King of Jeans

Long Live the King of Jeans

What will become of Passyunk Avenue's most garish landmark?

SQUAT PLOT: The two oddly positioned figures in the famous King of Jeans sign have a limited amount of time left at Passyunk and 13th, where they’ve made out awkwardly since 1994. But will they end up in a museum, or in the trash?
Neal Santos

“I always kind of wanted to live in a dream world where Duran Duran artwork comes to life, and the King of Jeans sign offers kind of a localized version of that fantasy,” says Matt Korvette, frontman of the band Pissed Jeans, which titled its 2009 album King of Jeans. The idea of a King of Jeans, says Korvette, “seemed both classy and boastful, and it fit the mood of the record.” Some of the band’s members lived in South Philly near the iconic, Nagel-esque sign at Passyunk Avenue and 13th Street at the time, and Korvette remembers finding the sign “outrageously garish and hilarious, and also sexy?” the first time he saw it. “I knew instantly I would have zero interest in shopping in that store, but that I wanted it to remain in business forever.” 

King of Jeans closed in 2012 after almost 40 years in business, though; last Wednesday, the Zoning Board of Adjustment granted the current owner of the building, Andy Kaplan of Rockland Capital, permission to go forward with his plans to develop the site into a five-story, retail-and-office space with 12 apartments on the top three floors. Since the inhabitants of those apartments will probably want windows unobstructed by an enormous squatting woman in hot pants, the question is this: What will happen to the King of Jeans sign, indisputably a South Philly landmark?

“Some people loved it, some people hated it, but it became part of the neighborhood,” says Izak Farbiarz, who owned King of Jeans, a family business, from the late ’70s until it closed. The sign went up in 1994, and has been the subject of many strong opinions ever since. “Most of the people really did like it,” he adds. In addition to being a “Take a left at the King of Jeans” neighborhood landmark, over the past 20 years, the sign even became a tour-bus attraction. “People would get out of the bus and take pictures of my sign,” says Farbiarz, still sounding a bit mystified.

The sign now on Passyunk isn’t the original, which had to be replaced due to weathering, but Farbiarz says it’s a near-exact replica — “Well, the eyebrows are backwards, but everything’s the same, yeah.” He considered a new design when he had to replace it, but says he was told to keep it as it was. “I was going to try to change it to make it more like a Calvin Klein black-and-white type sign, and the city wouldn’t allow me to do it. … They said, ‘We didn’t approve the first sign; we’re afraid for you to do something different.’ They were kind of scared because they thought it was too sexual, which it really wasn’t. So I figured I’d leave it the way it is, who cares?”

The sign and location of King of Jeans might lead one to assume that it was an old-school Italian-American business. That was the target clientele, but King of Jeans’ owners actually reflected the early diversification of South Philadelphia in the ’70s — Farbiarz is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, and his then-wife and co-owner was the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who moved to South Philadelphia two decades after the Farbiarzes. (The man in the sign has a heart tattoo that reads “Jade,” the name of their daughter.) 

Farbiarz says he’s taken a lot of flak for the sign over the years, particularly from people who find the woman’s squatting posture demeaning. “One time, a lady came into my store —she’s like, ‘I hate your sign, I’ll never shop in this store.’ And then she’s buying something! I’m like, ‘So why are you here?’ She’s like, ‘Well, you’ve got the best prices.’ Exactly! Even bad publicity’s good publicity.” 

The odd positioning of the two figures wasn’t the result of misogyny, insists Farbiarz. It was because he wanted to fit both a male and female figure into the sign — “I was probably the first jeans store in Philadelphia to carry men’s and women’s”— but had to fit them both into the awkward horizontal space on the front of his building. 

Farbiarz’s initial idea was “two people standing and hugging. … I had a bag from Italy with a picture of a guy and a girl standing, holding each other; that was the idea, from my bag.” 

He showed the bag to Angel of Angel’s Airbrush, still located right across Passyunk from King of Jeans. (She also did, among many other things, the façade at Lorenzo’s.) Farbiarz remembers Angel told him, “ ‘It’s not going to work. It’ll work better this way.’” Since Farbiarz wanted to keep the figures as large as he’d envisioned them, both would need to be contorted to be only about half their height, like giants crammed into a normal-sized room. Angel came up with the idea of one bending down to kiss the other, and Farbiarz says he liked Angel’s sketch better than his original idea. “It was more romantic!” he laughs.

Kaplan says that, having just gotten the go-ahead last week, he doesn’t have a schedule for construction yet. He is well aware, though, that people are very invested in the two figures on the front of the building. “There is a lot of interest in the sign; we are trying to figure out the most altruistic route.” Kaplan says that they’re “exploring options,” but couldn’t go into detail. 

Farbiarz says he’s out of the loop now, but remembers some options being thrown around in 2012 when he initially sold the building. “The person I sold to originally was going to use it in the construction of the [new] building. But he resold it to somebody else” — that being Kaplan — “so now my hands are out of it,” says Farbiarz. Also, he says, “there’s something called the Philadelphia Museum, they were interested in it at one time. ... Call the museum, see if they can get it from the new owner!”

We did. “I’m really looking forward to the possibility of the sign coming to the Philadelphia History Museum,” says Kristen Froehlich, director of collections at the recently reopened PHM. “We’re looking at the 20th century and trying to add pieces to our collection — and it really is a 20th-century landmark.” 

The previous developer had been discussing the possibility of the PHM acquiring the sign — a lot more feasible than you’d think, as it breaks down into more manageable-sized pieces for transport and installation. But when the property was resold, the PHM assumed that the deal to get the sign was off. Froehlich says that since hearing about the zoning board’s decision, she’s reached out to Kaplan, but also can’t say anything definite yet.

Her desire to see the sign preserved is at least a little bit personal as well as professional, says Froehlich, a longtime resident of South Philly and a Temple grad. “I was a child of the ’80s, and that is such an icon of ’80s graphic style. It takes me back to my youth — makes me feel young again. It’s just so perfect.”

Korvette says he hopes that the namesake of Pissed Jeans’ third album is preserved in some form. “It’s just curious, and uniquely Philadelphian, and I think most Philadelphians cling dearly to anything uniquely born of this city, good or bad.”