees in Venice than the creatives who call the city home. So it seemed fitting that the beach community—known for its surf and skate cultures with off and on the bus relationships with counterculture—provided a parking spot for Tommy Hilfiger’s Surf Shack bus on Friday, June 21.
Hilfiger launched his West Hollywood flagship this spring, and his team created the Surf Shack summer capsule collection for men and women and a line of limited-edition artist-designed surfboards in collaboration with Art Production Fund. The line includes clothes, shoes, sunglasses, watches and bags. The items were packed inside a 1970s bus that was restored and then remodeled to serve as a mobile pop-up shop parked on the corner of Palms and Abbot Kinney. Guests turned up at The Brig in Abbott Kinney in Tommy Hilfiger schoolboy blazers and madras shirts for the Friday night party where Venice-based band badbad performed.
Sultry vocals by Chelsea Tyler (third daughter of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler) and actor and musician Jon Foster drove the band’s bluesy electronic sound. The scene, rife with surfers including Kalani Robb, Alek Parker and Danny Fuller, evoked the look of a Gus Van Sant film, which seemed fitting given the filmmaker’s long-rumored plans to direct a version of Wolfe’s novel.
by Elizabeth Varnell
Pictured: Chelsea Tyler of badbad
Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Tommy Hilfiger
