DIY or Die
Interview with TVA Or Die
Carson, Calif.
There’s a room at the back of Ricky Alvarez’s house that mirrors what you might imagine the inside of his head to look like.
Nearly every inch of the walls are covered with graffiti, stickers and stencil work. A drum kit sits in one corner. Screen printing materials are in another. Boxes and miscellaneous items crowd the floor.
It’s kind of a mess.
But then no one would expect the mastermind—who also happens to shoot videos, take really good still pictures and plays in multiple bands—behind underground clothing company TVA or Die to be operating out of some bougie, hipster studio, right? You don’t get product descriptions such as these:
“Okay. Okay. Okay. So we got all artistic on this shirt. BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGG DEAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLL!!! We do it louda…. We do it bettah…. We do it scwyah….”
Or:
“Oh my god. Dude. Groovy! We are back, baby! With this supafly Destroy ‘Acid Wash’ long sleeve, ya dig?”
“You don’t want them to be serious,” Ricky said of the descriptions. “I was never really into any other brands. When I got into this, that’s when I started looking up brands.”
“Then we noticed just how basic every other brand is, not to dis any other brand,” said Ricky’s friend Andy, who sometimes helps him. “They’re all positive, the other brands [saying] ‘dream big’ and stuff like that and we’re just like fuck that.”
“We try to have as much fun as we can because people are too serious,” Ricky said. “It’s just like, dude, you got to bring them down to Earth, you know?”
He’s explaining the ins and outs of TVA—short for Technicolor Vision Apparel—in the living room of his home, surrounded by a sea of sweatshirts and T-shirts in various stages of production.
If you’re not familiar with TVA or Die, or haven’t figured it out yet, they balance just the right amount of snark and sarcasm. Every item they sell, they make themselves—in Ricky’s living room, in a house in Carson. They’re not looking to be the next big thing; they’re just designing for themselves and their friends. It’s a little bit of punk mixed with horror mixed with a little bit of smart ass humor.
Ricky, along with his brother Luis Alvarez and cousin Tomas Alvarez, started TVA in late 2013 and they have since amassed a loyal following for their sometimes irreverent designs.
“We all would just wear band T-shirts all the time,” Luis said. “So when people saw our catalogue and our logos, people were like ‘Man, those look like band T-shirts. It could be band merch because that’s how we grew up as teens.”
Ask any of them to describe the TVA aesthetic themselves and they’re not into it.
“I don’t know. That’s the thing,” Ricky said. “We just wanted to make what we were into. Like punk rock. We wanted to make flier-type T-shirts. Or, if we were into graffiti, we’d make a graffiti-type logo. It just depends.”
Ricky plays drums in band Catacomb Rockers, which he formed with Luis and Luis’s girlfriend Daisy. Ricky alsoplays drums in The Wasted and $ack Lunch and is on drums and vocals for xTommyLasordax. He was also in the first iteration of Carson band Deviated State.
Tomas is described as the money guy who provided the initial funding to buy that first round of inventory, but TVA’s doing well enough to the point where profits are now rolled back into paying for the next round of blanks.
It’s hard finding a reason not to like them. They’re a bunch of genuinely nice guys who went in head first and taught themselves the ins and outs of how to screen print. It was all trial and error, including initial tests using house paint. The results were what you might expect: hard, crusty logos that disappeared by the second wash.
“This guy [Ricky] started, I mean, just cutting out cardboard,” Luis said. “He would trace a stencil and cut a piece of cardboard out and spray paint onto a shirt. That’s how it started out.”
They went back to the drawing board. And got smarter. They bought a simple starter screen print kit comprised of a basic screen and DVD.
“I would just watch that DVD religiously from beginning to end, even just the credits or whatever to see if they had anything—other links to screen printing,” Ricky said.
TVA started out printing on irregular shirts, cheap blanks they found around downtown Los Angeles. That changed too after they formed a relationship with a vendor that sells them better quality shirts.
Everything is still done by hand, although Ricky does the bulk of it with the help of friends he dubbed the cretin crew.
“That’s the TVA mob there,” Ricky said motioning to a group of friends milling around the living room.
“We’re the slaves,” said one friend, nicknamed Big Tony.
“Every one of us has done our part,” said Andy, who helped with product descriptions on the very first collection.
“He runs a sweat shop,” said Sean, who is the guitarist in Deviated State. “He pays us in pennies.”
“I get paid lunch off the dollar menu sometimes,” said another friend, nicknamed Bastard (real name Andrew and another member of Deviated State). “It’s a good job.”
It’s a little bit of comedy mixed in with what would otherwise be considered hard work—and a lot of it.
“But that’s only if you view it as work,” Ricky pointed out. “I view it more as a hobby and when it’s a hobby, I have more fun. That’s the thing, you have to have fun with it cause if you don’t then it’s going to be a job and each collection you’ll panic.”
That’s why they’ve found it baffling as they’ve continued to grow TVA, the number of people that don’t get where they’re coming from or just want to pay their way into becoming a “brand.”
Case in point: the model who reached out to Ricky about being photographed in their clothes and wanted to be paid for not only herself but her photographer.
“You come to me asking me like ‘Hey, I’m down to model for your clothing company but you have to pay me.’ I didn’t even know people charged,” he said. “That’s why I was like ‘Man, screw this.... If you notice, it seems like sex sells. They show a girl with half her ass out in a shirt and it draws more attention but I’m just like screw that. I just want to model my shirts. I want to model my friends because it looks cooler. It looks more grimy.”
Ricky took a class at Harbor College where he met another clothing company owner who showed him the logo his designer had come up with.
“I was like, designer? What the hell do you mean? And he was like ‘You don’t have a designer?’ And I was like ‘No, that’s why I’m taking this class because I need to learn.’ First it’s people trying to charge me to take pictures of them wearing my shirts and now it’s fools paying people to make designs for them. I thought it was supposed to be your brand, your logos, your designs.”
Ricky’s in a zone at this point, having screen printed the remaining sweatshirts and brings the remaining stragglers from his crew to a new conveyor belt dryer he recently bought off Craigslist. We walk outside to what’s eloquently named the Bum Dungeon—otherwise, known as the garage—to dry the batch.
A friendly pit bull, Iggy, joins us. She’s one of the crew, too.
So what’s the end game in all of this? Would they like TVA to be bigger?
“Oh, yeah, it’d be cool,” Ricky said. “But it’s just not the goal. If it gets there, it gets there. I just want to make my own designs.”
He’s not into deep analysis of what TVA or Die means or what his prints mean. He’s more about the freestyle. After all, you start thinking too hard and it all becomes a little too contrived and there are enough “brands” filling the shelves of Zumiez and Tilly’s to speak to that. At the end of the day, he gets a kick out of when people use the promo codes for a sale or participate in raffles when he vends. Simple stuff that’s kind of endearing.
“It’s like, dude, these guys took time out of their day to buy one of our products,” he said. “That’s pretty tight.”
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