Fantasy Initiative brings sword and sorcery to streetwear

Dragons glide between the towers of a forbidden castle keep. A barbarian queen looms over a trio of slain goblins, her sword still slick with their blood. A knight peers out from the eye-slits of his helmet, gripping a candelabra tight against the encroaching dark. 

This is the world of Fantasy Initiative, the Columbus clothing brand reimagining classic sword-and-sorcery art for the streetwear crowd. Since starting the company in 2021, designer Justin Slaughter has built a devoted audience that anxiously awaits his semi-regular Saturday drops, hoping to score a coveted shirt, hat, tote bag, blanket, poster, or water bottle. Many of those fans probably couldn’t pick Frank Frazetta out of a lineup, but Slaughter says that’s okay.

“I like to believe that I’m making a clothing company that is influenced by sword and sorcery and wizards and dungeons, but you don’t have to love sword and sorcery to be able to think my stuff is cool,” he said recently over coffee in the Old North. “I take a lot of influence from other streetwear brands and clothing companies and popular fashion and things like that.”

Growing up in Columbus, Slaughter was bewitched by the usual entry-level access points to the fantasy genre: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and, once he got a little older, Conan the Barbarian. He described himself as a bookish kid, but credited a ubiquitous online role-playing game with taking his love for fantasy imagery to the next level.

“I started playing RuneScape when I was 11,” Slaughter said. “I played all through high school. I still actively pay for a membership. I haven’t played in a while because I’m too busy, but I will pay for a membership until the day that site goes black, because I love that game so much.”

Slaughter was also an active participant in the DIY metal and hardcore scenes in Columbus, and it was through that subculture that he initially became interested in fashion – not high fashion, he’s quick to clarify, but “cool T-shirts with fun graphics.” The early 2010s were a golden age for streetwear brands founded by metalcore musicians, and Slaughter soon dreamed of launching his own label.

“I’ve been involved in music and that world since I was 14,” he said. “So, a lot of it stemmed from seeing bands that I liked on Warped Tour wearing these small, scene-adjacent clothing companies that people were starting. All throughout high school, I paid attention to those.” 

It would be nearly a decade before Slaughter would start producing his own designs, but at age 17, he jumped into the music and fashion industries as a merch crew member for touring bands, slinging shirts all over the world for acts such as Beartooth and the Contortionist. He didn’t even know how to use Photoshop yet, but Slaughter said his time on tour laid the crucial groundwork for what would eventually become Fantasy Initiative. 

“I spent a decade selling T-shirts on the road for people, talking to people and listening to what people like and don’t like,” he said. “A couple of the bands that I worked for, I would work with the graphic designers that they would hire to come up with the ideas for the merchandise. I continued to be interested in that whole world.”

The pandemic provided the catalyst Slaughter needed to finally give it a go. With tours canceled for the foreseeable future, eliminating his primary income source, he started playing around with Photoshop. In short order, Slaughter developed a vocabulary to express the design sensibility he’d honed over all of his years on the road – one inspired by streetwear brands such as Brain Dead and Fuct as much as skull-and-flame metal tees. 

His first label was called Slaughter Bootlegs, and he gained near-instant notoriety for his bold, typography-heavy takes on familiar pop culture properties ranging from The Sopranos to X-Men. (As the company name suggests, Slaughter Bootlegs designs were unlicensed. It’s not uncommon for streetwear designers to start out making bootlegs, but the constant threat of cease-and-desist letters is a major reason Slaughter said he’ll never do them again.) The first reference to Fantasy Initiative appears on the back of a Slaughter Bootlegs-branded shirt from January 2022 – nearly nine months after Slaughter released his first shirt.

“I’ve been planting the seeds for the Fantasy Initiative stuff pretty much since the very beginning,” Slaughter said. “It’s what interests me. I like the freedom that it provides. The bootleg stuff, it was fine. It got the job done. It made me some money, and I’m very thankful that it allowed me to build an audience. But as soon as I was able to, I started trying to pepper in some Fantasy Initiative things.”

As Fantasy Initiative’s success allowed Slaughter to phase out the bootlegs, his artistic vision sharpened. Yes, the designs tend to depict knights, skulls, executioners, wizards, dragons, and all manner of medieval weaponry, but Slaughter’s influences from the worlds of independent street fashion and heavy music frequently creep to the forefront. One key is to look at the Fantasy Initiative wordmark. Slaughter and the artists he collaborates with have, alternately, imagined it as a spiky death metal logo, in tough-guy hardcore varsity letters, and with the overstimulated aesthetic of Online Ceramics. The result is a singular look that borrows from a lot of different things while remaining stridently its own. Fantasy Initiative shirts never look like the covers of fantasy paperbacks. Rather, they look like handsome, modern objects designed by someone who has read a lot of fantasy paperbacks.

“I’ve noticed a lot of people focus their design efforts so heavily into it being blatantly Dungeons & Dragons, or sword and sorcery, to where you lose some of the widespread appeal,” Slaughter said. 

Though the focus for Fantasy Initiative has always been on self-branded designs, Slaughter has recently begun branching out with a series of tightly curated collaborations. So far, he’s worked with the epic heavy metal band Eternal Champion, the tour-stories podcast HardLore, and Midwestern metalcore heroes Church Tongue. The collabs have helped get new eyeballs on Fantasy Initiative, but Slaughter wants to be careful that they don’t overshadow the main business. “I don’t want to be relying on these things, and I don’t want to be begging for these things,” he said. “I want it to come in a way where it feels natural.”

The Church Tongue collaboration did open the door for Slaughter’s first-ever in-person event, at the Columbus band’s hometown record release show in February. He debuted a pair of new shirts there, including a long sleeve that, in a Fantasy Initiative first, has “Columbus, Ohio” printed down the arm. Everything he brought to the show sold out.

“I spent a decade selling merch for people, so I’m very accustomed to setting up a merch table and selling things,” said Slaughter, who talked about the potential of hosting Fantasy Initiative pop-ups or even a small convention at some point in the near future. “It was a really cool experience to, for the first time ever, set up my stuff and sell it. It went better than I anticipated, and I did have a handful of people come up who wanted to say hello based on the fact that they like Fantasy Initiative, which was a very surreal thing.”