![]() “The font Kanye used has always been in production, it never died out like the font we are researching.” The font’s death has led to several companies attempting to remake it and most of them are logged on Heated Word’s Instagram. ![]() McCartney is keen to stress that the Kanye t-shirt doesn’t use the same font as the one found in Heated Word Projects. ![]() For some reason lots of different groups of people gravitated towards this font in particular - and they began to appropriate it for their own purposes due to Heat pressing the letters being easy, affordable and adaptable.” Lettering expert Paul Shaw expands on this last point, letting us know that Letraset, Presstype and Chartpak were three companies known for their heat press lettering kits during that period. The font never had an official name and was only ever available from small independent stores predominantly in NYC. “The letters were only ever made as heat press flock letters (they were never digitalized or printed). The font was created as an affordable way to personalized sports jerseys,” McCartney says. “It dates back to Sportswear back in the 1970s. The Heated Words Project was founded by Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, who held an exhibition in 2015 at London’s House of Vans showing off their initial research into the font. Which is why The Heated Words Project came to fruition. It’s rare that a font would be so popular and then disappear, especially when it’s been so important to some of the world’s biggest subcultures. Grandmaster Flash and his iconic track jacket is one of the standout uses of the font, but Rock Steady Crew, Biz Markie, Big Audio Dynamite, The Clash and Malcolm McClaren also used it at one point or another. The font was first used by gangs but, as 2010 documentary Rubble Kings and, 2014 documentary Fresh Dressed showed, NYC gangs held a truce and eventually morphed into B-Boy crews. The two types of shirt are different only by font, often using the same word placement. While the Cali DeWitt t-shirts were based on latin memorial t-shirts from the 1980s, there was also a rarer font from the same blackletter family that was once omnipresent in hip-hop before suddenly dying out. “Lots of different groups of people gravitated towards this font in particular - and they began to appropriate it for their own purposes due to heat pressing the letters being easy, affordable and adaptable.” This reaction died down after the Cali DeWitt connection was discovered, but few have looked into how the TLOP merchandise is the cousin of some of the most prominent old school hip-hop shirts in history. So when Kanye released his The Life of Pablo merchandise after his clearly Rock-influenced Yeezus tour clothing, it was no surprise some people turned their nose up at what appeared to be garments that maybe took rock inspiration a bit too far.
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