Sit down with A Store Like 94

Article by: Mitchell Grimes

Wed, Dec 29.21

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Some of you might have seen them some of you might of not, but small independent brand A Store Like 94 have been working their woven magic again this year with a host of the glory days footballers being turned into majestic tapestry rug form. We caught up with Josh who runs the brand to ask his inspirations behind the designs.

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Hi Josh, first of all how and when did the idea to work with this style of textiles happen?

Hello Ultras, so I’ve always been a bit obsessed with football scarfs. I used to own a vintage clothes shop near to where I live and whenever we got a delivery around Christmas I would always end up keeping most of them to myself, I think I have around forty or fifty in my collection from all types of teams across the globe.

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There's a couple of reasons why I think I’m drawn to football scarfs, firstly I am a sucker for fonts so this plays a massive part in my love and inspiration that I draw from them. Some of the 90s German and Italian designs really are special and the spacing and patterns incorporated really are like nothing else. Secondly I love early 90s computer games and the pixelation that comes with it.

Most scarfs unless they are some of the early 70s 80s silk designs are machine woven and this creates pixelation similar to early computer game art, it's all part of the process and got me thinking how to recreate this form on a bigger scale.

Around the same time I happened to stumble across an old wild unofficial WWF throw of the Rock and this is how the rug idea was born.

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What's been your favorite design and can you tell us how you have chosen which players to celebrate?

So my first design, the Zizou which is one of my simplest, is still my favorite, It was a beautiful experiment that changed my life so I think it will be hard to replace that on the top spot. The symmetry and space just works so well inspired by classic scarf designs and this has become the formula I have used for a lot of the other designs.

Choosing the players, well this has been a mixture of me just picking some of my favorite iconic players from the 90s and early 2000s that forever should be celebrated and collaborations with other creative platforms.

Another one of my favorite designs has to be my Maradona lockdown collab with Soccerbible for their June Utopia edition. For this project I was asked to create my vision of a football utopia and looking back to when this project came out my words were

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“Maybe a couple of years ago my vision [of what makes a football Utopia] might have been very different but with today’s worldwide restrictions in place, it’s remembering the simpler things that we had before the world went into lockdown.

Just watching old football clips of full stadiums seems completely alien, so for the basis of my utopian rug all I wanted to create was a world with packed crowds and people playing football again with friends at their local spot. That alone will be utopia for me when things are fully restored.

Couple that simpler image with more support for battling the constant problems with racism and homophobia across all levels of the game and top it off with the god of modern day football inspiring the new boys on the block and I think the utopian vision is complete.”

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It's up there with my purest design process, that came to me in a dream then flowed into a ruff drawing sketch and then full Digital design in the space of a few hours so that is always very special when something creative whatever it might be flows out of you with such ease and just feels right.

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What's next for your store and homage rug projects?

I just want to carry on working and collaborating with as many big and small creative brands around the globe. I love making new football friends and pushing the boundaries of the bootlegging world and creating products that either don’t exist or have not been produced for twenty plus years that need a reboot.