The death of LRG co-founder and creative director Jonas Bevacqua is still mysterious, leaving many questions unanswered. Bavacqua was found dead in his home in Laguna Beach yesterday morning at the age of 33.
What we do know, however, is that the American born, Vietnamese entrepreneur was a lover of art, skateboarding and fashion and helped to craft one of the most successful streetwear brands in the history of the game. This is what he told Hypebeast in a recent interview:
“Ralph Lauren and these other companies dominated the hip hop fashion scene in the 1990s. It was then that I realized how brainwashed we were as a culture and as a consumer,” he said. “It dawned on me that none of these companies cared about our scene or put any money back into the people that were buying their products.”
He preached the idea of finding your own identity and never caving to the trends.
“Cool guys are really a bunch of clowns. They are like the kids that got picked on in school and now they hide behind their keyboards. Don’t let them fool you, kids. Do what makes you happy.”
Bevacqua was born in Long Beach, California and was adopted by Joe and Helen Bevacqua, who created a rainbow coalition of adopted children in their home, so much so that Josephine Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be proud.
According to the Orange County Register, Bevacqua has “a black brother and sister, Filipino brother and sister, half-white-half black sister, half Jamaican-half-Spanish brother and a white brother.”
“I grew up in a pretty unique environment and was exposed to a lot of different things,” Bevacqua told the Register in 2009.
“I didn’t feel there was a clothing company to bridge the gap among all these different things that we were into – that spoke for that melting pot of what was going on. That’s what LRG was all about.”
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Jonas Bevacqua
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Jonas Bevacqua.
