Our Story

Bad Brooklyn began the year everything turned upside‑down. We celebrate contradiction—bad & good, day & night, clean & chaotic, polished & raw—because that push‑and‑pull is the heartbeat of New York. Think polished brownstones splattered with subway grime, sunrise optimism colliding with midnight grit. In those tensions we find freedom, proof that beautiful things grow in the cracks. 

Our standard‑bearer is the Brooklyn rat: resourceful, misunderstood, and impossible to ignore. Like the rat, we thrive in the margins, dodging trends and ripping up the rulebook. There are no seasons here, no stitched‑on labels telling you how or when to wear a piece. Just garments that hit like soundtrack moments. 

Alexander Egan is an artist and entrepreneur who has spent 95 % of his life crisscrossing New York. From a floor‑level Williamsburg apartment and late‑night wanderings through Manhattan’s neon canyons to Catskills cabins, Hudson Valley lofts, Long Island shorelines, uptown walk‑ups, Queens warehouses, and Staten Island storefronts—he’s collected vantage points as varied as the state itself. 

A fiery redhead—sometimes dubbed “the Red Herring”—he channels that spark straight into his work, venturing where no one else looks: forgotten tunnels, half‑lit rooftops, midnight diners, hunting for the liminal grit that hides in plain sight. Decades chasing textures—cracked subway tiles, midnight billboards, lens‑flare skylines—now funnel into wearable art. 

In 2025 he founded Bad Brooklyn to turn those street‑level stories into clothes. The city’s most notorious resident, the rat, is Bad Brooklyn’s badge of resilience and rebellion. 

Alexander works in the gray areas, abandoning black‑and‑white rules for the spectrum of possibility that is Bad Brooklyn. Each graphic starts as a sketch in a beat‑up notebook, evolves through alleyway photo walks, and ends up screen‑printed in lean runs that feel more like mixtapes than merchandise. Alexander designs for anyone ready to rewrite the dress code and live a little upside‑down.