Asian Sexy Star Apparel
A comedian’s t-shirt line, 2007: the graphics, the photographs, and the store to sell them — all of it from one desk.
The brief
Eliot Chang — stand-up comic, New York and then Los Angeles — had a t-shirt line called Asian Sexy Star Apparel and a stack of sketches for the shirts. In 2007 he needed everything else: the artwork made printable, a store to sell it, and pictures that made you want one.
What I made
Three jobs, one desk.
The graphics. Eliot’s sketch artwork turned into clean, deliverable vector art for every tee — the files a printer can actually use.
The store. A page with a shopping cart, first at a-nation.net and then as AsianSexyStar.com. The model was American Apparel, which in 2007 meant the plain product, a real person wearing it, and nothing else in the frame.
The photographs. The campaign shots of the models in the shirts, then the compositing and retouching afterwards.
Not your ordinary Asian girl.
How it was made
Studio portraits — against a deep blue for the close shots, clean white for the full-length — with the Asian Sexy Star lockup composited into the empty side of the frame so every image carried the brand. Retouched by hand. Everything was mocked up first — the flat art that went onto the shirts, then rough versions of the photographs themselves — before the final images were made; that stage is the Process row below. The shirts up top are “24/7 Asian American,” “Not Your Ordinary Asian Girl” and “Part Asian All Sexy”; the rest of the campaign — the skull tees, the men’s shirts, the whole run — is below. The line also ran tanks.
What happened
The store went live in 2008. Eliot went on to his own Comedy Central Presents in 2010, and these photographs are the record of the line.
Process
The campaign
