Palace Skateboards has become one of the most popular streetwear brands on the planet. The brand's infinitely looping triangle logo is seen on T-shirts, hoodies, and Coach's jackets worn by tons of guys in the know. FADER spoke with Palace's designer Fergus Purcell about creating the seemingly everywhere triangle logo and building one of the hottest brands on the planet.
Purcell was friends with Palace founder Lev Tanju, who asked the designer to come up with something for a brand he was starting.
"He said that the initial bunch of inspiration was triangles, and so I went away and started designing triangular stuff... He gave me the idea for a triangular motif, and then I started to think about how I could manipulate that symbolically. I chose the infinite-repeating thing as a motif for eternity. It implies that it loops around and around forever. That was a conscious thing to put that in brand and say, were not already, were infinite. When you work with graphics that imply a certain three dimensional quality, that instantly gives them an implied size, so you can print that image quite small and it still has a quality of being epic. I think that was part of it too. The best thing is that, in order to introduce any kind of word branding, I had to really put it where I put it. It had to be there three times, and I think subliminally that's quite powerful. That reenforced the name by repetition."
Purcell has a background in design, having attended school at the most prestigious fashion school in the world, Central Saint Martens. Since launching Palace, Purcell has scored a job at Marc Jacobs and birthed his own gender-bending brand Aries. In the interview, the accomplished designer also touches on the relationship between skatewear and fashion, the difference between skate culture in New York and London, and what's next for Palace.
Read the interview in its entirety here.
