I remember a few years ago Hydrogen was a big up and coming clothing brand for players, but now nobody seems to be wearing it anymore. Players I remember being sponsored by it (Coria, Karatsev, Fucsovics, Mannarino, etc.) are no longer. Anyone know what happened? Has the company fallen apart?
TimIsMyName
What happened to Hydrogen?
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Tennis Clothing by Hydrogen: t-shirts, shorts and hoodies
Own the court in style with high-performance Hydrogen tennis outfits and shoes to beat the heat on-court. Visit the official store!
www.hydrogen.it
Massive sales on all items. Maybe the story is indeed about to be over... IIRC the Hydrogen designer (edit. he was also the founder of Hydrogen) founded another brand which has similar stuff as Hydrogen (of course since he was a designer for Hydrogen). Fucsovics was wearing that brand at least last season.
edit. The other brand was called "About Sports". But Fucsovics has just changed sponsors again. Now sporting a brand called "Australian", which is actually also another Italian brand.
About Sports:
Australian:
I always hated the skull logo.
Australian is quite an established brand that has been around for decades. It was very popular in the Netherlands in the 1990s in the happy hardcore scene.
Australian is quite an established brand that has been around for decades. It was very popular in the Netherlands in the 1990s in the happy hardcore scene.
Initially also Berdych and Fognini, also doubles player Bolelli:
Hydrogen: the skull logo emerging in tennis
Mannarino is still around, sporting another fresh brand. Seems that everyone left Hydrogen.
Yeah, I was about to say that with 80% off their prices are just about how they should've been from the get-go, but even still too much for many of these clownish garments. There's a joke/saying "I did it myself and saved money" about utmost dilettantish designs, be it websites (more so back in the day), graphic elements/designs or whatnot that look like the person had no skills or training. Hydrogen always made me think of this saying.
Margins on clothes are ridiculous, getting cucked by consumerism to overpay 10x just because of a logo on the fabric is the lowest you can get in life
One of the craziest manifestations of this was the brand with the red rectangle and their brandname inside of that... Actually forgot their name. Massively popular among youth and within "street culture" (late) 2010s and maybe still early 2020s. Massively overblown prices. They were selling anything that had their logo on it. Even actual bricks (as a decorative piece 🥴) I believe. Simple white T's costing 100 dollars etc. I think they've fallen off now. At least haven't stumbled upon them in any videos as of late. Ok, I googled it now: Supreme.
edit. I recall watching a documentary about that brand. I believe that logo was actually done by some artists initially. And Supreme just started to use it. Sort of in a "rebellious DIY" sense. Then they became a massive business and began to safeguard their brand and sueing others who were doing similar stuff as they before i.e. now using the Supreme logo in some way. Let me find an article on this...
Art or Commerce? Supreme and the Unholy Power of an Iconic Logo - ELEPHANT
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www.modernretail.co
edit. I recall watching a documentary about that brand. I believe that logo was actually done by some artists initially. And Supreme just started to use it. Sort of in a "rebellious DIY" sense. Then they became a massive business and began to safeguard their brand and sueing others who were doing similar stuff as they before i.e. now using the Supreme logo in some way. Let me find an article on this...
Art or Commerce? Supreme and the Unholy Power of an Iconic Logo - ELEPHANT
Supreme was reportedly worth $1 billion at the close of 2019, and now has twelve stores around the world. Kruger finally spoke out about the logo in 2013, when a lawsuit was filed on behalf of Supreme for copyright infringement against another streetwear brand and its usage of identical white-on-red lettering. “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of uncool jokers,” Kruger wrote, furiously. “I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.”Streetwear company Supreme has built its brand with a bold graphic identity taken from the subversive artwork of Barbara Kruger. It is a deeply ironic overlap that speaks volumes…
![Image]()
“I Shop Therefore I Am.” Barbara Kruger made this statement in 1987, but it could just as well be applied to our lives as we know them today. Her iconic artwork combined the language of mass marketing with a subversive nod to consumerism, even as the hedonism of the decade’s stock markets headed towards major collapse. With its bold slogan and direct messaging, the piece offered a prescient reflection of the attention economy of the internet age that was to come.
Seven years later in 1994, a new streetwear brand was founded in New York by James Jebbia. He named it Supreme. The first Manhattan store employed extras from Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s first film Kids, teen regulars from Manhattan’s skate parks, and secretly supplied clothing to the set. The staff slouched between the rails as they sold the t-shirts, skateboards and other branded apparel. With its understated air of cool detachment and carefully minimalist branding, Supreme was able to fully embody the youth culture that it still knows so well how to leverage.
At the heart of Supreme is their distinctive logo, white-on-red in Futura Bold Oblique font. It is immediately recognisable, and has been applied to everything from the store interiors and packaging to the apparel itself. Kruger’s own bold white lettering on red is never far out of sight when it comes to Supreme, although the artist herself long remained silent on the undeniable overlap. It is a visual language that has come to signify a push-and-pull tension between the two, and ultimately, between art and commerce.
The irony of a fashion brand repurposing an artistic identity first intended to decry the poor ethics of the industry is quite something to behold. That this is a label able to command hundreds of dollars for a single item speaks volumes of our dissolute times, when the obsession with the self reigns, well… supreme. We have each been cut loose from the tyranny of doctrine, whether it was self-enforced or dictated from above, and it would seem that is no longer cool to care about anything much at all.
Kruger applied her signature colour scheme of black, white and red to countless artworks during the 1970s and ‘80s, with slogans pasted onto found photographs. The phrases that she alighted upon ranged from the feminist (“Your Body Is a Battleground”) to the personal (“Love for Sale”), to the cautionary (“The Future Belongs to Those Who Can See It”). The Supreme logo buys into the simple immediacy of Kruger’s message and capitalizes on its subversive legacy, all while shifting hundreds of dollars worth of apparel to hypebeasts who are willing to queue for hours at a time.
Supreme was reportedly worth $1 billion at the close of 2019, and now has twelve stores around the world. Kruger finally spoke out about the logo in 2013, when a lawsuit was filed on behalf of Supreme for copyright infringement against another streetwear brand and its usage of identical white-on-red lettering. “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of uncool jokers,” Kruger wrote, furiously. “I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.”
Instead of suing Supreme herself, Kruger took matters into her own hands at 2017’s Performa Biennial in New York. Here she sold a range of products, from skateboards to clothing; a custom red-and-white lettered subway pass was even created for use across the city. It could be seen as the closing of a loop begun decades earlier, when her screen printing techniques first enabled her slogans to be distributed via non-traditional means, from books to matchbooks to coffee mugs, and even shopping bags.
For Kruger, the medium has always been the massage. Bold, direct and immediately recognisable, her work communicates with the language of advertising and graphic design. The identity of her artworks is one that mirrors the tactics of the mass media. It is hardly surprising that Supreme, in turn, appropriated their own branding from this strategy. But it creates a bizarre hall-of mirrors effect, where style wins over substance. What remains of Kruger’s original message, and what exactly are we buying into? Supreme’s identity doesn’t say much at all, precisely because it doesn’t need to. Brand association is built through repetition and a clear logo. For most of us, just white-over-red lettering is more than enough.
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'Scarcity and growth are oppositional': How streetwear legend Supreme lost its luster
Supreme was the epitome of cool when it launched in 1994. But now, 30 years later, it's lost some of its cultural cachet.
www.modernretail.co
Yes, don't forget Benoit! He pretty much is the Celio "Be Normal" tennis OG athlete.
I bought a couple Celio polo shirts in Nice last summer. Terrific quality, much better than Uniqlo in look and fit.
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