Crispy Debuts With quot;El Layquot; Irony
The Pool show in Las Vegas featured plenty of new lines, including Beverly Hills–based T-shirt line Crispy.
Crispy produces T-shirts with ironic phrases. The company’s original shirt reads “El Lay” in gold metallic foil. Other Crispy shirts include the “Wokka-Chikka-Wokka-Chikka- Wokka-Chikka-Wokka-Chikka” style, which is meant to evoke the background music from ’70s porn films; the “_______aholic” shirt; and the “Bad Hair” series, which features yearbook photos from the ’70s.
“People who dig irony really dig it,” said Crispy designer Kenneth Dolin, an actor who “did apparel just for fun.”
“It’s been the weirdest two months of my life,” he said.
Though the company has only been in business about two months, its shirts have already landed in about 40 Southern California stores, including Kitson, Snob, Black & Blue, Pull My Daisy, Tryst, Fred Segal Street and Sharon Segal. It was Pull My Daisy in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles that recommended Pool to Dolin.
At Pool, Dolin gathered orders from stores in Dallas, Atlanta, New York and San Diego. “It’s helping me refine and define what I’m doing,” he said.
For more information, call (310) 276-2387. —Alison A. Nieder
