“Anyone who gets a T shirt becomes a line of the story”

interview by sirdorian

(pic by moxie from iloveboxie)

Relationships can be cruel. Thats a fact which everyone knows even he or she had one. But sometimes they are the beginning of a new love story. And this Girl from London falling in Love with Boxie. No, not a new Boyfriend. Boxie is her T-Shirt Company which made an impact all over the World with her T-Spoke Story Shirts. And soon, she will also shoot a Movie. But who is the Creative Mind behind and how does all things happen?

First of all, please introduce yourself to our readers.
Hello, I’m Moxie and I run a T shirt making company called I Love Boxie. We do lots of things, mostly tell people’s stories on T shirts.

Since how long does your company exist?
Unofficially for about a year. I started putting the pieces together last summer in Los Angeles.
Officially. a month.

Is there a plan to sell your Shirts to regular Retail Stockists?
When we were first talking about what kind of company we wanted to make, the dream was this magical place with typewriters and telephones, where people would come in and have an interaction with us. They wouldn’t just be buying a T shirt but entering a whole world. So far, we are achieving that. We have made it very difficult for people to directly buy the T shirts without getting in touch with us. But mostly the magic comes with T Spoke. This is where you call me/meet/write, tell me a story and I turn that into a line on a T shirt. The process is a 50/50 creative collaboration between the customer and us. It is also very personal. People will tell me stories of broken hearts or outrageous nights. We then find the line, but, even if it’s the best one we ever come up with, we never sell it to anyone else. At the moment, we are talking to places that can appreciate that. I am not sure how you would ever do this mass market without killing the experience.

Please tell our Readership the Story & Idea behind.
There are lots of different paths to this. But I think it started because I used to go out with a T shirt maker. When we broke up, I wrote 237 pages saying goodbye. He made a T shirt saying the same. The T shirt was better.
After we split, I went to LA and started hanging out with another T shirt maker. I am a writer by trade and someone told me I should write a movie script about T shirts. For some reason, in that script, I mentioned the word ‘Boxie.’ It was this place that everybody is trying to get to, where it’s at, but you can never quite reach. I ditched the script and went on a journey to find out what Boxie was. I printed 23 T Shirts with ‘I Love Boxie’ on them, took them across America on tour with a band called Tunng, and gave them to random and kind strangers I met. Everyone would say ‘what’s Boxie?’ and I’d say ‘I have no idea, you’d tell me.’ And they would. Boxie was a wonderful land, a beautiful woman, silence…
I went back to the drawing board and began to build the fictional story again. The idea was that in 1957, 2 T shirt makers called Duck Wood and Mister Dalston set up a company called 2 Dogs in Echo Park, LA. It embraced the youth revolution of its time and had mad, progressive ideas about T shirts. In 1978, Mister Dalston goes for a walk and never comes back. His last word is ‘Boxie.’ So, the search for him and Boxie begins…
Moxie is his daughter.
Anyone who gets a T shirt becomes a line of the story.

Henry Holland probably make the biggest Impact with his T-Shirts in the last years on the London Fashion Map. Holland started his own label and brought us seasonal Collections nowadays. Is this also a Plan of you?
I think HH did something really innovative with T shirts and made what you could say on a T shirt clever and witty again instead of basic slogans. I am huge fan of seasonal collections of tees. I like the idea of applying high fashion principles to T shirts.

I really like this Movie Idea. Can you explain it to our Readership?
We are filming every T spoke. In the end we’re going to put them all together and make one big movie. Every line on a T shirt will tell a piece of the story of how we got to Boxie. In 10 days we are going on the road and will be broadcasting one T Spoke a day on the site. Every person who gets a T spoke becomes part of the movie. It’s real basic interactive.

Who is your favourite Fashion Designer?
Martin Margiela.

Your recent T-Spoke PR-Pics are very authentic. They look as they also could be appear in VICE. Are they Shoot by a Pro or?
The T Spoke pics are all shot by me. The pictures in our collection (half a conversation) are shot by me and a very talented friend in Belgium. They were all people we met on the street and felt a connection to. We showed them the T shirts and asked them which one they felt told their story. With the girl who wears ‘I Loved Him,’ I was on a bus late at night when I heard her break up with her boyfriend on the telephone. I asked her if she wanted a T shirt, she chose I Loved Him, and I took the picture.

(inspired by Hunter S Thompson “a girl and a dog picture)

What things inspire you?
There is one picture that Hunter S Thompson took of a naked woman sitting on a hillside with a dog. I can’t explain why, but for anything to do with Boxie this is my constant source of inspiration. Day by day, our work is energized by everybody I meet, the kindness of strangers, story telling, hip hop. my granny and the internet. The web has made creative expression available to everyone, not just the elite. Those principles are now bleeding back into real life. Everyone has one thing to say – that’s what the T shirts are about. At the same, I Love Boxie is an advocacy of real life. Our T shirts are about saying ‘HEY! THIS HAPPENED TO ME!’

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
In a log cabin in the woods with a telephone, a typewriter, some dogs and a duck. Maybe that’s Boxie.

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