Stussy has tapped the always-on-point Russell Maurice (aka Gasius) to design a new capsule collection this Autumn. Featuring Gasius’ ubiquitous pizza themes on a range of essential apparel, the capsule is testament to the streetwear giant’s nose to the ground in continually working with the best artists and designers around. To coincide with the release, Stussy caught up with Russell for a quick chat about the brand. You can find the complete interview here.
WHAT OR WHO IS GASIUS AND WHERE DID HE COME FROM?
Gasius was born from an older company ‘The Gasface’… (For any one not knowing the name, it came from a track by Third bass and Zev Love X…(aka Metal Face Doom before he was reborn). It was a proper tune… But it had just become a bit of an obscure reference after so many years, so Gasius came around. It had a punch line at first too ‘All Things Gasius’ kind of referring to gaseous substances, the non solid, spirits etc… but also as a sentence that kinda holds all of its influences without mentioning them.
WHEN DID THE BRAND BEGIN AND WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO START?
Gasface started in 93 with 10 hand painted tees for my mates. Mostly Graf characters and skate stuff, the money I scraped from selling these was used to screen the first batch of ‘real’ T’s, which my brother Leon helped get together. I’m not sure he could be phased after the first couple of batches so I kinda just took it all on and kept rolling with it slowly growing after every print. I definitely started the company cause of Skating. I had been skating a bit allready, but Graf had been my main focus from a young age till… in high school a mate showed me a copy of Rad Magazine (or maybe it was Skateboarder) and the artwork blew me away, New Deal and things like that… I got proper into it after that, it was just fucking cool. The company was almost called P-Nut… and was gonna be selling kingpins, skate bolts (…and nuts) etc.
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR BIG INFLUENCES?
Graf has probably steered me the most through life, Newcastle was a good place to grow up and had a good scene from really early on (84ish). For Skating too throughout the 90′s it was a good city… Then Raving and so on.
Gasius is a company with many influences and references. The list is long, but I’d say Fuct was biggest influence for clothing though (and generally being a company), they were the coolest shit in the early 90′s. That period of skate graphics and style was so good! Original and new, like where the fuck did wearing shit brown colour cut off 40 inch waste pants ever come from… hahah. The adverts in Big Brother mag too… and companies like Mad Circle and Think. There was a lot of stuff that you could tell was designed by (Graf) Writers but wasn’t just straight up Graf.
