Bastardizing Ed Hardy's Name For a Horrible Energy Drink2009-08-18 00:00:00I totally get the whole Japanese aesthetic in tattoo design thing. I get the use of flash tatoo as a loaded symbol of human emotion BS. But really, the crass merchandising of an art form, any art form is deplorable. It is even more obnoxious when that art form is one about an underground culture - now usurped by mainstream america. When Ed Hardy started tattooing, the whole concept was so counter cultural - so against the mainstream. Hardy had even mentioned once in an interview that "I liked that it couldn't be commodified."
Well right now you cant get more commodified than the expensive and very upscale clothing lines by Hardy's merchandisers, which of course have no real connection to Ed Hardy ( except for the big fat check he gets). That was all because of Christian Audigier, the same one responsible for killing the image of Von Dutch by turning it into cheap crap (...
