Kenny Howard

Imagine if Nirvana didn’t become a global phenomenon because of their music. Instead, imagine the name became famous because a business mogul approached Kurt Cobain ’s daughter seven years after his death, purchased the name “Nirvana” and put it on T-shirts and trucker hats that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Paris Hilton would wear around. That might sound like an odd “what if” scenario, but it’s basically the exact story of how Von Dutch, the brand, became a global phenomenon in the early 2000s . With one highly notable difference: the subsequent airbrush waved over the history of the artist known as “Von Dutch” — a famous pinstriper in L.A. — conveniently blots out a history of overt racism and anti-Semitism. Von Dutch was the self-anointed nickname of one Kenny Howard. According to Steve Kafka, another famous pinstriper and artist who knew Howard during his life, it means “By German.” “‘Von’ is ‘By’ and ‘Deutsch’ is ‘German,’” Kafka says. “[Howard] was very much enamored by German precision, which, everybody [in the auto industry] is enamored by and impressed by German precision and always has been.” But for Howard, this bedazzlement over German precision was more than just a fascination with machinery. As reported by the Los Angeles Times in 2018, Howard was a self-admitted “admirer of the Third Reich.” “A letter he wrote about abandoning harsh medical treatment for a fatal illness is blunt: ‘I am not willing to go through it anymore only to emerge in a place full of [N-word], Mexicans and Jews. … I have always been a Nazi and still believe it was the last time the world had a chance of being operated with logic. What a shame so many Americans died and suffered to make the rich richer and save England & France again, or was that still. I hope you lying wimps get swallowed up with your stupidity,’” he wrote. Kafka — who also notes that Howard signed the letter with “Sieg Heil ” — tells me that, despite Howard’s own admission of hating Jews, Mexicans and Black people, he’s leery of “all the derogatory stuff about Von Dutch,” who he says would say all kinds of things simply to make people “go holy crap.” Per Kafka, the self-admitted “racist stuff” was just Howard being a provocateur (an excuse, it should be noted, we’ve seen from alt-right trolls more than a few times of late). According to Norm Fisk, who directed a documentary about Von Dutch, from what he gathered, Howard was a nasty drunk who was “quite a prejudiced individual.” “I don’t know if you’d call it racist, you might, but he would often elevate the concept of what Hitler did to the Jews, in his mind, as something he viewed as positive,” says Fisk. “Although that became more and more a theme as he grew older and actually sicker — he suffered fairly heavily the last year or so of his life. He lost a tremendous amount of weight. His daughters and his wife said anytime after about 3:30 in the afternoon, they didn’t even try to talk to him.” Strangely, however, the story of Von Dutch the brand has little to do with Kenny Howard/Von Dutch the person. Howard died in 1992. Four years later, in 1996, his daughters sold the name to Michael Cassel (an entrepreneur) and Robert Vaughn) (a clothing designer and entrepreneur) who established Von Dutch Originals in 1999. “[The] Von Dutch store opened on Melrose Avenue a year later,” Forbes reported. By every account, the sale of the Von Dutch name from Howard’s daughters to Cassel was a complicated transaction. A 2004 report in The Daily Emerald notes, “Ed Boswell, a Los Angeles art collector and publisher, said Cassel, an entrepreneur from Venice, Calif., conned him out of his interests. … Boswell said he has not received any portion of gross sales through Oct. 5, [2004]. He said he made the line what it is today and that Cassel takes full credit for the concept. Boswell said he helped Dutch’s daughters, who sold him out to Cassel.” Both Kafka and Fisk tell me that Howard’s daughters never really knew what they ha