Accessory fashion designer

THREE TIGHT-LIPPED MEN IN DARK SUITS AND TIES CLUTCHING briefcases stride single file from the second-floor office. They look like venture capitalist superspies. Not one of them wears a trucker hat fashionable, Von Dutch. It is designed to look like a garage and is full of bowling bags, leather jackets, and of course, trucker hats. In one shining moment of 2003, the company reinvented the roomy, mesh version of the baseball cap, taking something that belonged to the Pabst Blue Ribbon drinker and making it a fashion statement. Here at the store where the trucker hat was reborn, the bespoke gentlemen pass along a wall of pictures of hat-wearing celebrities.

Justin Timberlake, the Strokes, Rick Fox, Pharrell Williams, the Osbourne kids, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie--everybody this side of Dennis Kucinich has been photographed taking shelter beneath its bill. Today Pabst Blue Ribbon is a fashion statement, and Von Dutch is spinning working-class threads into gold.

It's such an ugly expression, but if you have a better on, please mail it in: white trash. Von Dutch cosmetics. They are manufacturing limited-edition motorcycles, which will go for up to $80,000 a pop. Right now, as the guys in the dark suits file by, the new line of Von Dutch kids' wear is spread across the second-floor office:jeans and T-shirts and trucker hats for those too young to drive a rig. With any luck--with a great of luck--your kid will be this year's Ashton Kutcher.

The hat may make the man, but the man that makes the hat says he's hardly finished yet. "You've just seen the tip of the iceberg," says Tonny Sorensen, CEO of Von Dutch. "Von Dutch is a lifestyle brand, not just a fashion." The company, according to Sorensen, celebrates the individual and strikes a blow for originality at a time of ubiquitous logos. "The world has become so processed, everything is so mass produced. I believe there are no limits to how big we can get. This is as American as it gets."

Also on the wall, looking down at the kids' clothes, is a photograph of a wild-eyed handsome man. He's not wearing a trucker hat, neither. He looks as Southern Californian as you can get: an airstreamed, crew-cut hipster from the '50s, blond, blue-eyed, ready to rumble in a print short-sleeved shirt. He could be a cool-school jazzbo, maybe, jamming at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, or he could be a surfer on shore leave.

His name was Von Dutch. What he would think of his signature wrapped around Justin Timberlake's noggin is unknowable, since he died in 1992. White trash? He'd have shot you a look and tossed the phrase back in your face. Call him that, and he would have regurgitated as many stereotypes as occurred to him. Then maybe reached for his gun.

What this visionary artist would have thought of the boutique on Melrose bearing his name is a subject his family and friends often wonder about. This much is clear, though: While his name has been branded on the consumer consciousness, few know anything about the man. That, and that he was a damn good shot, even when he was drunk.

IT'S A LITTLE HARD TO DESCRIBE WHAT VON DUTCH DID, BUT THOSE who remember him at all tend to remember him as a pinstriper. The craft of pinstriping can be traced to decorations on ancient Egyptian carts; in the industrial age, it was a motif applied to everything from safes to cars. Thin lines that ornamented a border, they were genteel and seemly When Von Dutch started pinstriping in the late '40s, though, car manufacturers weren't doing it anymore. Customizing cars was a fledgling practice--and bad custom paint jobs required a new generation of pinstripers who could decorate over the blemishes. Von Dutch turned an artful way of hiding imperfections into an out-and-out art form. Suddenly guys who had perfectly fine paint jobs were asking him to paint their cars.

His pinstripes are better than most people's entire paintings. They look elegant, Victorian, like lace doilies, but they convey an inelegant impulse to scribble over the world and thus reconstitute it. He emphasized what a physical act pin-striping was, a marriage of balance and movement stretched over hours. It's not far-fetched to compare his work to the allover canvases of abstract expressionists. Indeed, some of his cars suggest Jackson Pollock's poured paintings.

His line starts at the beginning of the hot rod era. He and his constituents customized their vehicles for show and speed, and they even customized the alphabet, referring to their scene as "kustom kar kulture." His line starts as mere decoration but ends up articulating a kind of art that belongs to the era before the assembly line and the era after it--and that was largely incomprehensible in his own time. Von Dutch used the methods of the folk artist--craftsmanship and artisanal skills--and applied them to mass-produced machines. You can't call him a folk artist, though, because he had a high mist's belief in self-expression, in sharing the good, bad, and wrecked thoughts that went on in his skull. But you can't call him a high artist because he had a funk and immediacy that had little to do with museum culture. Von Dutch was a high artist who used folk art techniques to create pop culture. How about that? He loved art and hated the art world. He was a living anachronism and a harbinger of the future who lived forever outside civil society

But to call Von Dutch a pinstriper is to miss whole forests. Strictly speaking, he was also a sign painter, a car customizer, a motorcycle mechanic, an inventor and painter and performance artist and designer of guns and knives and things that exploded. His pinstriping embodied motion. Von Dutch himself embodied the endless invention and energy that flowed out of Southern California garages in the second half of the 20th century. In the '50s, when Walter Hopps was running the legendary Ferus Gallery, which helped launch the careers of Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, and Ed Ruscha, he offered to show Von Dutch's work. Three times Von Dutch turned him down.

"He expresses what's good about the whole national character, the expression of freedom of the individual," says Temma Kramer, a professor in the cinema and television arts department at Cal State Northridge. "And he does it in a hip, crazy fun context."

The man was nothing if not funny. But to talk about his playfulness is to miss the know-how that lurked beneath it. His humor--simultaneously whimsical and sarcastic, which ain't easy--flourishes most of all in the exquisitely crafted inventions he made for his own amusement: a steam-powered television, a motorized pogo stick, battery-powered roller skates, and a coin-operated guillotine. He took the assembly-line product and rendered it one of a kind. He invested in functional objects the mischief of MAD magazine or Mark Twain.

A portrait of Von Dutch emerges from a videotaped interview with his fellow kustom kulture icon Ed "Big Daddy" Ruth in 1988. Slightly younger Roth learned much at the feet of Von Dutch, building and customizing hot rods. Sucking down Meister Braus as he talks, Von Dutch shows viewers how to pinstripe and, really, how to think like Von Dutch. "If its not the most important thing to you," he says, "you're not gonna do it. It's got to become an obsession, to make an absolutely perfect straight line.... It's very much like yoga--in fact, if you get deep into striping, you can go away and meditate while your body is striping."

The talk is elliptical, Von Dutch gruff and charismatic and surprisingly innocent, even wounded. His face is gnarled, but his hands tell the deeper story Marinated in paint and oil, they move tenderly and with great care as he draws. He uses them to say half of what he is trying to communicate, stabbing the air and gliding across a page in a single controlled motion. The hands form a portrait of the man: a laborer of great candor and unexpected vulnerabilities.

Another moment, another portrait: Good-Bye Cruel World, an oil painting that Von Dutch produced in 1968. A manual meat grinder sits on a tabletop. Reaching out of it is a hand that turns the crank while oozing below is a bloody flow of human meat. Floating on the viscera is a single eyeball. It's how we know this was a self-portrait, for the eyeballwas Von Dutch's symbol for himself, an image that pops up on cars, clothing, and canvases from the '40s 1992. Usually, the eyeball in a Von Dutch work is winged and signifies an all-seeing consciousness. But here it's trapped in a puddle of self-destruction, in a picture that positively brays that the artist knows that the hand of volition is attached to his own arm.