Over the Boulevard and onto Your Shoulder

Turn north from Wilshire or head south from Ventura and get on Sepulveda Boulevard. If you look left or right as you cruise toward the Getty Center, you can’t help but notice them: those long vinyl banners celebrating the latest Getty exhibitions. This type of signage is ubiquitous in LA, hanging from light pole after light pole in the California sun for months on end.

Visitors to the Getty Museum Store often ask about purchasing those banners after a show has closed. At eight feet tall and three feet wide, an exhibition banner would be one of the most unique, albeit unwieldly, mementos you could take home as a souvenir. They’re memorable, but where do you put them?

Now, the Museum Store has partnered with eco-conscious fashion designer Peder Cho to remake those giant banners into sustainable accessories, all available for purchase on-site or online. Want to wear a banner featuring William Blake’s art refashioned into a backpack, or an Édouard-Manet-banner-turned-bucket-hat? Now you can.

A Midwest accountant turned SoCal designer

Head 2,000 miles east from those banners hanging on Sepulveda Boulevard and you’re in Milwaukee. It’s cold and snowy, the temperature in the teens.

That’s where Cho was when he began questioning the career choices he’d made. This was a few short years before so many across the globe were stuck at home during the COVID pandemic, in limbo, reevaluating their lives in much the same way, asking: Is this the job I want for the rest of my life? Where am I going? What are my passions?

Cho felt unfulfilled working as an accountant, nearly half a decade spent staring at numbers and figures, analyzing financial records. He felt empty. Something was missing. “I had no creative outlets,” he says. “I didn’t like my career; I didn’t like what I was at the time. Being a young professional with a degree, I did all the stuff I was supposed to do, but it didn’t amount to happiness.”

Then one day he decided to experiment, employing something he’d learned from his family’s laundry and tailoring business. He sat down at a sewing machine and decided to focus on what he had instead of what he didn’t.

During those early days, Cho plied his craft with unused clothes that would have otherwise gone to waste—a practice fashionably known as upcycling. An initial project utilized excess Adidas cleats to create a 20 x 10 foot canvas, which was turned into a mural that still hangs in the University of Miami Athletic Department. “This one was special, because it happened within the first year of quitting my accounting career,” Cho says. “This was the artistic reassurance that I was extremely fortunate to receive so early on in my career exploration as a self-taught designer.”

Cho found something akin to a flow state while immersed in cutting and sewing bits of the old into the new, being in the zone like all the basketball players, musicians, and fashion designers who’ve inspired him. After years of creative experimentation and hard work, he launched his clothing and apparel line Utopia in 2018, specializing in creating products from upcycled materials. Seven years later, after multiple collaborations with companies like Reebok and Adidas, the brand is still going strong.

Upcycling Getty

Cho has since relocated to warmer LA. He understood how influential Getty was, not only as a local brand but also a global one, so he reached out to see if the Museum Store might be open to working together. They were, having recently experienced a successful collaboration based on another type of art, the graffiti of legendary LA street artist Jose “Prime” Reza.

Retail staff began by sending Cho a list of banners they had in bulk, including ones from the exhibitions William Blake: Visionary and Manet and Modern Beauty and others from the commemoration of Getty’s 25th anniversary. Jeneeka Perrera, Getty licensing administrator, recalls that Cho “gravitated toward the banners with specific art objects.” From there, he sketched out different concepts, keeping in mind the density of the material he would be using.

“These banners are heavy and thick,” Cho says, “so I knew there wouldn’t be much movement or flexibility in the fabric to play with.” He settled on bags and a hat as opposed to clothing. What makes for a sturdy backpack does not translate into pants and shirts. Apparently, it’s difficult to move in a banner.

It wasn’t just the unforgiving nature of the materials that made the project challenging. “The banners are quite large, and I never want to waste material,” he says. “The placements of the pattern pieces I cut have to consider the remnants. And I need to think ahead and be resourceful so I can use offcuts for other products like straps for a certain bag style.”

Sustainability is in fashion

Camille Kirk, head of sustainability at Getty, encourages this collaboration with Cho and the direction the Museum Store is taking by partnering with eco-friendly brands like Utopia. She refers to this as building a circular economy that aims to eliminate waste by keeping materials in use. “An example is composting our organic wastes to make soil amendments,” she says, “instead of sending the organics to landfills.” These new banner accessories help accomplish Getty’s goal and do so in style.

Cho agrees about the benefits of upcycling. “I think it’s being intertwined in everyday life,” he says. “Even outside of fashion, I think more people are keener to their waste contributions.” It would be a shame, he adds, for those banners to just sit in a warehouse, collecting dust.

Whether it’s a handbag crafted from a Manet banner or a backpack sewn together from snippets of Blake’s Satan Exulting over Eve, Cho’s handmade accessories not only breathe new life into old materials but are conversation pieces about the artists, the artworks depicted, and the environmental impact—or lack thereof—his products represent. You feel like you’re doing something good by wearing the accessories. Kirk is a fan of Cho’s Blake bucket hat. “It’s so fun; like something your cool uncle wears!” she exclaims.

Cho can’t help but see the parallels between his creative work and his own personal journey.

“That’s where the upcycling and sustainability came around,” he says with a bright smile. “That’s how I really got my start, and that’s what really took off, restoring the value of old garments into something new.” He sees his work as reflective of his life, returning these banners to their rightful place in the sun.