1984.02 SMILE 1 - Woking, England - Stewart Home
Here we have the front cover of Stewart Home's 1st issue of SMILE. Given that it was the "official organ of the Generation Positive" & that "THIS MAGNIFICENT NEW ARTISTIC MOVEMENT IS SO AVANT-GARDE THAT AT PRESENT IT ONLY HAS ONE MEMBER, MYSELF. CONSEQUENTLY THIS FIRST ISSUE CONSISTS SOLELY OF MY OWN WORK", the picture on the cover is of Stewart.
In 2014, a company called Komakino started making clothing with the image of the 1st SMILE cover printed on them. The ad copy claims that "Keeping true to the brand's musical roots, designer Federico Capalbo uses an 80s industrial music fanzine called "Smile" as inspiration for a print. Clearly, this company did NOT do its homework. I have to wonder whether Stewart sold them the rights to this image as both a prank & a money-making scheme - or if they just took the image under some other circumstances. Whatever the case, SMILE was never an "industrial music fanzine" (- in the 1980s at least: According to Florian Cramer, "In addition to the SMILE issues listed on your pages, there was a whole series of SMILE magazines published by an British industrial music/culture group (called something like Academy 23 - ?!?) in the 1990s") & if copying an image outright is using it "as inspiration for a print" then this designer's "inspiration" is a straight-up example of the "plagiarism" Stewart called for in this issue.
Completely annoyed by the talent-free machinations of this company & by the outrageously high price on a simple t-shirt (if the whole thing isn't just a prank of Stewart's), I designed an ad for them that struck me as a little more appropriate.
It seemed only appropriate that I should also supply a t-shirt design in case any DIY screeen-printers might want to give Komakino a run for their money.
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