Quick story before we even start. When Parker and Unathletic, the two young founders of the flourishing streetwear brand Absent, visited The Hundreds Homebase for an interview, Parker reminded me that this wasn’t the first time I had hosted him at our secret lair deep within the truck washes and train tracks of Vernon. This was just a much longer visit.

You see, the last time I had Parker stop by, he was tagging along with Sam From Half Evil and a few other friends when The Hundreds threw a 420-edition Spitset out back by the ramp. The only problem was, I didn’t know Parker was underage, and security turned him away at the door. Listen, there was a lot of free weed at that party. Can’t be too careful.

This time, I made sure we rolled out the red carpet for the Absent founders. They got the full tour, an intro to Ben and Bobby, I made them coffee, all the bells and whistles. It may not sound like a lot, but if I interrupt Ben while he’s investigating where to eat lunch, or Bobby while he’s on a Zoom call with like Brad Pitt and Oprah, it means you’re doing something great I want them to know about. Also, I make great coffee. And I cannot confirm or deny, but the free weed situation may or may not have also been rectified. So, we’re all good with Absent after the 420 debacle. If big blowout parties ever come off the endangered species list, Parker gets a +9 and a skip-the-line pass.

So, how did this kid who wasn’t even old enough to get into one of our parties less than two years ago build his streetwear brand fast enough to get the VIP invite back?

It used to take years to build a successful streetwear brand, sometimes even decades. It used to require going to trade shows and faxing linesheets and knocking down the doors of stockists all over the world trying to sell them some shirts. But those were the ancient times of the early 2000s, and times have certainly changed.

For Absent, one of the young brands absolutely exploding in streetwear today, all it took to pop off was a sewing scholarship, a dash of internet beef, and some good old fashioned Retweets. And then boom, they were getting worn by Quavo and locked down a blockbuster collaboration with Chinatown Market.

Alright, that’s a gross oversimplification of their inspiring story. Would you rather have the very lengthy, uncut and raw, no-punches-pulled, complete saga of their rise to relative-stardom? Because I have that, too. Something in between? Got it.

Absent is the amalgamation of two ends of the streetwear spectrum. One founder is a recluse, taking great pride in the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making the brand move but rejecting all of the outward-facing aspects of it. The other founder is the affable and engaging one, happy to be the face of the brand and content with doing most of the talking in interviews like this. Together, Parker (the one you know) and Unathletic (the one you don’t) form Absent, and they’ve managed to catch the attention of not only every teenager paying attention to this space but also all of the stakeholders.

Absent isn’t unlike a lot of other streetwear brands today. Big graphics on vintage-looking blanks, horror movie rips, and ‘90s-era flips, you know the vibes. But what separates Absent from their infinite list of competitors is their execution. Absent’s design language is crystal clear, and they stick to what they’re great at, but they also take huge risks when it comes to things like their accessories. And it pays off far more often than not. In a time when collectibles are king, Absent is creating some of the most memorable pieces in the game, from their logo script sunglasses to the genius toys you could get as part of their collection with Chinatown Market if you acted very quickly.

I could wax poetic all day about how impressive these two entrepreneurs from Absent are, but I think it’s far more valuable, especially to the kids reading this who aspire to create something just like Absent, for you to hear it straight from them. I’ll include the absolute most I can from our conversation and only remove side conversations about unrelated topics and things that feel redundant.

For anyone who has been sleeping and doesn’t know about Absent, can you guys introduce yourself and tell me how you met and started the brand.
Parker: I’m Parker, sitting here with Unathletic. Initially, I started the brand by myself. Did one drop in Summer 2018, so this was right after I graduated high school. I graduated in 2018. My first drop did good. I did some airbrush tees and it went good. I got connected with him two months before that because I was making 1-of-1 cut-and-sew pieces. I had had a sewing scholarship from my sewing class and he was doing similar stuff to what I was doing. It actually started off as beef…

Unathletic: I was a little hot.

Parker: It was like who bit who? It was like 2018’s version of Dripfaxx, the Fashiondemiks shit. That’s how we got connected and we just realized that we were on the same type of shit. That night or the day after, he sent me 13 designs and that was our second drop together. Our first drop together, still one of our most sought after pieces was our standard rhinestone hoodie with the MLB flip logos. That shit was a nightmare.

Before I even met you or talked to Sam about Absent, those hoodies were the first thing I saw, and I was like “those are tight but they’re fucked.” You’re pissing off not just one team but like eight.
Unathletic: [Laughs]

Parker: And a whole fucking organization, too.

Let me back up a little. What does a sewing scholarship even mean?
Parker: Essentially, I had the opportunity to have a full-ride college scholarship for sewing but Absent took off before I even got there.

So you got that because you were making a lot of stuff in high school? How do you even get a sewing scholarship?
Parker: I got to give props to Ms. Jessa, who was my sewing teacher. She really showed me that I could make whatever I want to. There were a lot of times where it was a one-on-one situation, she helped me make a full leather shoulder bag and I would just post my work on Twitter and stuff. She still to this day follows me and sees everything. 

Damn have you ever sent her a pack?!
Parker: I need to! She wants me to come speak to one of her classes, which I’m definitely doing.

That’s when you know.
Parker: Yeah, I got to get tatted up first though.

You were making custom 1-of-1 pieces and you guys met online there was a little bit of beef because the pieces looked familiar?
Parker: It was identical.

What was the piece?
Unathletic: It was a vintage Nascar tee, I made it into a pair of shorts. We posted it on the exact same day. So, we weren’t that original. [Laughs]

Any chance you guys still have a photo of it?
Parker: I can see if my mom has it. 

So, then you guys meet, Parker sends 13 designs. What made it go from “he’s biting me” to “I have to send him designs?”
Unathletic: It was when he dropped his airbrush tee. I saw the engagement with it and I was like, “oh shit!” We were still homies. We would just hit each other up and shit. I thought it would be funny to do this design with all the different MLB logos because my name is Unathletic, and I hate to say it but I’m the edgy, go-against-the-grain person. That’s what I do. I love contradictions and stuff like that. I pitched it to Parker and he was like, “yo let’s do it in rhinestones.” I had worked with rhinestones before on previous shit. People really don’t know but our first drop of the rhinestones was actually a collab. 

Parker: At that point, we weren’t even partners yet. It was Absent X Unathletic. 

Unathletic: And then the drop did so well that it just made sense. That’s when I started getting cracking on the designs.

So you heard that Parker came from a sewing scholarship. What was your history with clothes and designing?
Unathletic: I always loved clothes but I never really had money. I would just go thrifting and I would spend my last little bit of bread from working shitty fast-food jobs on these different garments and stuff like that. I would get tired of wearing the same shirt over and over and over so I said fuck let me cut it up. I used to hand sew. I didn’t have a sewing machine, I couldn’t afford one so I did it by hand. It was hell. I would spend 24 hours on a piece. I think I spent 36 hours on those shorts.

So you were extra hot to see someone else win the scholarship when you spent all that time.
Unathletic: Yeah, there was a little bit of animosity. I was like bro fuck you. [Laughs] Parker probably made his in two hours.

Parker: And you see me using an industrial sewing machine that I did not pay for.

Unathletic: So, instead of going out and buying new clothes, I would turn my old shit into different pieces of shorts. I made a t-shirt beanie, just stuff like that.

Parker: Fire.

Tell me all about the rhinestone drop. What were your expectations?
Unathletic: Nothing.

Parker: Yeah, nothing.

Unathletic: Literally it was: we’re going to put it out there and see what happens.

Parker: We posted a snippet.

At that point, what was your following like?
Parker: 300-500 followers

So you expected to maybe sell 10 of them?
Parker: Yeah or maybe we can do a cool 20 hoodies.

Unathletic: We posted the mock-ups.

Parker: Yeah, we posted a snippet at the time with no following, it got like 700-1,000 likes and then we posted the product shots on a Sunday afternoon and then Sunday, at like 8 PM, Nice Kicks posted it, the sandals. They posted a whole article on it.

How do you think they even found it?
The homie Matthew is one of their writers. He reached out to me at 5 PM and said “yo I write for Nice Kicks I’d love to post this.” I sent him all the product shots, all the info. Didn’t even know if it was going to come out.

Unathletic: Got a Nick Kicks article on our first drop. [Laughs]

Randomly finding you when you had 300 followers is wild.
Parker: They posted a whole thing on Twitter and Instagram.

Unathletic: When you Google “Absent,” it’s one of the first things that comes up.

Why did you want to do rhinestones?
Parker: To be completely honest, I think at that time I was just into how it looked. He (Unathletic) was already doing rhinestones. He made this white hoodie that said “HELL UNIVERSITY” in rhinestones and already had the plug on that so I was like fuck it let’s run it up and it just worked out. To put it into perspective, last month MGK’s people were hitting us up trying to get those hoodies. Every time someone asks us about them, we say, “we discontinued those, we’re not allowed to sell them.

Did you keep any?
Parker: No. I mean we have our personals but yeah, I don’t have any. MGK’s stylist responded back to my email saying, “Oh it’s okay, we purchased them off of Grailed.

How much did it go for?
Parker: $200

What was retail?
Parker: $80. I’ve seen some kids buy it for $300. My homies will hit me up and say, “do you have one? Oh, I’ll just buy one from Grailed.” Don’t do that.

Who was the first big person to fuck with the hoodie where you knew this was going to be a thing?
Parker: It was more like an internet personality. It’s this kid Based Savage. He’s an underrated team player within the industry for sure. He helped us out a lot.

Unathletic: He helped amplify shit.

Parker: Lucki, he wore it.

That lowkey might have been how I found out about Absent.
Parker: That was some of the coldest shit to me because Freewave 3 had just come out and I was listening to that everyday nonstop, it was just on at all times. I woke up to a DM and it was from him. All he sent was a picture of the hoodie.

Oh so he had already bought it?
Parker: I think he got it from Joey Fatts. He had his Freewave 3 tour and wore it every night. To me, Lucki wearing it, that’s the hardest shit. He’s one of my favorite artists. 

Unathletic: It’s nuts because that hoodie was a retail blank from LA Apparel that I bought online. I paid like $80 for it.

Parker: It’s essentially a prototype and he’s just rocking that shit every day.  

He’s always been ahead of the curve. When i was working at Elevator in Chicago–
Parker: You used to work at Elevator? That’s hard. So you know Brian and everything?

Yup.
Parker: That’s crazy. I went to Brian’s house one time and he gave me a whole case of Hypnotiq. I was fucked up for 2 weeks.

Yeah, I worked at Elevator like 2015-16. That’s where I found Lucki and so many other dope artists.
Parker: Chicago legend. If you found us through Lucki, not only does that make you hard for fucking with us that way but you have good taste in music.

I remember seeing Quavo in the rhinestone Absent hoodie, too, right?
Unathletic: Billie Eilish wore it before he did.

Parker: Late 2018, early 2019. She was the first official artist to wear Absent. It was the first time we had a big celebrity placement. She’s arguably one of the biggest artists in the world.

How did that happen?
Unathletic: Was it her Norway tour?

Parker: Her stylist Samantha reached out to us and said, “hey Billie is starting her Norway tour. These are the pieces we want but we need them tomorrow” and we got the email at noon.

Unathletic: I sent her the hoodie off my back.

Parker: At this time, we didn’t have the money to mass-produce this shit so we’re sending samples, prototypes…

Unathletic: Worn shit.

Parker: We didn’t see anything for two weeks and then she opened up her tour wearing it. It’s like all you see in her tagged photos. It was that shirt over and over again. She didn’t tag us but that weekend we gained like 8,000 followers. You know those Billie Eilish outfits Instagram pages, we got tagged in a few of those and they had over 100,000 followers. And we would get tagged every weekend. I remember I woke up at noon that day and I had about 80 texts saying, “Go look at your phone.”

Unathletic: We always respond to those stylist emails.

Parker: From there, we’ve built a really good relationship with her. And Zoey. She’s the one that got us on Quavo and Tyga.

Unathletic: Had Parker flying out to New York to style Quavo for SNL.

Parker: Yeah, they flew me out to New York in February to help style Quavo for Saturday Night Live. I never posted anything about it because it was some lowkey shit.

What was that like? Did you get to go to SNL?
Parker: No, that’s the thing. I watched it in my hotel room.

Had you ever styled anyone but yourself?
Parker: No. They hit me up at 8 PM on Wednesday night and said they needed me there Friday and they needed me to bring pieces. They needed me to make pieces. So I didn’t sleep from Wednesday until Saturday. As I’m watching him perform, I’m falling asleep like, “It’s over.” Then I woke up and flew back to Chicago. Monday morning, flew to LA to do the Menace collab pop-up. Good times. That’s how this year has been. Everything has been a blur. Everything is happening so fast.

And you guys have been on a crazy run.
Parker: Yeah we’re trying to snowball, we’re trying to keep it moving.

Let’s start at the beginning of this year. You guys have dropped one big seasonal collection this year?
Parker: Yeah, Spring/Summer.

What were your pre-pandemic plans for this year?
Parker: Originally, our plan was a Menace collab in February, Spring/Summer ‘20 at the end of May, which we met both of those goals. But the main thing is we wanted to do more pop-ups because I like to be 1-on-1, more hands-on with things.

Unathletic: We were going to do a Drive-In theater pop-up in the desert.

Parker: Didn’t you guys do a Drive-In Theater?

Yeah, in Chinatown.
Parker: Yeah we had this whole thing planned.

Unathletic: We were going to have a mascot of our character handing out t-shirts and shit. But just didn’t get to it because of the virus.

Parker: But, more pop-ups. That’s really the only thing because production is still going on. Shit is still getting made. But it’s slowed down.

You guys said you were using LA Apparel. Were you using mostly domestic stuff?
Parker: For the Menace collab, yes. For Spring/Summer, no. A lot of that was overseas. All the printables were here but the majority of it was overseas.

Was the Spring/Summer collection the biggest collection you guys have dropped to date?
Parker: Before the Chinatown Market collab, it was the biggest.

For people that don’t know, it’s only the two of you. So what was that Spring/Summer collection like from a design standpoint, what new things were you guys trying to do and what were the challenges of growing the number of pieces?
Parker: So, immediately after the Menace pop-up, that’s when Covid started getting crazy. We already had our ideas fleshed out for Spring/Summer but we were behind. The day after the pop-up, I flew home to Utah with my parents and I was there for all of March. Every single day I was home, I was working on it. We would FaceTime every single night.

Unathletic: We’d pop out like four pieces a day.

Parker: For that collection, I think we dropped 35 pieces. I think in total, we designed 150 within that month. Every single night as we were designing shit, I was sending it to the manufacturer so we could get samples going, right then and there. So, by the end of March, I flew back to Chicago. I got home and all my samples were there, some of it I had to make adjustments but we started making product shots, started promoting it. Just run and go. We have an idea, we want to get it done.

Unathletic: We could bust a design out here. We’re just improvising.

Parker: We’re trying to take a step away from us being a t-shirt and hoodie brand, which I think we’re already doing. We don’t really know how to say what our brand image is. I think when people have a certain brand image, it kinda boxes them in. That’s one thing we don’t want to let happen. For us to have such a confined space of, “Yo, this is what Absent is,” to the point where we can’t make a basketball with real devil horns.

You guys are all over the place but in the best way possible. Everytime you tease a product, I’m like oh shit. There was one of everything. Once I saw the first piece from the Chinatown Market collab get teased, I was like “I have no clue what they’re going to do.” Shit like that is crazy!
Parker: Yeah, once we flesh it out and show the whole body of work, it makes sense. Even though it’s all over the place, it belongs.

Unathletic: Our ideas come from your standard thought process. He’ll sit down on a couch and I’m pacing back and forth. Like, what if we made a ceiling fan with skateboards instead of the actual thing? Just crazy shit and it comes from that. We’ll be getting into an Uber and we’re like well what if we made this? And he’s like alright cool, write it down. It just comes from anywhere, there’s no system to it and that’s why it looks so crazy.

Is there a certain tone or attitude that Absent pieces normally have?
Unathletic: They’re very in-your-face. 

Parker: Yeah, the fuck you attitude. We’re at the point where we can make things that we really want to make. The fact that neither of us has any formal training in this is good because–

You don’t know what you can’t do.
Parker: Exactly. Absent is my first attempt at clothing. Just to see what we’ve been able to do, I want to keep the same energy going. Every time we drop, it’s bigger and bigger and bigger to the point that in the next six months, we’re going to need a team, we’re going to need an office, a lot of things. I think us just having the same energy we have now as when we started, if not enhanced, I think it’s going to make it easier to solidify Absent as a brand that’s here to stay. 

Unathletic: The reason we only have 60k followers at this point is that everything we do is completely organic. We don’t reach out to rappers to send them gear, we respond to emails when they come to us. We don’t run ads, we don’t do any of that stuff. I have never in my life DM’d the homie and asked them to repost. It’s just post, post, post and we just watch and see what happens.

Parker: We just passed two years in business and I think we have at least five more years of doing it exactly how we’re doing it until we have to move into a more corporate setting, which is something we’ll get to.

Unathletic: I don’t know if Absent could ever be corporate as far as today because I just always have all these nutcase ideas for graphic tees.

What piece or drop did you have that gave you the confidence to say ok now we can make these insane glasses?
Unathletic: It was a matter of connection.

Because that’s not something that you could have dropped right out of the gate.
Parker: Yeah, but that was designed before the rhinestones. 

Unathletic: I mean it was a pixelated-ass mock-up. I think you still have it on your phone somewhere,

Parker: So, basically that was honestly finding the person who was going to make it. We went through countless samples. I think we went through four different samples, we did 10 different 3D printed samples. Found someone overseas who could do it for us and the first sample was perfect.

Unathletic: Yeah they didn’t miss, it was rare.

Parker: When we got the photos of the glasses, that was a big moment because that was the first time that we had a crazy-ass idea and we just watched it come to life. 

It’s a risky drop because it’s a high ticket item with high minimums and if they don’t sell, you’re stuck with a bunch of them.
Parker: Yeah, thankfully they sold out within ten minutes.

Unathletic: Those are for fans, people who really love Absent because it’s just the logo blasted on each side.

Parker: I remember when we had the first 3D sample I posted it on twitter and said wait for it and kids were gassed. It took us a whole year from that point.

How did you link up with Chinatown?
Parker: So, my friend Dillon is one of the first people I ever connected with on Twitter and that was late 2017. That was when he was interning for No Jumper. Chinatown wasn’t really a thing yet. He would always post my 1-of-1 cut-and-sew stuff because he was doing similar things too but on a much higher scale. He was doing Midnight Studio collabs and shit like that. We were just internet friends and when I came out here for Family Style, Dillon was there. That was the first time we met in person. ComplexCon Long Beach was when Dilon introduced me to Mike. I came through the next day after ComplexCon and made a 1-of-1 hoodie with the print gun. I grabbed Mike’s phone number and then we had a meeting in December, and we did all of the designs the two days before the meeting.

Unathletic: All the graphics you saw in that collection were done before we pitched them, the knitted sweater, all of it. We presented the ball and we talked about all that. I think the only piece we added after that was the fortune ball because Mike was like “you can fuck with anything here that you want to fuck with.”

Parker: We’re going to do a Part Two because there were five items that didn’t make it on time and it’s going to be all art shit, not even wearable products. We felt very respected, just the way they let us handle it. Everything was designed by us. They let us do our thing with it. Mike, every time I sent him something, he would text back within two minutes like, “yes let’s do this, I’ll send it to our production guy,” and then sample. It was the first time that anyone has, on a business level much bigger than us, seen the value in Absent and let us run with it.

Unathletic: Yeah, I fuck with them forever because they just let our nuts hang. As soon as they didn’t tell me no, I just kept going.

Parker: Definitely our biggest drop ever. It’s really weird because we had been staring at this shit since January. You can only look at something so much before you’re not as interested in it. As soon as we started posting it and people started seeing it, it kind of brought a new life into it.

Unathletic: That was my feel-good drop. Normally he’ll be like what do you think is going to happen and I’m like I don’t know. I’ve seen this graphic before, I’ve done all that shit but this bro I don’t think I could ever get over this.

When does Part Two of the Chinatown collab drop?
Unathletic: Sometime in 2021.

And what’s next after that?
Parker: We’re at this point now where we can turn his graphics into crazy cut-and-sew pieces. So we’re going to be doing our first real denim. The guy that’s making our denim I really respect because of everything that he knows about making a pair of jeans. He used to do shit for Levi’s and all this other shit. He really put us on game on a lot of technicalities.

Unathletic: Denim that’s domestically made with custom hardware. 

Parker: And every little detail is going to be there.

Unathletic: We want our clothes to last. Like if some kid wears it for two years and then brings it to a thrift store and some other kid finds it like, “Yo, what the fuck is this?” And then that’s his. It’s a cycle.

You’re making pieces that people don’t want to give up. This is the shit they keep forever.
Parker: That’s what we like about clothes. We buy shit that we can pass down. Us having that mentality of clothing, in general, is what helps us make clothes like that.

Unathletic: I mean yeah I was a consumer for 21 years, I know what this is supposed to be. I want to give the same to kids. We made tons of revisions and things like that because I always put myself in their shoes. I know what it was like when I was buying streetwear and the seam would rip under my armpit, you know? Like I want this shirt to fit a little bit bigger and I get a 2XL and it fits too big. What’s the in-between? 1.5XL?