OXDX Clothing and NFL Collaboration

The National Football League or as it’s better known, the NFL, started a collection at the 2022 Super Bowl called Origins. The goal with Origins was to “celebrate the fabric of the [Super Bowl hosting] city but highlighting four unique designers at the intersection of fashion and community to create artfully designed Super Bowl merchandise,” according to the NFL’s website.

With the 2023 Super Bowl being help in Phoenix, AZ we knew at least one of the designers chosen would be Native American. The four designers are Ashley Macias, Elias Jade Not Afraid, Manor Phoenix, and OXDX Clothing. Three of these brands are Native brands, and C&I had the honor to talk with, Jared Yazzie, owner of OXDX Clothing.

C&I: When and how did you start OXDX Clothing?

Yazzie: I was a promising young college kid. I had a bunch of scholarships. I was going to do engineering. My family is a big engineering family. My mom and dad are both first graduates from college. And my oldest brother graduated from Stanford and became a mechanical engineer for NASA. So he is currently working on the perseverance rover that's on Mars right now. So big shoes to fill. I was a little overwhelmed. I thought I was going to find a passion for it and did not. I was always sort of sketching doing a lot of doodling, and making custom clothing on the side.

Eventually, I flunked out two years in and just started to do more art. So I would go take art classes at community colleges and then found a job here in Phoenix. And then eventually while walking around I saw someone in a shop that had screens outside of their shop and I would take my screens to them and ask them if they could burn 'em for me. They eventually got me hired and I worked for a screen printing shop for about three years. So I learned a lot of you know, on-hand learning from, from being at this shop.

OXDX was originally Overdose Designs, I took it from a Lupe Fiasco spoken word poem and for, and in one of his poems talks about different contexts of how things are perceived as cool. How you should kind of check your surroundings. So it's like riding around in a white hood was cool at a certain time in a certain place. Selling drugs is cool in a certain time in a certain place, but the last line is, “check your ingredients before you overdose on the cool.” And at that point, I was very over-consumed with being in a college city.

So overdose was a word I used to describe the overconsumption surrounding us and the people around us. And just remembering not to be so involved in things that don’t matter; to sort of step back and remember contributions to the earth, to the water, to your people just, not forget that kind of thing. So overdose was the name for a few months and then I switched it to OXDX mainly because of graffiti and writing. I used to write a lot and I used to write o d and the dots would be X's, so it would look like OXDX. And so I took on OXDX and just ran with it from probably 2010 on.

C&I: How did OXDX become a part of the NFL: Origins collaboration?

Yazzie: I was recommended by one of the brands last year. Bella Donna and they're cool. So, you know, we got excited when we heard that mainly because they're our peers. So, it's always like exciting when your peers give you a shout because their brand is established and, I'm aspiring to be like them and to get a recommendation from them is pretty cool.
We have been working on new designs since last summer. The end of July, I think, is when we found out, I think about August/September is when we did a contract and stuff. And then I was working on designs and I think I finally completed them in November. So it was, it was a really long process.

C&I: How did the designing process work for this collaboration?

Yazzie: They were very hands off, which was, really great actually. The NFL even had it as an OXDX release so no bigger entity coming in to take care of production. It meant more to me that way. It made me more invested and I wanted everything to be really good and on time, and it was tough but I only had to give designs for approval and that were mostly approved right away.

C&I: Can you explain the designs and the concept behind each one?

Yazzie: The Turquoise design was the first one, we did a pow-wow setup and I remember shopping, looking at the vendor tables and I wanted to make a vendor table pretty much. So it was supposed to have a lot more different things, like prices on it, and look like you're looking down at a table. But I couldn't make it work. So it got edited and edited and pretty much it just sort of became this pile of treasure pretty much. I like how it looks. It's a little abstract, but it looks, it looks really cool. I have a lot of turquoise at home. I just brought that over, sort of looked at different things, and made my own, I really wanted to make it my own because I wanted to be respectful as far as designs and just be original, but still include a lot of those details that silversmiths usually have. The turquoise is majorly Native Navajo. I wanted to shout out the Navajo people of the Southwest and it is just more home-based.

Then the cactus one came in. I wanted something first that would appeal to a wide audience. The cactus one is just pretty generic but I still had a story to tell with it. It's like how you lose a ball when you're on the reservation or something. You're playing rez ball with your cousins or something and you kick it far, it rolls off into a bush and gets a bunch of stickers in it. That is really relatable to rez people. So it still has, that story that fits with the brand but the imagery is still Phoenix.

And then [for the Native Land design]; our brand is always at least advocating for different issues. We're always trying to get these deeper stories out in front of people. We try to give some kind of amplification for it. So we knew we had to do some advocacy in one of the pieces. And it's big stage; we could make a bigger impact. So it was just the idea that there are many events taking place, the stadium, the players are all going to come here, and it should be remembered that this is Native land. That there are issues around all these communities that people should have respect for where they are. So that's what I wanted to showcase in this piece.

C&I: What other collaborations are on the horizon for OXDX Clothing?

Yazzie: The Next weekend, we are working with the Herd Museum for the Annual Hoop Dance competition. We will have something coming up with the Suns [Phoenix’s NBA team]. And, you know, I just have a lot of stuff on the art side being an artist. I have a residency that I'm going to be doing, youth programs in Vegas. So there is a lot of stuff that is coming up. And then we should be planning to do a few more launches. We will be gearing up for the Indian Market, we usually plan a lot of drops for that.

C&I: Are there any dream collaborations you want to do?

Yazzie: Oh man, there’s a lot. LA Streetwear brand, one of the owners is Native, I love them and would love to collaborate. Even more staple brands, Levi’s, Carhartt, I love those kinds of workwear type brands because I think any product we could make and would help people back at home, something that can last on the rez.
Even rez-type brands, like Spam and Blue Bird Flour. I sort of daydream about those sort of things. I have a lot of interests and I find new things in myself every time I have these collaborations and it motivates me to do different things and work on different processes.

C&I: We love the #savewhatwehaveleft, can you explain it a little more?

Yazzie: There's a lot of real positive type call-to-actions out there. I'm a little bit more of a realistic person and I think people need to be that way. Native people have lost a lot, and we've retracted land. We don't live in our original homelands. We're saving the portion that we have left. Suicide is running rampant on the rez; that’s another way we must save what we have left. Language, is disappearing for some tribes. And I'm lucky enough that the Navajo tribe is so massive and that we have a lot of language speakers, but that's not the case, for other tribes. So yeah, it's just the cultural practices and traditional practices, and there are less and less people knowing those things.

So it's those kinds of things we have to keep a hold of. So #savewhatwehaveleft is sort of a harsh reality. It's admitting that there's stuff that's gone and having the courage and keeping the promise to try to keep what's left, going. So we don't lose it completely.

Check out the NFL Origins collection available now on the NFL website and the brand's respective websites too!

Photography: courtesy OXDX Clothing