WEAR YOUR SCARS LIKE ARMOR
There is no shortage of clothing companies willing to slap a skull on a black T-shirt, throw some distressed lettering around it, and call the result “dark.” Spend five minutes in the underground music scene and you’ve seen enough mass-produced rebellion to last a lifetime.
Any Means Necessary Clothing is not that shit.
The Ohio-based independent brand caught our attention because underneath the brutal artwork, hyenas, skeletal figures, grim imagery, and unapologetically abrasive aesthetic is something considerably heavier than fashion: mental health, survival, resilience, and giving a visual language to shit people often struggle to explain.
That immediately puts Any Means Necessary on familiar ground for anyone who lives inside deathcore, hardcore, metalcore, industrial, or the darker corners of alternative culture. Heavy music has always been a place where ugly emotions are allowed to exist without being cleaned up for public consumption. Rage, depression, anxiety, isolation, trauma, self-doubt—we scream about these things because sometimes whispering doesn't fucking work.
Any Means Necessary seems to understand that.
The company describes its mission as creating a space where people can “wear their truth,” embrace their struggles, and find strength during their darkest moments. Its entire identity is built around survival rather than pretending darkness doesn't exist.
And that philosophy isn't some marketing department desperately trying to attach a cause to a clothing line.
Co-owner and principal artist Shawn Coss is an Ohio dark artist whose work became closely associated with mental-health advocacy after his 2016 Inktober Illness project, a series of illustrations depicting different mental illnesses. Coss has also spoken about his background in nursing, and Any Means Necessary says that experience helped inform the brutally direct visual language behind the work.
The response was massive because the artwork didn't sanitize anything.
It wasn't inspirational typography over a sunset.
It wasn't “good vibes only.”
It wasn't another goddamn coffee mug telling somebody with depression to smile.
It was uncomfortable, distorted, horrifying and strangely beautiful—and people recognized themselves in it.
That work ultimately expanded into the It's All In Your Head books and related artwork. Any Means Necessary says the books have sold more than 150,000 copies and have been used by therapists as a way of helping people communicate experiences that can be incredibly difficult to put into words.
That same DNA bleeds directly into the clothing.
Designs such as Internal Suffering, Always Smile, and the beautifully nihilistic I Hate It Here don't feel like mental-health slogans manufactured for Mental Health Awareness Month. They look like something you'd actually see somebody wearing at a deathcore show while standing three feet from a wall of death. The current catalog stretches across shirts, hoodies, jackets, hats, art prints, books, accessories and more, while officially licensed collaborations—including Type O Negative—make the brand's connection to darker alternative culture even more obvious.
Then there's the hyena.
Any Means Necessary has built its community around that animal as a symbol of survival and an unwillingness to back down. Their message is essentially that the damaged, discarded and misunderstood aren't alone—there are a hell of a lot more of us than society likes to admit.
The company currently describes that community as 150,000 strong.
That's the part that resonates.
Mental illness can be unbelievably isolating. It can convince someone that nobody else thinks like they do, feels like they do, or understands what is happening behind their eyes. Art cannot magically fix that. Neither can a hoodie.
But representation matters.
Sometimes seeing the chaos in your head represented on somebody else's canvas can remind you that you're not the only motherfucker fighting that particular monster.
Any Means Necessary calls its philosophy “ARMOR UP”—taking the things that make someone feel vulnerable and refusing to treat them as reasons for shame.
For the heavy-music community, that message should sound extremely familiar.
Deathcore has never been about pretending everything is fine.
It's about taking the worst shit inside you, tuning down to Drop Fucking Oblivion, opening the pit, and turning pain into something powerful.
Any Means Necessary does essentially the same thing with ink and fabric.
The result is a brand that looks vicious without feeling hollow, carries a message without becoming preachy, and understands something underground culture figured out decades ago:
Sometimes the people dressed in the darkest shit are the ones fighting hardest to stay alive.
That makes Any Means Necessary more than another clothing company worth checking out.
It makes them part of the fucking scene.
ARMOR UP. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT ART. WEAR YOUR TRUTH.
Want to check them out? Use our ambassador link below and save 10% on your order:
ANY MEANS NECESSARY — SAVE 10%