Some of you are too young to remember, but back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Internet was the World Wild West. Flash games, P2P file sharing, IRC, and Windows 98 reigned over a vast netherworld populated with clueless users, sinister hackers, and mysterious rippers selling CD keys and stolen software in the dark offshoots of the endless data stream. Everyone dancing anonymously to the erratic tune of countless 56k dial-up modems. Also called the Web 1.0, this early stage of the Internet was a new, promising, but ultimately dangerous place that influenced a whole generation and aesthetic. The skate brand Bronze 56k is like a fever dream that condenses and intensifies some of the pillars of this particular aesthetic. From pixelated GIFs, to Sprites, and three-dimensional, multi-colored fonts. It’s a hyper-simulation of the Internet before Big Tech and uniformity in design.
Remix Culture and Skateboarding
Bronze 56k hoodies, t-shirts, and track pants reflect the brand’s affinity towards remix culture. Run by NY local Peter Sidlauska, it liberally takes from the Web 1.0 and mixes it with skateboarding-specific imagery. The re-mixing and re-matching begin with the Bronze 56k's logo, which is an obvious play on Windows’s early logo and continues to inform the brand’s collections. Just like back in the Web 1.0 days, nothing is off-limits, and anything will be fed into the Bronze 56k remix machine. The brand’s core aesthetic is also represented in the various skate videos it has released over the years. They are teeming with silly fonts, fake video glitches, and ample references to the time when the Internet was pure.
Buy Bronze 56k Online at Bonkers Shop
One of the reasons behind texts like these is search engine optimization, a decidedly Web 2.0 strategy. Using it to advertise a company so rooted in the old Web’s look and feel is ironic, to say the least. This irony points to an inconvenient phenomenon: nothing has ever been exactly as we remember it. Every time we try to grasp a memory in its totality, we succumb to retro-fiction at best and conservatism at worst. At the same time, the collections reveal that remembering is also creating something new. Every item, from Bronze 56k crewnecks to track pants to Bronze 56k Reebok collaborations is informed by the past but created in the present. You can buy Bronze 56k online at our webshop and at our store in Frankfurt.
