Buying In - (Page 15) buying in 15 it very well—“too fat,” he told me. He couldn’t rap, either; but he could draw. He learned about graffiti culture through photography books by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. Visiting a cousin in Trenton, he told me, he would see “all the freight trains that I guess had run in New York, bombed with graffiti.” Graffiti characters replaced comic books as his primary visual influence. He raked leaves to raise the money for a pair of Adidas shell toes, like Run-D.M.C. had. He learned about Polo through a reference in “La Di La Di,” by Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick. Style was cultural expression, and customizing clothes was “a big part of the urban dialect,” he explained, so he took up the airbrush. By his early teens, he was charging classmates to make designs on their jeans or shirts, in his parents’ garage. “I was waitressing at a pizza shop, and I was counting my singles,” Marci told me. “Marc was counting off twenties.” As a student at Rutgers in 1992, he dreamed up six designs and screen-printed them on T-shirts that he sold. Soon he changed his name (first to Echo and later, after a trademark dispute with another company, to Ecko), teamed up with his sister and another Rutgers student who wrangled financial backing, and started coming to trade shows like Magic to sell his designs under the banner of what would become Ecko Unltd. A lot of new brands, including his, were writing their names out in graffiti-style lettering, so he wanted a symbol instead. The obvious thing to do was lift some icon of the rising new hip-hop culture that so entranced him, like a turntable or a spray can. Instead he found his inspiration in his parents’ Lakewood den, where his father kept a collection of kitschy little rhino statues. He didn’t think about it so much then, but he has thought about it a lot since.
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