Jungles Jungles is Reviving ’60s Counterculture Through Subversive Streetwear
Under the Radar is Highsnobiety’s weekly celebration of upcoming talent. Each week, we’re spotlighting an emerging brand that’s bringing something new to the worlds of streetwear and fashion.
Jungles Jungles got its name after the singular "Jungles" was already taken on Instagram. The Australian brand is notable for its anti-establishment graphics and apathetic slogans. After a long hiatus, founder Jack Ferguson revived his Melbourne-based brand following a few years traveling around central America. He's inspired by many things but Jungles Jungles took focus once more because, as he says, "fuck getting a job."
Funnily enough, Jungles Jungles is making a killing in the Asian market, and now in the U.S. too, so it's become a full-time job in itself. Stocked in Dover Street Market in London, New York and Tokyo, Ferguson is tapping into a kind of modern apathy with slogans like "Nothing Really Matters" and "I Don't Care Anymore" juxtaposed against psychedelic colorways.
Jungles Jungles riffs off the counter-cultural teachings of 1960s thinkers such as Timothy Leary, whose famous "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" speech lives on the brand's website along with some prescient quotes from the movie Trainspotting.
The graphics, all designed by Ferguson, range from anthropomorphized roses, scorpions giving the middle finger and a pair of cartoon handguns having sex with "Make Love Not War" printed above them. You get the idea.
The lookbook for the SS18 collection, titled "Lesiure Forever," can be viewed above. Shot in Australia, the images show how to style the seasonless range of hoodies, long-sleeve tees and and graphic T-shirts, with all-white looks and very Trainspotting-esque shaved heads. Jungles Jungles followed up with a collab with Surf Is Dead, a Californian brand resurfacing the laid-back surfer aesthetics of the early millennium.
The color palette is fresh and vibrant but rendered in a vintage, overdyed kind of wash, giving Jungles Jungles tees the same feeling as the kind of vintage gem that can take hours of thrifting and rifling through second-hand stores to find.
"Even if it's touching on a serious matter, I always present my ideas in a non-judgmental sort of way," Ferguson continues, "I take visual cues from a lot of different places. Whenever I'm traveling I'm always taking photos of random signs that I see, that I think look interesting and cool. If I see some weird stuff that's completely unrelated to streetwear, I like to play with that sort of thing. I try to turn something that no one would expect into a graphic T-shirt print."
The latest drop is a collab with X-Girl which can be seen below, featuring "Don't Trip!" long-sleeved tees, powder blue short-sleeve tees and hoodies with X-Girl branding on the sleeves.
Jungles Jungles is stocked at Dover Street Market, Fifth General Store, Juice and Confidence in Japan; Starcow and Concept Store in France; DPT in Canada; Dover Street Market, Black Market, Bodega, American Rag and Virgil Normal in the United States; Good Luck Brunch in Singapore; Addicted Seoul and Good Times Bad Times Seoul in South Korea; and Half-Sleeved, Laced, Violent Green, Created Range, Quay Supply and Highs and Lows in Australia.
You can shop Jungles Jungles online via their webstore, follow them on Instagram @JunglesJungles.
