Role Model Clothing

Role Model Clothing was an apparel company run by Pierre Bouvier, Chuck Comeau from Simple Plan and their longtime friend Patrick Langlois.

The trio started the company in 2001 before the band was signed to a record deal in an effort to create clothes that represented their lifestyle and their love of music.

“We started Role Model Clothing when we started the band and we thought at the time: “Why don’t we print some t-shirts?” cause we’re already printing shirts for our band. So we thought that we could think of some designs and put them on shirts and we could have our own stuff that’s original and that no-one else has.”

– Pierre Bouvier –

Throughout the years 2001 and 2010, the members of Simple Plan – most notably Pierre and Chuck (with little exceptions of Sebastien sometimes) – were seen proudly wearing Role Model Clothing at almost all times. Ever since the beginning, the designs were created with the help of Fred Jerome (Barnik), Simple Plan’s graphic designer, who was later on also seen as a model on some of the promo pictures of Role Model Clothing.

Simple Plan fans can also spot the band members wearing Role Model Clothing in most of their music videos:

The first collection of Role Model Clothing was produced in 2001, mostly featuring black & white t-shirts, tank-tops, caps and hoodies.

In 2004, Pierre, Chuck and Patrick came up with a new collection that the guys mostly wore during the “Still Not Getting Any” era – from 2004 to 2005. This line was very similar to the 1st one, but included slightly more colorful designs.

In 2007, the brand started producing a much wider range of apparel and other accessories – available were for instance backpacks, pins or shorts. At that time Role Model Clothing also introduced a special t-shirt inspired by the TV show LOST that Pierre, Chuck and Patrick were very fond of. Since 2007, the fans of Role Model Clothing have been able to buy the apparel not only online, but also in actual stores – first in Canada, later on also in various clothing stores in Austria, France or Hungary. The full list of places where Role Model Clothing used to be available can be found here.

With the new collection in spring 2009, Role Model Clothing started using much more colors into its designs. Still being inspired by music, the new line introduced some cool and colorful designs both in men’s and women’s sizes.

Ever since 2010, the brand stopped being active mostly due to Simple Plan being very busy working on (and later promoting) their 4th studio album “Get Your Heart On!”. In an interview for SimplePlan.cz in 2013, Chuck explained the “hiatus” of their clothing line and talked a bit more about its future:

“We partnered up with someone to help us make it bigger and the partnership didn’t really work out. So we ended up splitting from that person and that company. And with the last record we’ve been so busy and we didn’t have a lot of time to put into it. It’s still something that I wanna do and I think that now that we’re touring a little less, we wanna revive the project. So to me, Role Model is not dead, we just hit pause on it for a little bit and I would like to revive it. I just think we’ll go back to simple things like hoodies and caps and t-shirts, because when we tried to take the line into a full line, it was too much and it was too quick. And I think it will be much better to keep it simple, keep it to what you guys wear, what we wear anyway.”

– Chuck Comeau –

As of right now, Patrick, Chuck and Pierre do not own the brand name anymore, which is why Rihanna was able to use it on her own merch recently. Patrick Langlois discussed the end of Role Model Clothing in more depth in an interview in 2016 and also hinted on the possibility of its limited return with its profit going to the Simple Plan Foundation:

“The thing is – we partnered up with a company and the idea was to bring you guys high quality clothes and get better distribution. And that company.. they kinda screwed us, and they sucked. And they ended up owing us a bunch of money and we had to take them to court and then they declared bancrupcy… And after all that, we kind of looked at each other like: ‘Man, what are we do? Do we like relaunch, do we rebrand, do we start over?’ And Chuck and Pierre were on tour, I was in Montreal, just had a kid, and I don’t know, like, we didn’t have it in us anymore. I think that “failure” kind of like kicked us in the balls a bit and […] so we just decided to give it up.

But now, with Rihanna! Did you see? She launched her tour merch – it says “Role Model” all over. I have a secret plan to just relaunch some classic models, limited edition, on some good quality t-shirts and give all the profit and all the money to the Simple Plan Foundation. Just for fun, you know. Not for business…”

– Patrick Langlois –

In 2017, when Simple Plan’s debut album celebrated its 15th anniversary, the band brought back two old-school designs of Role Model Clothing, which were available for a limited time in their merch stand and which both Pierre and Chuck wore each night of the tour (each of them wearing a different Role Model t-shirt) to bring the old-school No Pads vibe to the concerts.