Asbury Park Fight Club

And this is where everything APFC begins. Two former cutthroat radio promotion men head out in a 1962 Chevy Impala to Asbury Park, NJ, returning with a lost fashion label—the rest is history.

In the early ‘70s, the APFC imprint couldn’t catch a wave in the larger Jersey Shore clothing marketplace, and yet today, the APFC label’s output stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any classic shirting of its era while effectively remapping the Asbury tailoring diaspora.

Each piece of clothing explores, in exacting detail, the city’s biggest small time athletic clubs and would-be world beaters tossed into the glutted second string athletic sea of the 1960s & early 70’s. In an alternate universe these motley and mishandled athletes – with their unforgettable records and games that could have and should have, but never did, would have been heroes. Find their stories here, retold for the first time.

The APFC legend could almost be fiction. The fashion house passing as a home, the harem passing as a family, the lead designer who’s still attending middle school. The dream. The con. The end. APFC inhabits the same Asbury landscape as Elmore Leonard’s characters; taking equal measures of inspiration from Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite and Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. Drawn to the underground and fancying themselves rogue entrepreneurs, the APFC label operates somewhere in the space between money laundering outfit, cult and driving school.

The APFC story is no fashion retread. Rather, it’s an examination of Asbury’s creative underside. Hitched to APFC are no CFDA awards, no million dollar buyouts and no quaint ateliers to visit—instead, there’s a handful of shirts, a binder stuffed with photographs, and the condemned shell of a former bar masquerading as a beauty parlor. Putting artistry and genius in front of commercial viability, The Founders have laid down lush graphics and copy into a crusader daydream; sharply incongruent with the sometime reality of the city that dreamt it.

Collected here for the first time are the story and clothing that came out of this thriving, if totally unknown athletic club scene. A decade in the making, the APFC Founders have compiled twenty dizzying models, a medley of fist fight funk and Tex Mex kaleidoscope copy, all done up with unhinged graphics too off the wall for comparison. When they weren’t busy as mobile DJ operators, jingle writers or enduring on-air personalities at Promised Land Radio, The Founders could be discovered in the APFC archives sorting out the prodigious ideas swirling around in their heads.

Dollar-for-dollar the best big time small time athletic club clothing compilation of its century and the perfect primer for anyone piqued by its origins—otherwise known around here as the “budding APFC enthusiast.” Wear these in front of your friends and watch them walk to the other side of the fence.