Fashion, Faith, & Visual Parables

Why do you wear what you wear? Fashion has always been an important part of civilization. Of course there’s a healthy involvement with it, but we often see an obsession. Although not primarily a clothing company, Blacksheep Collective is a movement that expresses “visual parables” on clothing. Founder and Art Director, Byron Elliott, joins us this week to talk about fashion, faith, and visual parables in this encouraging conversation.

 

Who’s Our Guest?

Byron Elliott is an illustrator and graphic designer living and working in Indianapolis, Indiana. He specializes in apparel design, illustrative branding, visual storytelling and character design. Byron is the founder and art director of Blacksheep Collective. He’s done work for awesome people like Funny or Die, Rapzilla, Deitrick Haddon, Indy Eleven, Kottonzoo, Indy Film Festival, Vision 3 and many more.

Episode Links

Be sure to check out Blacksheep Collective, the movement Byron founded.

Also, here’s the graphic design (or, visual parable) that Byron was talking about.

Read It

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio conversation.

With me today is Byron Elliott. Byron is the founder of Black Sheep Collective. It’s not just a clothing company but certainly nothing less than a clothing company as well. Anyways, thanks for being here today, Byron.

Hey, what’s up?

Hey, first before anything, let’s just tell us how you met Jesus. We want to know who Byron is.

Well, the short version of that is I grew up in church, was baptized at nine, but honestly I want to say that my real relationship with Christ started honestly two years ago. It’s one of those cases where I’ve been in church my whole life and I thought I had a relationship. Honestly, I don’t think that I was actually practicing my faith or really getting to know Jesus up until two years ago where I had to step out on faith and prove his word to be true. You know what I mean?

Let us know what Black Sheep Collective is and even in that, in your mission of Black Sheep Collective you do say that your art is really to glorify and magnify Jesus Christ, all that he is. Obviously with Black Sheep Collective you’ve chosen the art of displaying graphic designs on clothing. Along with asking you what is Black Sheep Collective also the question is why clothing? Maybe that’s a question that you can only ask God when you’re up in Heaven. He’s the one that told you to do it. Anyways, let us know what it is about.

Well, you know, for me, and just the way that after much prayer and just really trying to figure out what it is God wants me to do, clothing is really just a starting point. I believe we chose it because as far as I’m concerned the only thing that really matters is the message or the art, right?

The canvas and the medium, for me, they’re almost secondary. I feel like with clothing you’re literally wearing … Especially when it comes to graphic design or graphic tees. You’re wearing your beliefs. You know what I’m saying? You’re wearing things that you feel like resemble who it is that you are on the inside. They say not to judge a book by its cover but the reality is that’s how most people choose their books. You know what I mean?

For sure. Yeah.

What you choose to wear, who you choose to represent, the things that we wear they do say a lot about who it is we are and what it is we believe. I guess that’s just one way that I justify going...