Kill Your Idols

Saturday at noon. All five of the vehicles in the Foulplay General Store parking lot are double parked.

If you’re an idiot, like me, you tried to park in the business lot off of 7th Ave where every spot is questionably reserved, and the gate to the business park may not even be open. To get to the main lot, you go up to Rose Lane, then turn left into an alley then double back about a block. The lot is dead silent despite the five gas-guzzling semblances of life. There is barbed wire and a security camera above the door.

Inside, the place is empty, save Manny clacking away at the MacBook decked out in brand stickers. The various racks and displays around the room are untouched, pristine. This is by design - the General Store is open by appointment only. The door isn’t open unless Adam says so. Otherwise, the door is locked, the shades are down, and the whole operation all but disappears.

A false wall lines the interior half of the space. It looks completely different from the last time I was here. Last time, it was a smattering of 60s propaganda, Vietnam news reels, and Che Guevara. Now, it’s an arresting display of vandalism, like a bathroom stall wall from The Purge. The piece is ripped straight from Foulplay’s collaboration with Burma, which dropped the night before. Things went down the way they usually do. Kids lined up outside and waited for an undisclosed amount of time to shuffle in and get the shirt of their choice, so long as their size was still available. Then, off to their respective homes to show off their coveted prize.

Manny goes to get Adam. He opens the door in the false wall. The sound of boxes being packed and inventory rustling around ventures out into the showroom for only a moment. Then Adam closes the door behind him, and everything is once again still. While the vintage military aesthetic gives the General Store a unique vibe, for the most part, it feels like a natural selection of Foulplay’s preview lookbooks and online shop: clean and crisp, but also confrontational. A handful of simple brand logo shirts scatter the racks, but the majority are more subversive, brandishing messages like “At war with myself” and “Run for your life”. It transcends the seeming casual nature of the clothing itself, pushing forth a much deeper reflections of self.

“For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what Foulplay was about”, Adam explains. “I was just kind of making random shit. I grew up in a fairly conservative religious household. I got into a bunch of trouble when I was younger and it kind of made me open my eyes to the real world because I grew up in this little bubble. But that was a turning point for me. I knew I needed to make my own opinions. So now, I just try to focus on my upbringing and use that as, kind of like… don’t always believe what you’re told.” Adam looks to the racks and all of his designs. “That’s why I’ll have like Jesus on a t-shirt and put like ‘Kill your idols’ on it. I don’t have anything against religion. I think religion is tight. I think everyone should have something to believe in. I just kind of want to challenge people to think a little more.”

Before the Burma collaboration, one of Foulplay’s latest runs was a collection under the motif “America’s Worst Nightmare”. The lookbook is a colorful collage of fundamentalist street preacher type protest signs: “Keep Foulplay out of our USA”, “Foulplay is your enemy”, “Wear Foulplay? You’re going to Hell”.

The observation is particularly poignant for his long-time home state of Arizona, which also lays home to (and the list is not nearly exhaustive): Trump-endorsed senate hopefuls, racist policing policies, scandalous megachurch leaders, and plenty of affluent, insular, conservative bubbles like the one Adam broke out of. I wonder if that makes Adam nervous at all - the concept of his brand message being missed in the wake of hype. But he shrugs it off. “[Somebody might] not get it, but now he’s a walking billboard for my message… that shit is fire to me”. And suddenly, the sprawling outlet mall landscape of metropolitan Phoenix seems like something out of a scene out of John Carpenter’s “They Live”: mass consumption ripe with hidden messages and propaganda both understood and swept over. It’s a delicate art that Adam is bent on mastering.

“It has [a lot] to do with the presidency and politics right now”, Adam nods, obviously. “Like, this is America’s worst nightmare - the time we are in right now… I pull a lot of inspiration from the 60s and the Civil Rights movement. It’s crazy that the art that was made then is still so relevant now. It’s insane. That shouldn’t even be relevant [to our present day], but I can look at books or magazines printed in the 60s and look at propaganda and it’s like still the same thing now. People think we’re in this space where everything is changed and everything is so good. Like we overcame that… but no, we didn’t. A lot of people still think like this.”

Adam’s approach has refined through the years to the blitzkreig online frenzies that consumers can now expect. There’s a finesse to it that feels organic, but still magical, like bottled lightning. “Now, we’re doing stuff every month, but keeping it small and keeping it moving. Like 15-30 SKUs and 100 pieces of each, so it’s pretty rare. Basically, bigger product offering but keeping quantities capped.” The choice comes from market knowledge and experience, but also from personal research. “Growing up I was really into brands like Diamond and Hundreds and like Black Scale - the staple streetwear brands. I watched them build their platforms where it was super limited at one point. But then, it became a thing where it became so oversaturated that no one cared anymore. Now, everyone had it but it was supposed to be like this secret. That’s why I think streetwear is so important because it’s a thing where, like, it’s a secret. It’s a secret handshake. But when all these brands started putting their shit in every store that was offering, it became a thing where it wasn’t a secret anymore. I don’t want it to be a thing where you have a shirt and then you see 50 fucking people with the same shirt. Growing up, I wanted to have shit that no one else had. I wanted to have stuff that was special to me. If 50,000 people have the same shirt as you, that’s not really special.”

“Basically what I’m trying to do with Foulplay is keep it where it’s like still cool and secret but it’s profitable and has longevity as opposed to building this whole thing and then it washes itself out. I want Foulplay to be small. I don’t want to be the biggest brand ever. I guess my goal is to really just have something for myself and for my friends and be able to make sure that we’re good and don’t have to get regular jobs.”

Luckily, not everyone just buys into the hype, and the friends and collaborators Adam has gained along the road are partners for life.

“Jordan”, Adam says, pointing to the Burma spread on the wall, “He’s from Jersey. He just moved out here. One of his friends Patrick is like a really good photographer. It’s weird. They grew up like 10 miles apart from each other but met online playing like GTA or something. Now, they’re best friends and live together and moved out here together. He just needs more light on his brand because he’s super talented.”

In a lot of ways, it’s Adam’s tenacious love for his craft that draws people in like a magnet. “Armando, from Neighbors”, he explains, “He works with me, back here [at Foulplay]. He’s like my little bro. He came to one of my pop ups and just wanted to help. We did this pop up where we put a bunch of dirt in this studio space and made it look like a desert inside the building. We had a projector and like a cowboy riding a horse and shit. It looked like an old Marlboro ad on the back wall. [Armando] just came, 16 years old, skipped school. His mom dropped him off and he was like ‘Hey, I’m here to shovel dirt’. It was so tight. Now, I’ve taught him everything I know and I try to relay shit to him. He helps me with designs, I help him with designs - we just go back and forth.”

While the brand has gotten national attention and brought Adam more than his share of work (most recently, taking on the role of creative director for G59 Records out of New Orleans), Adam prefers staying in close quarters with his friends. There’s more than a little symbolism in the fact that all that separates them from Adam at this moment is a false wall decked out in streetwear motifs. Here they are, Saturday at noon, clicking away, making that dream apart from regular jobs a reality. And to the rest of us, it’s a desirable mystery - one that Adam plans on maintaining for as long as he can.

“Really, I still want it to be a secret” he says. “I know some stores like Alife in New York where you have to go down in the basement, or like RSVP in Chicago where you go into an apartment building and walk down some stairs and then they buzz you in. That’s why we did [the showroom] in this space instead of [on the corner], because it faces out to the courtyard. I want people to pull up out front and be like ‘Where the fuck is this at? How the fuck do I get back here?’ I don’t want it to be a thing where you just pull up and get a shirt. It’s something more, where you either love it or you hate it.”

I silently take a gulp of breath, knowing this is exactly what my thought was the first time I came to the Foulplay General Store. Standing in a business park courtyard in a line of 100 vaping kids dressed head to toe in FTP waiting patiently to maybe get one shirt and a sticker. And I’m thinking to myself, why? Why am I here? But I know why I’m here. I know in my heart of hearts that the greatest object of my affection is curiosity. It’s the secret that Adam talks about. I want to know it. What’s next? What’s new? What’s inside the door?

For Adam, it’s all part of the plan.