Art-Inspired Fashion Drops Anchor at Getty

The four co-founders from the art house Pirate Worldwide stroll through the Getty Center’s courtyard on a crisp Friday morning as a boisterous group of schoolchildren skitter past.

Michael S. Wells, one of the co-founders of Pirate, takes notice and recalls his parents dragging him to museums as a kid. Browsing centuries-old fine art might not have been his first choice for an outing.

Now, Wells is at the Center with his partners, David Garay, Bryan Bonilla, and Timothy Policarpio, to launch a product line based on artwork at Getty—and those museum trips have become a lot more inspiring. The Getty x Pirate collaboration includes embroidered headwear, silk bandanas, graphic tees and hoodies, a jacquard tapestry hoodie, and an embroidered crewneck. It’s steeped in the past but also the present: the title of the project is A Space for Timeless Imagination.

The mantra of Pirate Worldwide has always been “to design with the intent that our art will one day live in a museum.” This new partnership with Getty has accomplished that goal.

“How I spoke my language was through clothes”

The four became friends decades ago when they played against one another on the football fields and basketball courts of their hometown of Pomona. Their families are from all over the world: Wells’s mother is from Poland, Garay’s family roots are from Italy and Mexico, Bonilla’s parents are from El Salvador, and Policarpio and his family hail from the Philippines. They describe their team much the way they do the county of LA: as a melting pot.

Outside of sports, music and fashion were central to their identities in their adolescent years. Policarpio perhaps represents this deep-rooted connection to clothing the best. When his family emigrated in his teens, kids picked on him for not speaking English. How do you connect at such a formative age when you don’t have the words? “How I spoke my language was through clothes,” Policarpio says.

He didn’t have the money to buy Nike Air Force 1 shoes and other pricey items he saw his high school classmates wearing, so he’d save up the lunch money his parents gave him for the week and go thrifting after school on Fridays. While combing the aisles of secondhand shops, he couldn’t believe people had donated the clothes, that he could buy them for five or 10 dollars. “So then Monday arrives and I come in with this new outfit,” he says. “And then everyone’s like: ‘Whoa, where’d you get this? Where’d you get that?’”

“We were going to figure it out and create by any means”

When the guys hung up their shoulder pads and basketball shoes, the arts became their passion. They picked up Photoshop and Illustrator off a free file-sharing site and began to immerse themselves in the creative tools that would offer new outlets for their energies, always with that competitive drive they found early on in sports and as fans of the Dodgers and Lakers. Kobe Bryant brought home five NBA championships during their teenage years, memories that stay with them to this day. When they talk about their approach to creating clothes, Garay said it was Bryant’s Mamba Mentality, which is rooted in rigorous and focused preparation, practice, and discipline, that allowed them to keep creating even when things didn’t go their way.

“We may not have had the money or the access to a lot of resources,” Bonilla says, “but we were going to figure it out and create by any means.”

The team founded Pirate, name partly inspired by the torrenting site The Pirate Bay, in 2017. Their hard work was beginning to pay off the following year when they put together their first exhibition, showcasing prints, apparel, and accessories. As Garay tells it, “This was one of those special moments that made what we we’re doing feel real, based on the incredible response.” They decided to take Pirate from a purely creative endeavor to a business. It was time for Pirate to evolve.

The four men are primarily creatives but also their own reps and art dealers, priding themselves on cutting out any middlemen to get their work to the public. Wells and Garay manage the business operations and overall creative direction; Bonilla oversees branding relations, connecting Pirate with athletes, artists, and the media; and Policarpio oversees design direction and product styling. Along with these responsibilities, each founder also plays a pivotal role as a designer for the brand.

They work in concert, practically finishing each other’s sentences, but they all bring their own aesthetic to the table. Bonilla says, “The reality is if each of us started our own brand, Pirate would look completely different.”

They jokingly refer to themselves as The Avengers of Fashion, a team of people with individual talents who provide each other the combined confidence that has made Pirate a success.

“I think any creative has that moment where you think: ‘Hey, if one person buys it, 10 people might buy it. If 10 people might buy it, 100 people might buy it,’” Policarpio says. “And you just keep reiterating, iterating, and you end up here, at Getty.”

“It’s about the framing and the conservation of the art”

Two years ago, the team was walking the Center grounds to get ideas for an art project they called Castles, inspired by their travels to places like the Netherlands and Portugal, where they were awed by strongholds tough enough to withstand the ravages of time.

During that visit to the Center, an idea struck: what if they were allowed to sample pieces from the vast Getty collection for their burgeoning clothing brand? They didn’t know anyone at Getty, so Policarpio emailed the Getty Museum Store’s customer service address with their pitch. The person on the other end appreciated their aesthetic and forwarded the email to the partnership team, and the collaboration began.

The Pirate aesthetic is best embodied by their reinterpretation of arguably the most famous work at the Center—Vincent van Gogh’s Irises. Garay admits it was challenging to recontextualize the work and make it both modern and personal. “I was trying to make sure that I wasn’t just taking the irises and throwing them on a shirt or hat,” he says. “I isolated a bundle of flowers from a portion of the overall painting and added an oval frame to give it the Pirate aesthetic. Then I made the flowers come out of the frame to make it more dynamic and intentional.”

The gilded frames are a Pirate signature. “It’s about the framing and the conservation of the art,” Wells acknowledges, but also “about the curation of the room and what paintings are next to other paintings.” They want to offer the experience of entering a gallery for the first time, seeing everything with fresh eyes.

The collection is also inspired by their love of hip-hop—a genre that samples from older generations of music. In fact, the only other partner Pirate has joined besides Getty is Dreamville Records, founded by Grammy-winning rapper and producer J. Cole, another one of their role models.

Take their Witte Marvelje Knitted Embroidery Crewneck, a knit sweater in Cannoli Cream, one of the brand’s go-to PANTONE® colors. It’s embroidered with floral and avian imagery “sampled” from three different works: Two Tulips (recto)/One Tulip (verso), [Two Birds], and [Pink flower note card].

“This piece feels unisex,” Wells says about the sweater. “It’s an elegant, sophisticated piece that could be worn throughout the holidays and for any special occasion.”

There’s also a bandana designed by Bonilla that samples the painting Mediterranean Harbor Scene, with that signature Pirate gilded frame at its edges. The 18th-century seascape by Pierre-Jacques Volaire depicts a vessel entering a port. The ship looks like one that could’ve been ferried by Pirate if they had been around hundreds of years ago.

“The castle on our hill”

Policarpio acknowledges that the word “pirate” can have a negative connotation of “stealing, looting, and going against the law,” but to Pirate it’s more about pocketing bits of inspiration from their travels, returning with those riches, and sharing, not hoarding, them. Not very pirate-like.

Bonilla likens their creative journey as a brand to that of Santiago, the protagonist of Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist, who ventures out into the big world, only to realize the riches he always had back at home.

“The architecture is beautiful here,” Policarpio says of the Getty Center. “We’re inspired by castles, and I feel like the Getty Center is the castle on our hill.”

Shop the Getty x Pirate collection in person at the Getty Museum Store or in the Getty store's online shop.