SL: What’s the background on W.O.R.? How did you and Rick meet and come to work together?

TM: Rick and I met Back in 95 or 96 through John Moore, who was working for Rick at the time. John was an older friend who watched over the young kids at first point Malibu, and when I say ”watched over the young kids” I don’t mean like a pedophile. At a very young age John would take us down to the Jive factory to hook us up with gear and also sneak us into Hollywood clubs that Rick was involved with at the time. Over the years, every now and then, I would go into Jive for free cloths and to hear some crazy fucked up story Rick had to tell. In about 2003, Rick left work to travel around the world and take up his lost love, surfing. I had just moved back to L.A. from San Francisco around the same time so we found are selves surfing Malibu together a lot. We planned a surf trip to mainland Mexico with a few friends and brought along a duffle bag full of Medium format film and Holga cameras. On our trip we really found that we really had a lot in common when it came to music, fashion, design, history of Los Angeles, and the views of the surf industry.

We returned back to L.A. with tans, photos of transvestites, and a concept for a high end casual Surf inspired line called Gonz!. I went over to Rick’s West Hollywood Apartment one day and we started drawing, listening to old spoken word albums, going through old graphic Annuals and I never left! We spent a couple years just working on Gonz!, surfing, researching L.A. history, and stink bombing Hollywood parties. Rick went back to work at Jive after a year and I continued to work on Gonz! stuff at his house. At that point we were selling Gonz! to only a few really tight accounts like Opening Ceremony and Hollywood Trading Company. As Gonz! grew all the kids and surf dudes wanted it but either couldn’t afford it or didn’t know where to buy it. We soon realized that we were in a great position to start a more cost effective line that was coming from the same place . My friends and I started a surf gang called Warriors Of Radness a while back, and Rick offered me an office downtown and a position to work full time on W.O.R. and Gonz! . The rest is history I guess.

SL: Surfing, less so than any other of the sport marketed in as fashion, really requires no clothing. So, with that, it becomes a great example of clothing and style being a construct of the culture rather than something born out of technical necessity. How does that notion inform W.O.R.?

TM: With W.O.R. its about coming up with those items that define who we are in and out of the water! And, really represents the L.A. culture we grew up in. A minor example: we are doing a collaboration with Jim Ganzer (Jimmy Z) and we re-made our version of the side Velcro short. This is a design born in L.A., designed by Jimmy himself.

SL: On that same note, I’m interested in learning about when you first came to realize there was a style, or a look, to surf culture and how you might have grown into it.

TM: There was always a look! It’s just now none of the surf brands embrace it. They all try to be some fashion thing from another place (and not their backyard). This is the exact reason why we started W.O.R.! Over the past few years all the surf brands and the so called “fashion” company’s in Orange County we trying to be fashionable by trying to rip off East Coast and European fashion. We wanted to create something West Coast, casual, cool that expressed what we were about. There is so much design, history and culture in Los Angeles and the more we researched somehow it all led back to the beach. All these things that intrigued us somehow got tied together by the beach. We saw all these O.C. brands trying to be fashionable and hide the fact that they were a huge surf corporation, or front as an “art” company, when all they really are, are wack-ass OC companies with shit style. Rick and I came up with the re-concept of surf, but from specifically Los Angeles. We asked ourselves what is the exact opposite of what was out there in that industry. Why be ashamed of this culture. We should embrace it and bring the fun back into it like it used to be in the Mid to late 80’s.