STUSSY - IT AIN'T WHERE YA FROM 2 OF 3

STUSSY - IT AIN'T WHERE YA FROM PART 2 OF 3

In 1979, when he was 24 years old, Stussy gave up his itinerant ways and settled in Laguna Beach to establish a regular surfboard business. To brand his handiwork he took a large marker and scrawled his signature on the finished boards. It soon became his trademark and logo. In a 1993 interview with WWD, Stussy recalled, "It was seen as 'new wave,' anarchic. I had the logo screen-printed on T-shirts and sweatshirts, but it had nothing to do with producing clothes. I was trying to promote the boards." During this early period of his career, Stussy shaped surfboards in his Laguna Canyon studio during the days and at night boxed his T-shirts for sale in area surf shops. He drifted further into the apparel business by simply being involved in finding clothing that he and his friends liked to wear.

As he explained to The Orange County Register in a 1989 profile, "We've always worn interesting clothes, but it's not like I'm from a garment-family or anything like that." After T-shirts and sweatshirts, Stussy began producing Bermuda shorts, as he explained to WWD: "A couple of my buddies and I used to go to the Army-Navy surplus stores and buy size 40 khakis and cut them off way up at the knees. Everybody used to say, 'Those are so fly!'--so we started making them. My mom made a pattern off of them. We started taking orders."