Go Diet Crazy

This is the truth: This baseball hat is worth $1,000. There are no others like it in the world. Dozens of hats were killed to make this hat. This hat is the originator of a fashion collective called Go Die from Los Angeles. They only make hats like this. Each hat is totally unique. Most of them sell for about $400. They are worn primarily by hipster Latino stars like Benicio Del Toro, as well as Y Tu Mamá También’s Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. The collective refuses to ever have their pictures taken or be filmed for any reason whatsoever. And that’s only the beginning.

“It all started when I saw this hat sitting on the ground on Venice Beach,” says Arturo Die, the group’s first member. “It was in one of those tacky souvenir places where they make custom hats for the tourists. I don’t know what it was supposed to be saying—”Go Diet Crazy”? I picked it up and pleaded with the man to make me another. It’s very difficult but he tried a few. We loved them but were never satisfied with how little they looked like the original. Now we rent the machine from him and make our own. Our whole collection is based on his mistakes. People love them and so do I. Do you know why? In the world of embroidery and silk-screening, everything has been done. What are you going to put on a T-shirt? A blueprint of an airplane? What can you put on a hat? An embroidery of a marijuana leaf? These loose threads were perfectly original. They were more than new. They are true and honest art. That’s how we feel at Go Die. Like loose threads thrust into Los Angeles. Honest and true and just hanging here.”

And still that’s only the beginning. I haven’t even begun to tell you the whole story. Go Die is made up of dirt-poor, scabies-infested street punks who escaped Colombia thanks to an art grant that gave them full scholarships to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. In Colombia they lived in constant terror. The cities were rife with police brutality and drug crime, and the jungles were filled with rebel forces that would eat you alive if you even thought about them. With no money and no hope for survival, Go Die learned a new way to see the universe. To treat irrelevant things like they were the most important things in the world, and conversely, to treat the most important things in the world like they were nothing. This attitude made them simultaneously very unhappy and very talented. So much so that liberal art-baron and Überphilanthropist Vicente Arrigorrieta got their IDs together, assembled their portfolios, and got them into the best design school in L.A. They shrugged their shoulders, got on the plane, and have been miserable ever since.

You see, though they have their books and classes fully paid for, they are totally broke. Living ten to a room in a squat, the twelve-member group makes art, plays in death metal and punk bands with names like Rectal Remorse and Cementary, eats in bulk, and looks like shit. They are also the most sought-after designers in the city. “I think one of the reasons famous Latinos like Benicio are into our hats is because they feel the same way. They feel lost at home and lost here. I would rather die than go back to Colombia, but I hate L.A. I love the garbage but I hate it here.” With sales climbing fast, Arturo may be making some nice garbage of his own—or not. “I don’t care about the money,” he says of his company’s newfound popularity. “Even the $500 ones don’t make us any money. The process kills the profits. That’s the beauty of it.” Go Die is very strict about how their product is made. These anarchists have invented a whole litany of rules that can never be broken. First, the original design must be found on the floor of the hat shop they rent the machine from. These loose-thread designs will say anything from “Los Angg” to “What ar-” and the collective must decide which hats they are going to try to reproduce. Once they have a hat to go from, they must try to make ten hats that match it exactly. “It’s very difficult to make the machine fuck up like that,” adds Arturo. “You have to yank it back and forth and sometimes unplug and pull it out. We throw dozens out before we’re satisfied. We made ten of the original Go Dies and we must have thrown out thousands of misfires. They have to be perfect.” For now Arturo and his twelve friends seem to be perfectly satisfied with their lives of dissatisfaction. They have ignored ambition and fame and focused their passion into seemingly irrelevant minutiae like perfectly reproducing embroidery mistakes. If the collective ever finds true happiness, they will lose their talent and will cease to exist. In other words, the only option for these kids is misery or death. Hence the name.