By Ruth Finch
Streetwear designer Tyler Wichmann and his wife, Jessica, founded their clothing brand Timeless Thrills in 2011. Originally just a Facebook page, a website and a trunk of T-shirts, they found enough success to open a brick-and-mortar store in East Sacramento in 2016. They wanted a physical location to not only sell their clothes, but to serve as a community hub.
“We found ourselves doing a lot of events and pop-up shops, art shows,” Wichmann says, “having food and drink vendors come in and set themselves up to the point that that whole ‘hub for the community’ was really ringing true.”
A Sacramento native, Wichmann went to Sacramento City College until he transferred to New Mexico Highlands University on a baseball scholarship. He graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in business, and after working a series of unfulfilling sales jobs, he decided to revisit a passion he’d been fostering since childhood and work for himself.
“I was always into fashion and clothing and collected and resold shoes in middle school and high school,” Wichmann says. “I had this knack and this passion for clothes.”
After opening the physical store for Timeless Thrills, the owners used the space to sell clothes and accessories like lighters and pins, and they had a newsstand where they stocked print media. “I grew up before we had the internet and the phones,” Wichmann says. “All I would do is look at magazines and collect magazines.”
The art shows started as a way to premiere work that they would stock in their newsstand, a collection of zines and photobooks created by Sacramento artists, as well as streetwear publications like Suspend Magazine and Pages Magazine. Their first show, titled “Solera” featured photos from photographer Paulo Buencamino and his zine by the same name. The photos were displayed among the store’s regular merchandise, wherever they would fit.
“We still had all these different shelving units on the wall and so it looked very different,” Wichmann says. “We would display photos on top of a shelf or kind of just leaning on the wall.”
Timeless Thrills has long served as a communal meeting space. Going back to the physical store’s inception, they were known for something else — ping pong tournaments.
“I called it the underground ping pong league, but we would do tournaments about every month and you had to be on the ping pong newsletter to get the sign up link to register for the tournament,” Wichmann says. “It was as serious as you could take ping pong without involving money.”
Since they held the last ping pong tournament in September 2023 — with Wichmann in the lead in the tournaments’ power rankings — they’ve only grown more committed to the exhibitions held at Timeless Thrills, transitioning to a space focused on exhibitions in December of the same year.
Their first exhibition as a full-time gallery, entitled “Battle Royale,” was curated by Britton McFetridge, local tattoo artist and organizer of the Capitol City Classic tattoo convention. McFetridge helped push Timeless Thrills into its current form.
“He kind of gave us some influence in terms of maybe some things needed to change in here where it’s not so much that setting of a boutique or gift shop, but more that of a gallery,” Wichmann says. “My wife and I had some big talks over a span of a couple of weeks and in the end, this was the direction that we felt we had always been heading, and that was his opportunity and his idea to do that show.”
With that exhibit, they took clothing racks and shelves off the wall, transforming the space into what it is now.
“We really took the gallery sense of it very serious and went with blank walls and added a ton of lighting and basically gave the space a true makeover in terms of becoming legitimate,” Wichmann says. “I needed it to be a legitimate art gallery space.”
Their current exhibition, “Over Under & Through,” has an accompanying zine for sale featuring all 38 photos from the exhibition, which runs through Aug. 9. Photographers included in the exhibit were asked to submit one photo encapsulating their interpretation of the exhibit’s title, which was drawn from children’s book author and photographer Tana Hoban and her book of the same name.
Proceeds from the zine will go toward Unión Del Barrio, an organization dedicated to promoting and defending the human rights and class interests of Latin Americans in the United States.
Timeless Thrills’ transition to a gallery seems to be the most logical next step in the space’s winding history, one that both Wichmanns felt is in the right direction.