Charlie Ertola and George Crampton-Glassanos got to the corner of Mission and Valencia early one sunny Saturday in April 2018, with a ladder and drop cloth, a cassette boombox, a few oldies tapes, and a whole lot of paint in tow.
They had one goal in mind: To refresh and renew the iconic Ben Davis logo mural on the side of Arik Surplus, a workwear spot on Mission and Valencia. The infamous grinning monkey had endured after that Arik’s closed down in 2017, an emblem for people who grew up in the Mission, but its former glory had been faded by time, graffiti, and wheatpaste posters.
After “half-heartedly” trying to find the building’s owner — or, really, anyone who could give them permission to repaint the mural — the two men opted to do it on the sly, Ertola told Gazetteer in an interview.
“Eventually I think our inner outlaw kicked in,” he said. “We were like, ‘you know what, let's just go do it, man.’”
Ertola, a sign painter by trade, handled the lettering, while Crampton-Glassanos, a muralist and longshoreman, took care of the monkey. As they painted, they noticed a divide in response between long-time Mission residents and athleisure-clad transplant types: The transplants tended to walk on by without so much as giving the two a cursory wave, despite their efforts to engage with anyone who passed by.
“Then, we’d get people walking by who said, ‘I lived in the neighborhood a long time.’”’ Ertola said. “They’d come by and they go. ‘Oh, thank you so much for cleaning up the sign.’”
The sign meant a lot of things to a lot of locals, Ertola explained. One person approached the two, thrilled that someone was cleaning up their daughter’s favorite mural. She’d point out the impish primate every time they passed the mural on their way home, Ertola recalled. Another, an older woman who said she was the frontwoman of two-piece post-punk band Noh Mercy in the late ‘70s, told him that they went to Arik for Ben Davis and Levi’s pants that they would stitch up at home to make into skinny jeans.
They didn’t realize it at the time — it was just two dudes looking to make a mark in the city that raised them, Ertola thought — but in reviving this mural, they were doing an act of historical preservation.
“This is for the community and the city at large that has seen so much of its history paved over,” Ertola said. “You're not gonna paint this over that easily.”
The appeal of the brand has waned a bit since its ‘90s heyday, as trend cycles shifted away and the company moved its headquarters out of San Francisco. But there are few clothing brands more tied to the city than Ben Davis, the longtime workwear company that has dressed generations of blue-collar workers, Black and Latino San Franciscans, and multitudes of people who went against the grain.
For the people who have been here the whole time, the little-known legacy of Ben Davis is a reminder of the San Francisco histories that don’t get told.
Ben Davis was founded as a union brand, a point that was emphasized with its original four-word slogan: “Union Made Plenty Tough.”
In a labor town like San Francisco, that carried a lot of weight.
Longshoremen, tradespeople, Muni bus drivers — all of them wore Ben Davis, purchased from their neighborhood surplus store. The clothes were certainly tough, lasting longer than other workwear classics like Dickies, said Connor McCann, a writer who was born and raised in the Mission. He remembered his mom wearing Ben Davis gear to her Department of Public Works job every day. And he, too, wore the brand as a kid growing up in the Mission in the ‘90s, either as hand-me-downs or bought new.
In an interview with Gazetteer, rapper and SF community historian Dregs One remembered the experience of walking into a store like Arik or Acme Workwear (his shop of choice) back then, when Ben Davis was everywhere.
“Anytime I would go to any of these stores, it was me and my friends just looking for something that was cool to wear, there were always union guys or construction guys or actual blue-collar guys actually shopping for their work clothes there, too,” he said.
The brand was a key part of California’s predominantly Mexican-American lowrider culture as it developed in the mid-20th century, according to Ben Davis collector and enthusiast Ray Abad. His parents rocked Ben Davis while they rode around in ‘60s Chevy Impala lowriders. And by the ‘70s, the brand’s oversized T-shirts and billowing khakis were a staple for cholos in the Mission, along with Dickies and Converse sneakers.
At its peak, Ben Davis was a key part of West Coast rap culture, too. In ‘90s music videos, you could see Dr. Dre and Eazy-E in Ben Davis tees. Ice Cube name-dropped it. Hitman, of the legendary San Francisco gangsta rap crew RBL Posse, wore a bright-orange Ben Davis jumpsuit on the cover of his 1995 album Solo Creep. Even the Beastie Boys shouted out the brand.
“It represents something like a level of street culture that people want to wear, but maybe not take part in, or even if they don't take part in it, they want to look like they do,” Ertola said.
Elsewhere in the city, Ben Davis was for the skaters. Dregs One first saw Ben Davis’ starchy, densely-woven half-zip collared shirts on the backs of the guys skating around the Oceanview where he grew up, and later in Thrasher, the San Francisco skater magazine. Abad saw it in his middle school, too, coupled with classic skater brand Stussy and Mossimo jeans.
That was the beauty of Ben Davis: Everyone could wear it, and in its malleability, everyone could make it their own. It was local, it was durable, and, crucially, it was accessible. Every subculture in the city had its own way of wearing Ben Davis. Even if it meant different things to different people in different neighborhoods, it stood for a vision of San Francisco that was working-class and stood away from the mainstream. Union workers would get the same pants and shirts and coveralls as the skater kids and the cholos and the punks. When you went to a place like Arik to get some Ben Davis, you were making a choice to stand out.
“Growing up is also about getting your hands on something rare, in the sense that you're not going to find Ben Davis at the young men's department in Macy’s,” said Dregs One.
It also suggested a bit of grit, a bit of toughness: Schools banned the Ben Davis logo because of its perceived gang affiliations, a claim that blue-collar parents who also wore Ben Davis protested.
Ben Davis’ appeal waned in the tail end of the ‘90s, when The North Face and Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren — standard-bearers for WASP-y prep apparel — started gaining popularity in the hip-hop world and among San Francisco teens.
Some diehards hung on, though, including Abad. “In the early 2000s, people would be like, ‘You still wear that stuff? What are you, Eazy-E? Ice Cube? It used to kind of mess with me because it was kind of like that West Coast aesthetic really was kind of going away,” he said. Longshoremen and other blue-collar workers also kept on wearing it.
Today, you don’t often see newcomers to San Francisco wearing the workwear brand that was born here.
You still see it in the army surpluses and workwear shops that remain in the city, including the Acme Workwear store that Dregs One shopped at growing up. But it’s lost two things over the years that made it what it was. It’s no longer union-made or American-made following union disputes and a push to outsource to international factories. It’s technically not even a Frisco brand anymore, since the headquarters moved to Marin County.
Even though workwear has re-entered the zeitgeist in the last few years, Ben Davis hasn’t seen the same mass revival that, say, Dickies 874s and Carhartt double knee pants have. High-end collaborations with tastemaker-y brands like Supreme and Opening Ceremony have only slightly moved the needle stateside. Some of this may be intentional: Abad notes that the brand doesn’t really do much marketing in the way that its workwear competitors have; it still maintains its “if you know, you know” appeal that way.
But in Tokyo — where hardy Americana-imbued apparel is arguably more popular than in the States — the brand has been licensed out to a Japan-only subline of Ben Davis apparel, including oversized pants and overalls made out of pricey Solotex fabric and sleek suiting. That fervor has spread across Asia, including in the Philippines and Vietnam, where the San Francisco origin story and the tough-guy ethos of its wearers resonates.
The people who still rep it here are the people who keep the city going: chefs, bartenders, construction workers, barbers, and tattoo artists chief among them. (Barbers, in particular, seem especially enamored by Ben Davis’ wares, Abad said, both for its function and aesthetic.) The San Francisco artists Jeremy Fish and Sam Flores are big fans of the brand.
A few hip local businesses with their finger on the pulse have Ben Davis apparel. Longtime skate shop Mission Skateboards sells Ben Davis gear. Tenderloin streetwear maker Tilted Brim carries new Ben Davis, and has a Ben Davis collab with the denim makers Holy Stitch. Local Filipino restaurant chain Señor Sisig sells a classic Ben Davis half-zip with their logo on the pocket. Most recently, a shop called Working Panda opened up on Mission St., not far from the other Arik shop in the Mission, that continues the workwear shop tradition.
Still, it’s just an echo of the status the brand once held in the city. That’s largely a reflection of overarching cultural change, as tech companies have displaced the people and subcultures who once made San Francisco cool, once upon a time.
“A lot of people would associate San Francisco with Patagonia more than Ben Davis. And that’s kind of disappointing,” Dregs One said. “The history, the lineage, it's just, communities have been disrupted by so many people being displaced and moving out.”
But those who know still know what Ben Davis (and that mischievous monkey) has meant to the city over the decades, and are working to preserve its legacy.
During the pandemic, a handful taggers left their marks over the mural. In September 2022, Ertola and Crampton-Glassanos went back to fix it up again. This time, Crampton-Glassanos put the word out ahead of time about the work they were planning to do. When they got there, a guy pulled up in a cherry-red Chevy lowrider, with a pitbull in tow. A few neighborhood guys brought a few beers. The two-man scene turned into a mini block party.
“It was still pretty early in the morning, but it turned into a little party on a Saturday of other older locals from the Mission who wanted to come out and celebrate what was going on,” said Ertola. “That was like their identity being restored.”
