Visual artist Chris Cunningham has collaborated with New York clothing and accessory brand Supreme for a capsule collection based upon “Rubber Johnny,” the iconic and unsettling video he created with Aphex Twin in 2005.
Cunningham is probably best known for video work with electronic artist Aphex Twin — which also includes the music videos for “Windowlicker” and “Come to Daddy” — but has also worked with artists and brands like Madonna, Björk, PlayStation, and Gucci to create art installations, short videos, ads, and more.
The collection includes a hooded sweatshirt with a still of the “Rubber Johnny” Chihuahua, a T-shirt with a still of the Chihuahua, and a second T-shirt with six panes of various stills from the video. All the items are available in taupe, white, black, mint green, and red, and can be bought both on Supreme’s website and in select retail stores.
In the decades Cunningham has been producing art, “Rubber Johnny” continues to be a highlight. A six-minute experimental film, the project was shot in infrared vision and took three and a half years to complete. Cunningham himself plays Johnny, a boy locked in a dark basement with a Chihuahua who is seen babbling while being interviewed. At the time of the video’s release, Cunningham described the process of self-directing and wearing the prosthetics as “horrible” and “pointless torture,” to Pitchfork. But the finished product does capture the hysteria he heard in Aphex Twin’s “Afx 237 v.7,” and over a decade later, is still a marker for boundary-pushing in music videos.
The collection is currently available now online and in-store at Supreme’s New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Japan locations.
As expected, much of the collection is already sold out on Supreme’s website and people are already reselling the merch on eBay, asking for as much as $400 for the Chihuahua hoodie. If you’re trying to cop one, good luck and in the meantime, relive the virtuosic terror of “Rubber Johnny” above.