PUNK MERCH: The exterior of CBGB with logos of the club’s big acts on the awning.

PUNK MERCH: The exterior of CBGB with logos of the club’s big acts on the awning.

CBGB

L.A. Company to Make CBGB Live Again

The styles inspired by the scene at the CBGB nightclub in mid-1970s New York, one of the world’s first punk clubs, made a big impact on global fashion, but the club closed in 2006. It has since become the site for a John Varvatos boutique, but it’s not the last word on CBGB. There is an annual CBGB Music and Film Festival in New York, and Los Angeles–based branding and licensing company Epic Rights plans to make CBGB a notable fashion name in the current era.

Epic Rights announced recently that it was named as CBGB’s global branding, licensing and rights-management representative. Juli Boylan-Riddles, Epic Rights’ executive vice president of global strategic partnerships and licensing, said her company’s CBGB-licensed gear will include T-shirts with the iconic CBGB logo, which has been spotted at rock concerts for decades. It will offer other merchandise, which includes hoodies, footwear and unique capsule collections inspired by CBGB. Some of those new looks include graphics from the original CBGB site, such as the club’s unique graffiti. “You can’t go there now, but you can wear it,” Boylan-Riddles said.

She forecast the first delivery of CBGB merchandise will be in high-end specialty stores for Spring/Summer ’15.

Epic Rights started business in January 2014 and is led by Dell Furano, one of the pioneers of the rock-merchandise business. In the early 1970s, he started selling merchandise at Grateful Dead shows. He turned the guerrilla business into a multi-million-dollar company, Signatures Network Inc., which worked with artists such as Madonna and U2.

In 2007, he sold Signatures to Live Nation, a publicly traded concert-promotion company, for $79 million. Furano ran Live Nation’s merchandise division for five years.

Epic Rights also holds licenses to make licensed gear for acts such as Kiss and Aerosmith.