Brendan Fowler’s Election Reform Project Is Giving Away Dope Merch To Midterm Voters
On September 13, the date of New York state’s primary election, Desus Nice posed this rhetorical question on Twitter: “what if u got a supreme sticker after voting.” At a time when a mere 50% of eligible millennials hit the polls in the last presidential election, even joking hypotheticals suggest tempting opportunity. What if? How do we combat youthful apathy against a backdrop of intentional voter suppression, uninspiring political slogans, and dark money-fueled trickery?
To Brendan Fowler, the L.A. artist, Some Ware designer and DIY scene stalwart, any effort to reverse youth disillusion is fair game. Getting out the vote, he says, should be done “by any means necessary.” Which is why on November 6, Fowler and Tremaine Emory will be giving away free limited edition T-shirts to streetwear heads in L.A. and Boston (and other cities to be announced) who prove they voted.
If there actually exists a “Supreme sticker coalition” of potential voters out there waiting to be convinced that exercising their civic duty is meaningful, effective, and deeply cool above all, Fowler is determined to find it. He is the man behind Election Reform, a fashion line founded in 2015 that seeks to foster dialogue about, obviously, reforming America’s broken electoral system. (“I’m totally hyped to have it be the most heavy handed fucking name humanly possible,” Fowler laughs. “It has an exclamation point!”) The collaboration with Emory—AKA Denim Tears, the No Vacancy Inn emcee and streetwear style oracle—is one of several efforts to spread Election Reform’s message around the midterms. The central piece is a pop-up shop at ICA LA, which is selling a wave of Election Reform drops and collaborations, and hosting events like the midterms tee giveaway.
The seed of that effort stems from Fowler and Emory’s frustration with the fact that kids will wait in hours-long lines for streetwear drops, but are easily discouraged from voting. Though he acknowledges that it should be much easier to do so, Fowler says, “It’s really not hard to vote. Unfortunately some people can’t vote. But you do a lot harder shit to get streetwear.” They may be slinging dope tees, but voting, Election Reform argues, is the ultimate jawn. Those who plan to pull the lever on November 6 can register for the event beforehand, then bring their “I Voted” stickers to the ICA LA to get a limited edition Denim Tears x Election Reform tee. (Other museums around the country, like ICA Boston, are partnering with Public Fiction to give away the tees.) “We’re putting our money and our effort where our mouth is,” Fowler says. “It’s not casual to produce a bunch of stuff. We’re trying to say how important voting is.”
Well before Russian election meddling and politically-motivated voter suppression dominated the national discourse, Fowler read a 2012 Harpers article about electoral corruption that, he says, “fucked me up.” “How To Rig An Election” by Victoria Collier details, among much else, the shady right-wing ties of America’s leading voting machine manufacturers; Fowler was astounded that, while alarm bells went off every four year, the urgency to examine the integrity of our elections inevitably faded away soon after. “We were talking about ballot fraud when Bush won in 2000, and then everyone just stopped talking about it,” he says. “This is shit that we all to some extent know is happening, but it’s so gnarly because we’re not dealing with it or talking about it.” Fowler, who at the time was best known for the experimental music he made as Barr, became obsessed with felon disenfranchisement, the electoral college, and electoral cybersecurity. “I was like, OK, this is a cause that is so unsexy and people are so not fucking with that I just got really fixated on it,” he says. Election Reform initially became the name of a planned final Barr record. After scrapping the album, Fowler used the name for a line of one-of-one artist edition hoodies that he customized using an industrial embroidery machine he had acquired for his studio art practice. Each hoodie, which Fowler first released in early 2015, came with a photocopied election reform reader that includes the seminal Harpers article.
Though every hoodie and embroidered T-shirt Fowler made sold out—and got co-signs from celebs like Kanye West and The Weeknd—they each took him hours to make and had luxury fashion price tags. After working on an Eckhaus Latta collaboration in 2017, Fowler began exploring ways to reimagine Election Reform as a more accessible platform. Along the way, he became obsessed with clothing production, and Election Reform evolved into a brand with its own design language, collaborations, and top-tier stockists like Union L.A., SSENSE, and, ironically, Tokyo’s Gr8. “The design aspect is the most legible part of the project, in a way,” Fowler says. “You can tell that I’m freaking out about graphic design, I’m freaking out about this new way I figured out how to bleach shirts.” Basically, he says, “I’m thinking about drip a lot.” A core aspect of Election Reform’s drip is that every piece is upcycled—the latest drop feature thrift store tees that Fowler bleached down and emblazoned with midterms-themed graphics. Each is unique and sells for $60. “I’m trying to get the least rad shirts humanly possible at Goodwill that no one would want, under any circumstance, and turning them into the raddest shirts,” Fowler says, “that people would line up for.”
It would seem like a lot of misplaced effort if the hype-ness of Election Reform’s drops wasn’t the key to the entire project. Though plenty of brands—including Supreme—pushed voter registration in the lead up to the midterms, Election Reform’s effort attaches the message directly to a product, one that could get in front of way more kids than a newsprint op-ed imploring them to vote. Case in point: Travis Scott has been wearing pieces from Election Reform’s latest drop. One of his Instagram posts, featuring a midterms tee, has nearly 900,000 likes. When is the last time you saw someone wear a Rock The Vote tee?
That said, it’s unclear if the Rager will be casting a vote for Beto O’Rourke (or anyone, for that matter) in his home state of Texas. “Travis and I ran into each other on the street and we talked about the clothes, we didn’t talk about politics,” Fowler says. “And I’m totally fine with that. I’m fully aware of the fact that the majority of the people who are gonna like Election Reform stuff are gonna respond to it aesthetically.” In a year that has seen the generally-superficial world of fashion earnestly engage with the realities of the Trump era, Election Reform’s gear is indeed among the most covetable in a lineup of slogan-emblazoned graphic tees. But as room opens up for mobilization around America’s deeply undemocratic electoral system, a T-shirt increasingly feels besides the point, a hyped-up streetwear drop like more obfuscation than issue. Fowler, though, thinks that kids are primed for political streetwear. “I got into politics through punk music,” he says. “Right now rap and electronic music, rave culture, style—it’s punk right now, it’s the energy that kids are responding to. It’s such a thrilling time in culture, and it’s like, fuck, there’s totally room for politics to be there.”
There is indeed plenty of room: only 28% of millennials say they are definitely voting in the upcoming midterms, as opposed to 74% of seniors. Rock The Vote had access to every celebrity under the sun in the ’90s and early ’00s—their televised, corporate voter drive campaign might have worked then, but it’s not resonating now. If 1,000 kids who follow Travis Scott on Instagram Google “election reform t-shirt” and find their way to Fowler’s manifesto, that’s not nothing in a country where Trump seized power because of less than 80,000 votes in three states. We live in an insane fashion moment—and an even more insane political moment. Single-issue streetwear isn’t bizarre; beautiful, apolitical garms are.
Fowler is now developing Election Reform pants and dresses in advance of the label’s first runway show, which will be held in January in L.A. If voting can be framed as cool in a streetwear context, why not in the high fashion world? “I couldn’t wait to be old enough to vote,” says Fowler. “Kids are always hitting up Tremaine asking him what books to read and stuff like that, and it’s like, yo, voting is the best, most important shit you can do. It’s not for nothing. This is not random. This is not pointless. This is not fucking fake. This is really fucking straightforward, and it’s important.” Or, as Tremaine put it in an Instagram post announcing the Election Reform event: “if you vote you get to drip and you get to complain about the ills of our government, if you don’t vote no drip and no complaining.” Is no vote, no drip the new rock the vote? Revolutions need to start somewhere.
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