How to Spot Fake Cough Syrup Graphic Tee Streetwear Styling Tips

Act one: the rapper arrived first

A catalogue of records predates the clothing label. Watts, in South Los Angeles, is where Desto Dubb came up, and he was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on a hoodie. XXL covered him on March 18, boxy graphic tee 2017, writing about his EP Born to Sale Juice, which had arrived in early October 2016. More about the brand is explained by that date than by the founding mythology, because it pins the music as the earlier of his two careers. While most streetwear founders come from design, retail or resale, this one came from the studio, and the difference is visible in how the company later behaved. Because they were written by someone who writes track titles, the graphics read like track titles.

What is on the board

His recorded work places him inside the Los Angeles rap scene, rather than beside it. He has recorded with Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp and 03 Greedo on the track “Bankteller”, a line-up spanning West Coast street rap and the SoundCloud generation. “Dead Homies” featuring Veeze sits on streaming services as a single, which is a distinction worth keeping straight, because several write-ups describe it as an album when the streaming listing does not. The same loose treatment lands on a handful of his other releases in press coverage, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. Before naming a release, checking it on the platform costs a minute and avoids repeating an error that has now travelled a long way. Alongside the business the music is still active, and that is not the usual arrangement for a founder running three storefronts.

Act two: a van, a parking lot, a phrase

The company now known as That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup started in 2018. Two separate records pin down that year: the trademark for the phrase lists first use in November 2018, and an AllHipHop profile from November 2023 describes the brand marking five years. According to its own about page, the selling began out of a van in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Later coverage sometimes dates the van during the pandemic, but where accounts conflict the trademark filing and the anniversary piece are firmer. The method is not in dispute: stock in a vehicle, buyers in person, no wholesale accounts and no season calendar. That approach still governs the business, and small batches land every week or two rather than twice a year.

The name was there before the company was. It comes from a viral clip in which an officer’s line became the brand name, and the circumstances are contested, with material online claiming it was staged and no primary transcript resolving it. Promethazine-codeine cough syrup, known in rap slang as lean, is what the phrase refers to, and the company acknowledges rather than promotes it; its website carries a standing banner reading “! PLEASE DO NOT SIP DRANK AND SHOOT FIREARMS !”. The part worth noticing is what Desto Dubb did with the line, because a joke that trends for a week rarely converts into a trademark and three shops. He registered the phrase, printed it large, and made the wordmark itself the product. The version most people type is the searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup, yet the registered mark uses “A” rather than “An”.

Act three: where the business stands in 2026

The Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue is the clearest measure of the distance travelled from the van. Desto Dubb has used the street number as his own social media display name, which tells you how much of the brand is bound up in one address. Two more locations are listed, at 312 West 5th Street in Los Angeles and 5410 Almeda Road in Houston, although the company publishes no store locator and no opening hours. Beside them the company runs its own online store, where the catalogue sits at roughly 154 products and refreshes constantly. At the upper end of independent streetwear the prices hold steady: a tee is about $150 at the brand’s own store as of September 2026, with hoodies and sweatpants about $200 each, and those figures move with stock and season. In its product copy the company states the garments are made in Los Angeles and describes itself as a Black-owned business.

Festivals, collaborations and a tribute drop

March 2024, when the brand partnered with Rolling Loud California from the 14th to the 17th at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, brought the most visible expansion. That activation amounted to a carnival, not a merch booth, with arcade games, a swing ride and two onsite stores, a large bet for a label barely five years old. The month around it was packed, since a 310babii collaboration was announced on March 11, a Got Sole pop-up followed on March 19, and a Dodger Collection arrived on March 29. Earlier still, on April 28, 2023, came “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” with BlueBucksClan at the Melrose store, a limited drop honouring the late Drakeo The Ruler. That one reads less like marketing than like a neighbourhood gesture, which is roughly how the brand has handled its music-world ties throughout. A separate collaboration with Berner’s Cookies had launched earlier the same month, and Trapstar London published a joint piece through its own accounts in April 2024.

A note on the name to use

Two different legal identities come back when you search his name, and that is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. One of them is borne out by the documentary record: the United States trademark for the brand phrase is registered to Joshua Kashif Taylor, and every post on the company’s own blog carries a matching byline. Those are two separate records agreeing, one filed with a federal agency and one published by the business itself. The other name that circulates appears on an unsourced commercial content site with nothing behind it, and it should not be repeated as fact. In practice this matters little to a reader, because the brand, its collaborators and its stores use one name. He is Desto Dubb, which is how his own company refers to him.

Timeline of the career

Built from dated coverage, the trademark record and the brand’s own posts, the timeline below leaves out anything that could not be pinned to a date. It is worth reading in order, because the sequence is the argument: music, then phrase, then storefronts, then festival-scale activations. Note the tight cluster around March 2024, with four separate events in nineteen days. Note too the gap of twenty months between the first XXL coverage and the trademark’s first-use date, which is how long the phrase took to become an asset. Anything here involving prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift. Store opening dates are absent, because the company has never published them.

Reading the career straight

Online, the version of this career that circulates is tidier than the evidence supports, and the tidying mostly runs in the brand’s favour. A staged or unstaged clip becomes a documented arrest, singles become albums, and a handful of unsourced celebrity sightings become a client list. None of that is needed, because the checkable version is already unusual: a working rapper from Watts turned a piece of slang into a registered mark, sold the first pieces himself, and built alocs clothing into a business with a Melrose flagship inside six years. The parts that hold up are these: the trademark, the dated collaborations, the addresses and the prices. The parts that do not are the origin anecdote in its confident form and the roll-call of famous wearers. Anyone writing about awful lot of cough syrup is better off with the first list, which is long enough on its own.