Jack White

THE RED & WHITE YEARS

Chris Norris

Story

Many years ago, a Detroit native named Jack Gillis found the secret to galvanizing attention: black, white, and one solid color. Bold, basic hues. Stark, primal contrasts. He who masters these may someday rule the world. Gillis practiced these core design principles as an upholsterer with a shop in Detroit. He practiced them as a musician playing in local bands. In fact, he was so committed to the power of elemental colors that when things got serious with his band’s drummer, Meg White, it was clear who’d take whose name in marriage. Before, during, and since Jack White’s capture of music’s global stage with the White Stripes, nearly every move he’s made has shown a certain visual fixation. Like his belief in the alchemy of hues. “[Red, white and black] are the most powerful color combination of all time,” he told Rolling Stone in 2005. “From a Coca-Cola can to a Nazi banner.” And somewhere between these poles lives the bold American design sense of the guitarist-singer-engineer-sculptor-graphic designer, and (why not?) baseball-bat manufacturer doing business as Jack White, now releasing two new solo albums, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive on his own Third Man Records. Jack of all trades and master of several, White’s design work reveals an artist with a profoundly un-siloed creative life. Here, a guide to Jack White’s discriminating eye.

Alexandra Wozniczka

Design

Jack White

The youngest of 10 kids, White was attending Cass Technical High School when he began an upholstery apprenticeship with family friend Brian Muldoon. “By 18, I was really immersed in furniture, and through that design,” he told the podcast Design Matters. “Design, designers, mid-century modern, Arts and Crafts.” The trade built a lifelong practice. “You have to learn like a thousand different tasks” to work on furniture, he told GQ. “You have to basically be a carpenter, you have to know about fabrics, you in turn end up being a de facto interior designer by the end of it, you need to know how to sew like a seamstress. I mean, you’re turning all these disparate fields into one package.”

The Lifelong Side Hustles of...

After completing his apprenticeship, at 21, White opened his own shop, Third Man Upholstery, where he sought to harmonize his art and business sides, developing a mania for branding. Firm motto: “Your furniture’s not dead.” Firm colors: yellow, white, and black—on everything from the company car (a utility van that had toiled for the City of Detroit) to the proprietor’s uniform, to the bills in colored crayon. He also began putting handwritten poems inside the furniture that he’d return to customers. This was not the fast-track to success. “Everything became an art form with me,” he said on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “I was filling the insides with poetry, I was writing bills in crayon: yellow paper and black crayon saying ‘You owe me 300 dollars.’ And I would present it to them when I delivered a piece in a yellow and black uniform, with a yellow van and people were like, ‘…What?’”

FURNITURE MAKER

The Third Man

In 1994, White teamed up with former mentor Muldoon as a band called Two-Part Resin, which later became The Upholsterers. He told NPR’s All Songs Considered that they “made a hundred pieces of vinyl. We made a record we’d stuff into furniture that you could only get if you ripped the furniture open. We even made it on clear vinyl with transparent covers—we thought you couldn’t even X-ray it to see if it was in there… There’s a hundred pieces of furniture out there that have those records, and maybe one day someone will find them.” At this time, he also had an art studio, where he did what he describes as constructed sculpture, carpentry-based, garbage picking,” and what he calls “hardware store art.” He’d bring a guitar in the studio to take a break before he realized this was cutting into his production time. He still does this kind of art and in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, he said, “I worked on nothing but furniture.”

Provocateur of Common Objects

Exterior of Third Man Upholstery shop in Nashville, TN.

The logo revives the upholstery company’s bold, black and yellow globe, and updates its motto to “Your Turntable’s Not Dead.” While White registered the label in 2001 in Detroit, it wasn’t until 2009 that he joined business partners Ben Blackwell and Ben Swank to open Third Man’s physical location in Nashville, as a combination record store, venue, and corporate HQ. They opened a Detroit branch in 2015, adding the vinyl pressing plant Third Man Pressing, in 2017. Then a third location in London’s Soho neighborhood in 2021. Third Man Studios now includes Third Man Books, Records, Photo Studio, Design Studio. White feels that the colors, motto and other creative branding flourishes help make everyone who works there feel included. If you’re in the art department, or you’re the sound man, or you’re working in the store up front, you’re all part of this creative team.” Or as O’Brien put it, Jack White has effectively built himself the lair of a villain in the classic ’60s TV version of Batman, with White as, say, The Riddler.

THIRD MAN RECORDS

Third Man Pressing Plant in Detroit, MI, which prominently features a mural by artist Robert Sestok.

Goober and The Peas performing in the 1990s.

STAGEWEAR

White came to appreciate the importance of a band’s look early on, as the 13th drummer in a band called Goober and The Peas. The Peas all dressed like Grand Ole Opry cowboys, Hank Williams-style, in Nudie suits with cowboy hats. Every drummer was named Doc. At the time, White wasn’t into the get-up—“I’m not living in Nashville, I’m from Detroit, and it’s hard to play drums in a ten-gallon hat,” he recalled to O’Brien. But he came to realize that it didn’t matter what kind of music they made, whether it was better or worse than another band’s. If Goober and the Peas was on the bill, that band would get noticed. White realized, as he said, “If you go onstage wearing jeans and a t-shirt, all the people who are doing it are thinking that they’re not wearing a uniform. But they’re not wearing the new uniform, which is jeans and a t-shirt, and if you’re doing that, you’re making the same choice that everybody else is making. So if you’re going to make a choice, you might as well start thinking about what it is that you’re trying to project and what message you’re trying to send out into the world—as a performer, an artist.”

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In 2013, as the longtime Detroit Tigers fan White was rekindling his love of America’s pastime, he became fascinated with baseball bat design. He’d been reading a design magazine where he saw photos of differently colored baseball bats and something clicked. At the time, he recalled that Third Man Records shared its Detroit building with the watch company Shinola, who’d collaborated on a bat with bat designer Warstic. So when someone at Third Man’s Nashville HQ suggested a baseball bat in Third-Man yellow and black, White balked for fear of ripping off Shinola’s product. Then, White met baseball player-turned-designer Ben Jenkins, who’d founded Warstic in 2011, opening up yet another creative avenue for White’s distinctly American visual mojo. In 2016, he became a Warstic investor, drawn to what he called “the simplicity and harshness of the designs.” He co-created a Jack White signature bat that married a sunburst wood stain, vintage-looking logo, and sheer blunt-force power, and shared a commitment to bringing the “beauty and purpose to the weapons that athletes use to accomplish their goals.” White put $1 million into Warstic, which has since diversified into equipment for lacrosse, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding, and fishing—a wide range of products that’s strikingly true to Jack White’s aesthetic. Beauty, function, and bruising force—a Detroit native’s primary colors.

WARSTIC

If you’re going to make a choice, you might as well start thinking about what it is that you’re trying to project and what message you’re trying to send out into the world, as a performer, an artist.”

“Workbench of Third Man Upholstery shop. Everything in its place. Blue rubberized horse and pig hair sheet being cut for furniture foundation.” —Jack White

As “creative director” of the White Stripes, White was free to pursue his tritone vision from the band’s first steps onto stage—the peppermint stage wear to the album covers for White Blood Cells and the more explicitly Mondrian-referencing De Stjil. Michel Gondry’s music videos: stop-animation red and white Lego for “Fell in Love With a Girl.”

Named for a Dutch phrase that translates as “the style,” the De Stjil movement included painter Mondrian and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld, whose Rietveld Schroder House Jack and Meg White visited while the band toured the Netherlands. “I started reading about the period, which was the same time American blues music was happening,” White told Debbie Millman on Design Matters. “And it seemed to clearly apply to the White Stripes. Breaking things down to the absolute essentials, to blues being one person against the world, one persona and a guitar or a piano, like what Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld were doing with their painting and furniture, breaking things down to their essentials.” He also drew inspiration from Dutch currency. Each denomination has a different color,” White explains. “So you instantly know whether you have a 10 or a 20 in your hand.”

The White Stripes’ albums: self-titled (1999), De Stijl (2000), White Blood Cells (2001), Elephant (2003), Get Behind Me Satan (2005), Icky Thump (2007)

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PORTRAIT by olivia jean. Courtesy of jack white art & design.

Even before he launched himself to stardom with the White Stripes, Jack Gillis was fixated on aesthetics—as a Detroit upholsterer, a self-styled brand creative, and a visually-savvy performer. And he still is. Meet Jack White, designer.

If you’re in the art department or you’re the sound man, or you’re working in the store up front, you’re all part of this creative team.

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White says that he creates his visually codified creative worlds partly with an eye to a younger generation’s needs. “I think that the newer generation especially needs to see music,” he told the shelter magazine Dwell. “They need to see it in front of them as well as hear it. If my brothers hadn’t put albums in front of me when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have known anything about them.” Yet White's strikingly disciplined interdisciplinary approach never falls into visual fascism. The consummate stylist occasionally bends his own color scheme for maximum effect. In the music video for “Freedom at 21,” the blue-and-black color scheme casts a road vignette in muted noirish shades, which makes the appearance of a neon-green Dodge Charger practically explode from the screen.

THE BLUE PERIOD

Musicians that visit Third Man Records in Nashville are invited to record a music single produced by Jack White.

Lillie Mae

artek

Courtney Barnett

Artek

Tenacious D

Artek

My Bubba

artek

Michael Kiwanuka

Artek

Beck

Artek

First Aid Kit

artek

Dwight Yoakam

Artek

Kate Pierson

Artek

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A promotional video for Warstic starring Jack White, retired baseball player Ian Kinsler, and indigenous activist Thosh Collins.

hover to Play Video!

Courtesy of jack white art & design.

Courtesy of @jackwhiteartanddesign on instagram.

Courtesy of jack white art & design.

hover to Play Video!

Courtesy of jack white art & design.

White came to appreciate the importance of a band’s look early on, as the 13th drummer in a band called Goober and The Peas. The Peas all dressed like Grand Ole Opry cowboys, Hank Williams-style, in Nudie suits with cowboy hats. Every drummer was named Doc. At the time, White wasn’t into the get-up—"I’m not living in Nashville, I’m from Detroit, and it’s hard to play drums in a ten-gallon hat,” he recalled to Conan O’Brien. But he came to realize that it didn’t matter what kind of music they made, whether it was better or worse than another band’s—if they were on a bill or you went to a festival, this band got noticed. White realized, as he said, “If you go onstage wearing jeans and a t-shirt, all the people who are doing it are thinking that they’re not wearing a uniform. But they’re not wearing the new uniform, which is jeans and a t-shirt, and if you’re doing that, you’re making the same choice that everybody else is making. So if you’re going to make a choice, you might as well start thinking about what it is that you’re trying to project and what message you’re trying to send out into the world—as a performer, an artist.”

White

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White performing in 2012.

Like Picasso, Jack White has a blue period, which coincides with his career as a solo artist. As of 2012, gone was the White Stripes’ red-and-white peppermint whimsy, replaced by a cool blue-and-white monochrome reminiscent of vintage post-war album covers from jazz label Blue Note. This color scheme punned with White’s inescapable blues influences and chimed with the moodier, more cynical songs on early solo albums like Blunderbuss and Lazaretto. But as with the White Stripes, this color scheme ran through everything: color-coordinated promo materials, album art, music videos, and live performances. Touring as a solo act, White gave his sidemen complete freedom with their wardrobe, letting them wear anything that they wanted. As long as it was blue. “In doing this for him, we all get into the current incarnation of his world,” Luz Studio’s Matthieu Lavirée, who created on-stage visuals for White’s Supply Chain Issues tour, told the industry website Production Lights and Staging News (PSLN). “For two hours, you are drawn into this space. There’s no doubt, it’s Jack’s world when you see the blue scheme.”

Wikimedia commons

White feels that the colors, motto and other creative branding flourishes help make everyone who works there feel included. “If you’re in the art department, or you’re the sound man, or you’re working in the store up front, you’re all part of this creative team.” Or as O’Brien put it, Jack White has effectively built himself the lair of a villain in the classic ’60s TV version of Batman, with White as, say, The Riddler.

Tap to Play Video!

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Courtesy of jack white art & design.