Plastered 8 is Back – for a Limited Time Collab with the Grateful Dead

Vincent R. Vinci, Contributing Editor | Nov 14, 2022 2:59 pm | Add a comment | 474 reads

Dead heads and Plastered 8 fans unite! The Beijing-based t-shirt brand, which shut its doors after 16 years in the capital on Oct 8, is back with their last t-shirt ever – which is also a collab with American rock group the Grateful Dead.

We spoke with Plastered founder Dominic Johnson-Hill to find out more about the collab – which consists of a special Grateful Dead x Plastered t-shirt with a wad of special “hell money”.

So Plastered is back – at least for this collab. How did this come about and why the Grateful Dead?
We are nearly Dead, Gratefully. This looks like our swan song and it’s a good one. Grateful Dead approached us earlier in the year, at first I didn’t believe it and then I flew to LA, met some lovely people and it was true. The timing was impeccable as we were already winding up things in Beijing. I’m a huge fan of their artwork so being given access to that was like a dream come true.

What inspired the design of the shirt?
We had been playing around with some old Chinese fire cracker packaging artwork from the 1930s, the old “Ming Guo Feng” aesthetic. This is the first Chinese-centric Grateful Dead artwork ever made so we had a responsibility to deliver something mind blowing. Plastered 8’s long standing artist Da Qian locked himself in a room for two days and came out with this artwork. We had total creative freedom from Grateful Dead and they made zero changes to the first draft…how cool is that?

What about the bundle of Hell money? How’d that come about?
Hell money is very iconic and is an obvious idea when it comes to a band with Dead in their name. You can chose to burn it and send it to Hell or keep it and go to Hell and someone else can burn it for you. Each Plastered 8 x Grateful Dead set comes with a T-shirt, bundle of this Grateful Dead Hell money and a limited edition screen print of the artwork.

How can people purchase the shirt and how many will be made available?
You can buy from our WeChat store or www.plastered.com, there’s only 244 of these sets. As it’s our last t-shirt there’s a lot of demand so best be quick.

Plastered 8's Grateful Dead collab package -- including shirt, hell money, and print -- is RMB 288 a set and will go on sale on Friday, Nov 18. You can buy via their website (plastered8.com) or via their WeChat shop (QR code below).