The Two Ears Brand Interview – A Conversation with Jonathan Lukacek

• Interviews
• By Those That Know
• 6th December 2020
• 5 min read

Jonathan Lukacek spent almost ten years trying to make a bandanna properly. The search took him through thousands of vintage examples, historic printing methods, specialist Japanese factories and the creation of the Elephant Brand Bandanna Museum for Kapital. It eventually produced not one label but two: The Two Ears Brand, devoted to faithful reproductions, and The One Ear Brand, its larger and more unpredictable creative counterpart.

When Those That Know introduced the brands in 2020, Lukacek’s aim was to challenge how casually the bandanna had come to be treated. What looked like a simple square of printed cotton contained a far older and more complex history than most people realised, with origins stretching back to India and an extraordinary range of regional variations, makers and techniques.

Years of collecting taught him to recognise what had been lost. The nineteenth-century Turkey Red bandannas he studied had a depth of fabric and print that later Fast Color examples, and most modern versions, could not approach. Contemporary brands often treated the bandanna as a novelty or printed their designs on generic blanks. Lukacek was blunt about the result: the fabric, print and stitching were frequently so poor that they were barely worth discussing.

That disappointment became a challenge. “Why not try to make an authentic replica of the print and fabric?” he remembers thinking. “How hard could it be? Wrong. It took almost ten years to get it right.” Progress came through a chain of introductions to people with the right knowledge and equipment. The resulting product became The Two Ears Brand.

Printing was the first obstacle. Much of Lukacek’s research pointed towards discharge printing, in which cloth is dyed before the design is removed or bleached from the colour. Some nineteenth-century examples appear instead to have been printed with dyes and stencils. Recreating the right visual effect required more than placing an old pattern on new cotton; the method had to shape the design from the beginning.

The fabric mattered just as much. Many manufacturers use ready-made blanks with a selvedge on only one side, or simply overlock the edges. Lukacek wanted a true square woven from narrow selvedge cloth, with a thread count close to nineteenth-century originals. Those old textiles are not especially soft, but they drape beautifully and withstand use in a way that many cheaper twentieth-century examples do not.

His ambition went beyond making a better accessory. “I wanted to change the way people perceived bandannas,” he says. “It may sound grandiose, but I am one of the most passionate people on earth when it comes to them.”

The decade spent finding a suitable production route also deepened that knowledge. Lukacek continued collecting, built friendships throughout the field and eventually joined Kapital. One of his first major projects there was the Elephant Brand Bandanna Museum, which he researched and curated himself. He dated much of the collection and contributed several rare pieces. His relationship with Kapital ended after seven years, but the museum remains evidence of how seriously he approached the subject.

Authenticity, however, has a natural limit. Once a replica has been made as accurately as possible, there is little room left to move. Lukacek likens it to playing the same record repeatedly. The One Ear Brand emerged from his need to make something more original.

Working with artist Yurika Cherise Shikai, he began developing entirely new designs. Historical bandannas might provide a distant reference or help communicate an idea during the drafting process, but the finished work is not a reproduction. “I wanted to design bandannas that feel more like music albums than pieces of cloth,” he says. “You can’t really do that with replicas; the art and originality are left out of the process.”

One Ear’s bandannas are larger, intentionally unpredictable and designed to work in several ways: around the neck, as a scarf or displayed on a wall. That scale can make them difficult to sell at first, but Lukacek sees the label as a bridge between the highly specialised audience for historic bandannas and a wider group drawn to contemporary art and design. Building those bridges is, he says, much of what he has always done in Japan.

The Two Ears Brand necessarily moves more slowly. Every replica layout must be resolved precisely before it can be printed, while the hand-printing process introduces the small variations found in originals from more than a century ago. To Lukacek, those differences are part of the appeal. They ask the wearer to accept that an object can be imperfect without being poorly made, and that generic uniformity is not the same thing as quality.

At the time of our original conversation, several further designs were approaching production, including a colourway called Lancaster Blue. Whatever comes next, the two labels remain complementary expressions of the same obsession: one recovers what industrial production has forgotten; the other asks what the bandanna might still become.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Explore our current bandanna collection. You can also follow The Two Ears Brand on Facebook and Instagram.