What is the Ugly Kids Club?
The Ugly Kids Club is a creative clothing label based out of London that started out as a loose collective of clothing customisers, graffiti artists and designers. Our first T-shirt release was another canvas for us to put our designs out – now our collection consists of tees, sweats and hoods with our creative prints.
Where did the name come from?
It was a catchy, audacious name that has ring to it and obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is us. But truth be told, the founding members of The Ugly Kids Club all shared the unfortunate bad luck of being an ugly duckling as children – bowl cuts and bad dress sense were among some of the unfortunates. We saw that what we were all doing creatively was like us blossoming from being plain old ducks into swans… That’s why we adopted the flying swan as our logo.
How do you come up with the designs for your line?
We are inspired by everything and anything that’s around us – tattoos, football, food, smoking papers, fruit machines, graffiti, cartoons. Anything from current and popular culture gets regurgitated and remixed with our Ugly twist. Our newest print to the line-up is the ‘100s to 1000s’ print and it goes back to our original love of sweets, cakes and doughnuts.
What’s distinctive about your designs?
We have always wanted to put out creative designs, creative in the style we have done it, creative in the colourways or creative in the concept behind it. The designs from The Ugly Kids Club can always be taken in numerous ways. Our flagship print, the ‘Roll with The Ugly’ smoking papers-inspired design can easily be mistaken as a stoner’s T-shirt, but look deeper into it and you can see it’s more about art than anything.
What was it that inspired you to start designing?
Walé Adeyemi, graffiti denim and garage raves!
For more information go to: www.theuglykidsclub.com
