California Apparel News

What’s in a name? For Los Angeles fashion designer Brian Lichtenberg, it’s a multi-million-dollar T-shirt line.

One of Lichtenberg’s biggest fashion sellers this year began as something of a spoof on words. A few years ago, he started selling a T-shirt splashed with “Homiés,” which mocks the logo of French heritage brand Hermès.

The Homiés T-shirt is part of his new label, BLTEE by Brian Lichtenberg, which includes sweatshirts and caps.

Homiés shirts have been sported by in-crowd people such as music star Rihanna and leading model Cara Delavigne, leading to a flurry of sales.

At the hip, upscale Los Angeles boutique chain Kitson, Homiés T-shirts have emerged as one of the company’s top sellers. It is also a hot seller at e-commerce sites such as Revolve and Net-a-Porter as well as stores around the world, including Colette in Paris, Browns in London, and Harvey Nichols in the U.K. and Hong Kong.

Since the beginning of the year, Kitson has had more than $1 million in sales for the shirts, said Fraser Ross, the boutique chain’s founder. That’s a lot of revenue for a product that only occupies a small table at each of the 13 Kitson locations in Southern California. “It’s only gotten started. It’s got a lot of steam left,” Ross predicted.

A focus on satirical T-shirts is something new for Lichtenberg. Until last year, he was best known for designing a critically lauded, idiosyncratic, self-named ready-to-wear dress line.

The ambitious Brian Lichtenberg line was sold at avant-garde boutiques for $398 to $595. In 2008 and 2009, he produced runway events during Los Angeles Fashion Week. The dress line, now on hiatus, was embraced by women who were very serious about fashion, said Alisa Loftin, who sold the Brian Lichtenberg label at Aero & Co., her Los Angeles boutique, which closed in 2010.

“It was edgy, and sexy, and no one was doing it,” Loftin said of Lichtenberg’s style, which was influenced by science fiction and Japanese pop culture.

The women who wore Lichtenberg’s dresses often gave high marks to the dresses’ silhouettes, Loftin said. “Your body always looked pretty lean. It was different from the contemporary bohemian brands. He was the only one doing the sexy, punk-rock thing.”

Sitting in his spare office on Maple Street in downtown Los Angeles’ fashion district, Lichtenberg said his company is focused on BLTEE by Brian Lichenteberg. The name is an intentional pun on the BLT sandwich.

“It’s crazy to say that a couple of years ago I was concentrating on glitter fabrics, and now I’m all about T-shirts and graphics,” Lichtenberg said, wearing a Homiés cap over his shag haircut, which is currently dyed platinum blonde.

And maybe it’s crazy that a simple T-shirt could be so profitable. For the first quarter of 2013, Lichtenberg said, sales totaled $3 million. He forecast that by the end of the year, his new label will bring in $10 million.

In a recent interview, Lichtenberg mulled over the quick success of his unisex T-shirts with a simple silhouette compared with the slow burn of his dress business, which began in 2000. “Anyone can wear a T-shirt,” he noted.

The designer said he produces his own cut-and-sew T-shirts as well as tank tops and sweatshirts. He also produces several different kinds of caps. He intends to turn BLTEE into a lifestyle collection with cashmere sweaters, bags, phone accessories, and, perhaps, a skatewear line.

Yet his avenue for growth seems to be which logos to spoof next. The company has another shirt logo, “Ballin,” which is a spoof on Balmain.

For Gucci, there’s BLTEE’s “Bucci.” More is on the way.

Despite his sudden success, Lichtenberg is still headquartered in the same 2,200-square-foot office and design space where he has directed his new label since 2011.

Legal papers

With such close similarity to these luxury brand names, it would seem only logical that a troop of lawyers would be knocking at Lichtenberg’s door to squash his satirical ways.

However, jokes and trademark law are not always clear, said Doug Lipstone, an attorney with the offices of Enenstein & Ribakoff in Santa Monica, Calif. When it comes to trademarks, merely claiming that a T-shirt graphic is a parody is not an absolute defense to a claim of trademark infringement.

“A very general rule is that a non-infringing parody is one that is ‘amusing, not confusing,’” Lipstone said.

Lipstone cited a case involving Chewy Vuitton dog toys. Louis Vuitton’s request for an injunction was denied in 2006.

But when the humor turns crass, courts tend to rule that a trademark was infringed upon. That was true in the 1972 case of the Enjoy Cocaine parody of Coca Cola.

“Courts tend to find a reason to stop something that is vulgar while allowing something that may simply be humorous,” Lipstone said. “My thinking is that it should be exactly the opposite as the more crass the parody, the less likely it is that a consumer would think that there is any relationship between the two entities.”

Lichtenberg started out a long time ago making fun of big names. T-shirts spoofing well-known brands sometimes made their way into Lichtenberg’s runway presentations. In a 2007 runway show, he displayed a T-shirt with the word “Brianel,” which was a riff of the brand name Chanel.

Lichtenberg, a fan of hip-hop music, made the logo of Hermès into a variation of “homies,” hip-hop slang for “friends.” He put it on some T-shirts in 2011 and then shopped the idea.

He and Reda Bouaissa, his line’s sales chief, showed the shirts to some high-end boutiques that had ordered his dress line. The retailers all wanted them. The new label hit stores in 2012, and it took a year for momentum to build for the line. Bouaissa vowed to keep supplies tight for BLTEE.

“Our strategy is to have a few partners in key territories and sell to them exclusively,” he said. The line will concentrate on selling to high-end retail and online shops as well as prominent skate and surf shops.

This strategy is not much of a change for Lichtenberg. Making exclusive fashion is what he planned to do all along. “It’s staying on top of pop culture,” he said. “I try to stay one step ahead of what is current.”