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www.alifenyc.com

The purest attitude and motives go into the creation of their constantly amazing clothing range and other amazing products and projects. Alife is the strongest brand that’s come out of the New York bombing movement. Alife started out as a creative space on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. They chose this spot as 1) it was affordable and 2) it was an area that people from all the other boroughs of Manhattan would not be opposed to coming to. Coming out of bombing you have to think about this shit! I sat down with Rob Cristofaro the founder of Alife.

‘I used to write graffiti and I decided to start this new thing — workshop, retail space — I guess it was a store but never had any experience doing any of that shit. Me and a few other dudes were like “we’re gonna start something” as there wasn’t anything going on. We started the plans in 1998 and by ‘99 we found the space and opened up shop in the Lower East Side, Orchard Street, which was basically at the time affordable rent as nobody was really down there. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing and were just like “fuck it, let’s just try this new jump-off and see where it goes.“’

Once they opened the space, Alife became their new tag and their mission was to get the name out there in any way possible: stickers, T-shirts, magazines, the same shit as usual; self-promotion is all bombing really, with no budget. They don’t pay for advertising and everything is hand done, independent street promotion. That’s not to say that if they had a big budget to go do some serious marketing, they would be going large on billboards, as I’m sure they’d still retain that no-budget attitude.

‘That’s the graffiti way — it’s like, “king, shit, fuck everybody else; fuck all crews, we’re by ourselves, no respect for really anybody else out here,” and that’s our shit: We’re gonna king New York. Alife was based on the street and before we opened our space we put the word out to the graffiti community — who were the only people we were in touch with — that we were opening a platform, a workshop, a creative space, and we wanted them to be involved. We had a meeting before we opened the store with 50-60 people. These were all the creative people before the shit became what it is. This was people like Espo, Reese, Kaws, the people that were graffiti writers but ready to take it to the next level and at the time there was no other venue for it.’

At this time there wasn’t any commercial side to the graffiti movement, and Alife has been based on the art side of things from the beginning. Back then they didn’t make clothing, they didn’t do footwear — just a space for art, and after they had made enough noise from that, did they think about producing clothing and everything else that they do now.

‘Everything that we’ve done has been a learning experience from having no experience of owning a business to running businesses and independently promoting all the shit that we do. And then having big corporations come and, like, mimic the shit that we’re doing but with big fucking budgets. Once in a while there is some interesting shit that goes on out there, and the people that evolve and are not following any shit, any trend — that’s the kind of people we like to involve ourselves with. Where I see us going is hopefully the money is going to get bigger and with the bigger budget do more powerful, widely seen things for the public. Using the clothing and the footwear to bring the money in to do the shit that we really like to do — the creative shit.’

Wherever Alife is going you can be sure of one thing: that Alife will continue to create and produce art clothing whatever, with a real connection to the streets from which it came — New York City streets, and that is the one place that is King of street culture.