Kalaʻi Miller: Aloha and welcome to Home is Here.

Fitted Hawaii was formed in 2005 by former pro skater Rene Matthyssen and designer Keola Nakaʻahiki Rapozo.

A contemporary streetwear brand based in the heart of Honolulu, Fitted uses the non-traditional medium of apparel and hats to share stories about the history and culture of Hawaiʻi.

Keola Rapozo: Well, I grew up in Kahaluʻu, Okana Road.

My mother and stepfather they were entrepreneurs themselves.

We did the craft fair circuit.

Where I come from, you hunt, you fish.

I was around a lot of drug dealers.

My uncles, everybody that was normal, right?

I didn't have any, uh, any mentors other than these, these things I would read in the magazines or, you know, like, these designers that I, I loved or like rappers I could see that I couldn't touch, I would consider them mentors.

Graduated from Castle High School, 1994.

I'm dating myself, went to Windward Community College, studied, studied my liberals there.

I was kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

I befriended a librarian at the time, she was amazing.

The librarian crew at Windward, in those days, they were so great.

She knew I was very interested in music and design and or clothing design at the time.

And she was like, Hey, there's this interesting fashion technology program at Hawaiʻi Community College, you should check it out.

I was like, ah, I'm barely learn—barely, you know, doing my work here.

And she's like, No, I think you'll be fine.

You should just try it.

She helped me apply.

I got accepted.

And I was like, Whoa, I guess I'm going to fashion school.

And yeah, so I started fashion school 90, 1998.

I graduated from the fashion program in 2000 with a degree.

Carol D'angelou, she was teaching, sketching, she mentioned to a couple of people in class that, that there's an internship at Tori Richard and that if anybody was interested, you should apply.

So I walked out of class, in the middle of class, and I called the number and asked if I can apply for this internship.

I got a meeting and yeah I sat down with with Agatha and Amy Renshaw and one of them asked me, so what do you want to do?

I was like, I’ll do anything.

I’ll sweep floors, I’ll fold garments, whatever, whatever it takes, like, I’m here to just learn.

Whatever you guys need me to do, I’ll do it.

I’ll start tomorrow.

Three days later I was there working, and my career started.

While I was there, you know, I learned a lot.

I mean, I, I was able to tag along to Magic shows.

Magic at the time was the biggest I don't know if you'd call it a clothing show, it was much more than that.

It was literally a convergence of every single aspect of the clothing industry at that time.

And then I really, I really, gravitated towards this idea where I could just design and produce my own collection and I did women’s wear.

I did, I started with, I started with skirts, and tops and accessories, did a couple of fashion shows.

And then, and then I decided to take my samples on the road.

It was just literally was just me, borrowing buddy passes from friends.

And I would go to San Francisco, Magic, San Diego, LA, flew to New York, back to San Francisco, and then back home.

But on this trip it was sort of a coming of age for me.

Here I was, you know, I was just me solo and I had all my samples.

And I was just taking it to stores and showing people at Magic, showing people at Coterie in New York.

I mean I've never even been to New York is my first trip to New York and here I'm taking my samples thinking like these people gonna buy, you know?

I had no idea what I was doing but it was coming of age, I learned so much on that trip.

Yeah and I was able to sort of you know, gain a little bit of notoriety here in Hawaiʻi and then I hooked up with the boys at In4mation.

They had a store on Ward and I would just hang out, talk story with them.

We just created a friendship and they were cool, man, they had this little space upstairs in an attic.

And they let me bring my sewing machine, my dress form all my fabric, all my tools, and they said brah, you can have this space and just create whatever you want to create, put it on the floor for consignment.

You know I was working full-time at Tori, I was still at the gas station, I was valeting, and then I was finishing up one class.

I was finishing up one class.

This was all sort of happening at the same time.

While in my spare time I would just stay there and just drape, cut, sew.

It was a few years where I was able to really learn the process of trying to create my own my own brand.

My own vision, everything.

Rene Matthyssen, my current partner, he was flying home.

And he had just landed and he asked me where I was.

And it was interesting time for me.

You know, I was, I was, I had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time I moved out, I was sleeping on my sister's couch.

It's pretty nuts time, my mom had passed away.

I was transitioning, at that time Tori Richard had offered me salary.

So he came and he’s like eh let’s go take a walk.

So he told me, he was like, you and I are going to open up a hat store.

And I was like, brah I'm doing this like this women's thing, you know?

He's Iike, think about it, you know, we'll do hats and you know, you can design everything and, and, you know, I'm not going to do it with anybody else.

You know I got this good thing going with Tori.

I was there four years at that point, you know it was a career.

And then I was like, I don’t want to be 30 and like wondering what if, you know?

So I said, All right, done.

Let's go, what are we doing?

Like the next day we were just like, we started grinding.

This was December 29, 2003.

We started grinding from that point on.

I was still working three jobs.

And this new thing was on my mind, and I was obsessed with it.

I didn't sleep.

I mean, went to work, worked after, and then spent the whole night just working on Fitted.

And we opened our doors.

This date is crazy.

Like no joke.

We opened the doors, we blessed it, open for business, October 20, 2005.

It was two years, from the same day that my mom passed away.

It’s consumed every hour of my life for the past 16 years.

Yeah.

Rene was born in LA, grew up in San Diego.

Then his family moved here to Hawaiʻi.

Good part of his teenage years, he is traveling the world as a pro skater.

And he had this really like, interesting outlook on life.

He saw things that I've never seen.

Up until, you know, 2003 and I went on that trip, I barely went traveling, you know, I've been to the Big Island, but that was it.

Never been out of the country.

So I didn't have, I didn't have a really deep perspective of the world, you know, but I knew what it was like to grow up in Kahaluʻu, I knew what it was like to grow up in Hawaiʻi and he loved that.

We could sort of like forge our own path.

He was a pro skater but I'm this country boy, you know, I grew up hunting and fishing and, and I have this weird, you know, love of fashion and design and, and the narrative was embracing identity, our own identity, who we are and not being afraid of it.

Like, we don't have to, we don't have to front like we're from a place that we're not from, like we from here, you know, and just speak on the things that we know.

Designing um, is adjacent to storytelling, right?

Whether it be through mele, through oli through hula gestures, different types of gestures.

We just use this this different medium, different palettes, different fabric, different, different styles, different techniques to share our stories.

Using the culture as, as inspiration, just gives us gives us a much more viable resource to speak, to to speak from.

We start at this point, and we're talking about food systems, the golden age of Waikīkī was not the 50s or is not even current times, you know.

It was when Kalamakua was growing mass amounts of kalo, feeding the community, nobody was going hungry.

There was this lifestyle that they implemented, you know, the surfing, this canoe fishing, everything in that in that area was sufficient.

If we are able to start our process in those stories, no matter what comes out of it, it may not look or be perceived as this, this core idea of Kalamakua and Waikīkī, But that inspires you know, just even knowing that, that back in those days, they would weave hats as gifts, you know, they would give freely, meaʻai.

I think it's important for stories to start there and inform the process, it could not be the outcome, but it informs the process.

And all these stories are very important from a design perspective, because to design something just because it's handsome, or just because, you know, it looks good, is uh, I think it's not taking full advantage of the opportunity.

And I think we can’t as Hawaiians, we cannot be afraid to go and, sort of reclaim and say, you know what our ancestors was here, we’re allowed to be here.

This our space, you know, and if we don't occupy those spaces, and continue to share stories of Kalamakua, and Kelea, and all of these old names of all the surf breaks down there.

The battles of Apuakehau then, you know, we're not perpetuating, you know, what's important.

What is traditional Hawaiian culture?

I've had this conversation, I've went down this road many times with many different people.

I've had conversations with elders, who are very strict with their mindset and resolve when it comes to, no, it’s only this.

And then I have mentors and kumus now, who are much more open and understanding and realize that the work that we're doing now, not me, everyone is doing now.

Look, I’m Hawaiian I'm a creative.

It's how I make my living.

It's how I feed my family.

It's how I feed 16 other people and their families.

How can this not be considered an iteration of innovation of cultural practices?

And we innovated by observing.

And through observation whether it be Hoʻokele, kahuna kalai waʻa, food systems, all of these things had to have been concepted, thought of, implemented, applied—whether through tooling, through fabrication, and an actual case study, and then putting your whole entire family on a boat.

To me that's the ultimate innovation, traveling 2500 miles to a place you haven't seen before by observing birds, wind patterns, stars, currents.

Hula itself is innovation of coded language, right?

Food Systems, ahupuaʻa was innovation.

Loko ai iʻa is innovation.

Finding these instances where we can play this cultural flute, so to speak, but in very contemporary way and blend it with modern techniques and styling, but have like, choke manaʻo in it, you know?

I feel like that, that's particularly to me, is thinking Hawaiian.

But I dedicate myself to my culture and learning every single day, so I can get better for no reason other than just understanding where I come from, this amazing, beautiful place that we live all of the sacrifices that our kups went through, and this this abundance that was left to us.

On our label I have this quote that resonates with me, or that has sort of been a guiding principle, is, was by Pai’ea "E naʻi wale nō ʻoukou i kuʻu pono ʻaʻole e pau."

and it kind of speaks to it kind of speaks to this, this responsibility now is on us.

What it means to us, and it's broken down in this little ethos I have dedicated to life past, present and future, embracing change to build a bridge for culture and youth to intersect, respect daily, culture daily, ʻike daily, mahalo daily.

Kalaʻi Miller: R. Kikuo Johnson was born and raised on the island of Maui and fell in love with comics at a young age.

That love never left and today he is an award-winning graphic novelist and illustrator.

Recently, he received a Whiting award as one of the ten most promising emerging writers in the country.

Kikuo Johnson: I'm Kikuo Johnson.

I'm an illustrator and comic book artist.

I was born on Maui, and I, we grew up in Makawao while and you know, it rains a lot up there.

So I spent a lot of times inside.

My dad had lots of paper, was drawing all the time, and never stopped.

When I was about eight, I think I found comic books.

And I was hooked.

My brother had this one comic.

It was like a GI Joe comic, I think.

And it had an advertisement for another comic.

And it was about this big.

And it was a drawing of Wolverine.

But when they photographed it, they they kind of made all the color go to black and white.

So it's super edgy and dramatic.

And it's the cover of Wolverine number one by Frank Miller where he's like this.

And it looks scary.

It looked intimidating.

But also I was so drawn to it as a little kid because there's nothing like that like in the cartoons I’d seen on TV.

So I begged my dad to take me to the comic book store.

And that was that.

Right after I got my first comic it was about in third grade.

And I started drawing my own comics almost immediately.

I think like, one of the things that's super appealing about comics is that it's just paper and, and staples, really.

And if you have a pencil, then you can make your own comic.

I kept all these old comics that I was making when I was a little kid.

Wind Man versus Dark Destructor—definitely needed a copy-editor for these ones.

When I was kid, I was super attracted to the superhero stories.

When you're a kid, you have power fantasies, and that's a way to kind of, an outlet for that.

But pretty soon, I was still buying comics.

And I just actually didn't care that much about the stories.

They weren't, the superhero genre just wasn't that interesting to me.

And as I became a teenager, I found other kind of independent comics and, and other stories and just got attracted to like, regular novels.

The stories that always appealed to me typically are just family relationships, like the, like how people that love each other are interacting.

And those are the stories I'm drawn to.

Those are just the stories I want to read, and those are the stories I wanted to make.

So, I was always drawing, but it never occurred to me that it was a job like you could actually make a living this way.

My parents saw me just drawing all the time in my spare time.

And I was actually shocked that my parents, by the time I was a senior was like, have you thought about art school?

I was, I couldn't believe that they would like, go it like pushing that kind of like less stable direction.

And I'm just super grateful that I have supportive parents.

And it made sense.

It's all I ever wanted to do, I would just be doing it anyway.

I went to went to the Rhode Island School of Design.

It’s super far, but I wanted an adventure.

While I was in school, I did a comic called Night Fisher.

I started it my junior year.

I worked on it for another three years.

So when I was working on Night Fisher, and I was living in New York at that point with some of my classmates that I graduated with.

And I was waiting tables, and I was sharing an apartment with three other guys, and I was broke.

The thing that kept me going, that kept me like, you know, this is worth it.

This is a story that's worthwhile, was I really wanted to show the Hawaiʻi that I knew, because in any of the media, I saw I didn't recognize the Hawaiʻi that was presented at all, and especially not the Maui that I knew.

So I tried to write a book that really presented a version of Maui that I really, really recognized.

And that really kept me going and I believe that it was something that needed to be put out, I convinced myself that it was worth struggling for.

Looking back at it, I'm 40 years old now I wrote it when I was 21.

Now looking back, I do see that I was working out a lot of the kind of events of my high school years and some of it is autobiographical, a lot of it is fiction, it's kind of a mix of both.

To be honest, I was never sure how I was going to totally make it all work.

I just knew that I really wanted to draw comics and I thought, if I made something that got out there, and people saw it, I hoped that it might lead to other opportunities.

I was like, I'll make this comic and this will be my debut, and people hopefully will see it.

And it actually worked.

Amazingly, it came out people saw it and people started hiring me to do drawings for their magazines.

It takes about a year for like a book to go from it being announced, and then finally being published.

And during that year, I was trying to publish comic strips in magazines.

So I would just like make up emails, I'd look at the art director, and it'd be like John Smith.

So I'd be like John underscore Smith, at outdoor magazine.com.

And I, and I would email John Smith and be like, hey, publish this comic strip, please.

And, of course, everybody either just didn't answer or rejected me.

And eventually, I started submitting stuff to the New Yorker.

And amazingly, I got an email back from the New Yorker.

And they said, we don't know what you want us to do with this comic strip.

Like, that's not how it works.

But we do have an article that we'd like you to illustrate.

Because I have your book on my desk.

They sent it to us as a review, copy.

I love it.

Do you want to do this illustration for us?

And so that was kind of my break, where I finally started kind of pivoting to paid magazine work.

And that became my bread and butter and how I kept the lights on in New York for a while.

I had already worked for The New Yorker for years at this point doing interior illustrations, which were really fun to do, but like kind of the Holy Grail as a professional illustrator is to try to get a cover.

One reason for that is that it's a really rare illustration gig where the illustrator comes up with a concept.

Most of my job is illustrating someone else's idea.

But for the New Yorker, it's all about coming up with your own idea telling your own story.

So after years of submitting ideas something finally clicked and I got my first cover in the New Yorker.

I got a call and Francois was like, we need a cover.

It's the music issue.

We want it to take place in Brooklyn.

So we want someone that lives in Brooklyn, and we want someone young, we want someone new and that's you.

So we're gonna give you a try.

So I kind of had like this set up audition.

It was cool, because I did a bunch of different sketches.

I actually went out to a club that was close to my house at the time in Brooklyn, with a music writer, which was a fun night, and came up with his image.

And you can see that it's like the perspective like you're standing on a stage.

And I don't know if this is a real story, but it sounded like maybe it got accepted because the editor of the New Yorker plays guitar and could imagine himself on the onstage playing his guitar.

That was one of the rare moments in the career where you know, you pop a bottle of champagne.

For my second book after Night Fisher, I did a book called The Shark King and the art editor.

And an editor for that series is a woman named Francois Mouly, who also happens to be the art director for the New Yorker.

The concept for the line is that comics are a really great way to learn to read, because it's like pictures and words, instead of books that parents are, parents are reading to kids, it's books that kids can read to themselves.

And I got a call from the editor.

And she was like, Have you ever thought about doing a kid's comic?

We're doing some like mythological stories.

And immediately, I thought of the Nanaue story, which is a story I grew up with.

Of this, you know, demigod, Nanaue, half shark, half man.

And it's a pretty scary story if you know the story.

But it's also a story of a character with a foot in two worlds.

And that really appealed to me.

And I tried to honor that story as best as I could, while making it not quite so violent for kids.

But I went to Waipio Valley and really tried to dig into what that story meant.

It was it was such a treat, just to research and really kind of dig into that mythology, they’re such incredible stories.

I feel like there's a lot of insight in those stories.

And they survive for a reason, right?

They're, they're hundreds of years old, and they survive for a reason.

I've lived in Brooklyn now for, for years.

And it's still, I still just feel like a visitor there.

I don't know if that'll ever go away.

I always think of Maui as home.

I come home and spend about a month here every year, and it's still just feels like home.

I come home every winter, and spend time with my family, and like when I think about family time, it's all in Hawaiʻi, and it's the people I know, it's the people I love.

And so there are stories that I've set elsewhere, that don't really make sense to me until I if I reset them in Hawaiʻi suddenly like it all becomes real and it becomes familiar.

When I was first started writing No One Else, I actually had set it in Massachusetts, where I was like, briefly living, and uh spending a summer.

And I wrote this script and it kind of didn't make sense to me or like, not that, it didn't quite feel real, wasn't working.

And then I came home one winter, and this would have been 2015.

And I was sitting up on up on up in Wailuku and looking out at a cane fire.

And it just occurred to me what if I set it right here?

And what if like, the cane fires were the backdrop for the island?

And what if the characters were local people, and suddenly, it all seemed super real, it all seemed familiar to me, it seemed natural.

And, and then I was like, I have to have to write this.

I started writing the book, started working on the book.

And then the next year, the mill closed.

So it was kind of, the story almost became like a story of mourning, as this kind of era was ending.

And think there’s like a magic, just as a reader, when I'm reading a story about a world that I'm not familiar with, would be a culture I'm not familiar with.

I just noticed that those kinds of really specific ticks have a place or have a culture or have a language, make it feel so much more real.

I think there's a paradox, where almost the more specific, you can make it a story to your own experience, the more universal it is somehow.

And so if you're wanting to tell your story, I think if you can be as specific to it as possible.

I think that's only a strength.

So when I was a kid I got hooked on comics.

And it just never went away.

I just always loved them.

And I think the magic of it is, like reading pictures, like in a movie, the images don't stay on the screen long enough to really kind of really study and kind of figure out what the story is from the image if you have a more complex story.

One cartoonists that I really love, his name is Chester Brown.

And he always says that what he loves about comics is the silence and the stillness.

And I couldn't agree more.

It's looking at a still image, and kind of deciphering all its nuance spending, taking your own time on it.

And then going to the next image and seeing how those two images connect.

It's just a magic reading experience for me that I love.

And I just, I love a new great comic.

I crave that I just, it's my favorite way to my favorite form of entertainment.

Kalaʻi Miller: Mahalo for joining us.

Please be sure to check out our digital extras for tonight’s episode on PBS Hawaiʻi dot org or on our PBS Hawaiʻi YouTube page.

For Home is Here, I’m Kalaʻi Miller…a hui hou.

Keola Rapozo: Our customers, they feel a sense of pride.

It's something that early on, that was our number one driver was like being prideful to come from this place.

When nobody was trying to be from Hawaiʻi.

Everybody was trying to be from New York or LA or Europe, we’re like, nah, this place is the coolest place on the planet.

Let's share our stories.

This is a watercolor I did for my parents as a Christmas present.

That's actually a picture of our yard and that's a Kolea that lives in our yard.

Every year, they they live here in the winter and then they migrate to Alaska.

But always come back in the winter.

And that's like me and my brother who go away to the mainland for most of the year and then come home and visit for the holidays.