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“Sandoval, have you slept with anyone else since you and Raquel started sleeping together?” Andy Cohen asks Vanderpump Rules star Tom Sandoval at the show’s Season 10 reunion. Only weeks prior, it was revealed that Sandoval and Raquel Leviss were having a monthslong affair behind Ariana Madix’s back, despite Sandoval having dated Ariana for nearly a decade and living with her in their shared Valley Village home.
“No,” Sandoval responds.Ariana and the other women of the cast jump in, addressing rumors of his other infidelities.
“Well, no, you know who he did sleep with after he and Raquel started sleeping together?” Ariana says. “Me.”
Sandoval chimes in: “Yeah she kept her T-shirt on, it was really hot.” An awkwardness falls over the room and translates on camera, with Cohen grimacing, DJ James Kennedy making a quizzical face, Lisa Vanderpump rolling her eyes, and Lala Kent offering up her words of wisdom, “You’re such a fucking dick, you asshole. What the fuck was that, Sandoval?” Raquel glares at him while Tom Schwartz, Sandoval’s best friend and business partner, holds his head in his hands between his knees in shame.
Sandoval’s comment was one of the lowest blows to come from the Vanderpump Rules reunion. Ariana and her fellow cast members, including her business partner Katie Maloney, heard these comments when they filmed the reunion back in March. Instead of letting Sandoval win, they decided to capitalize on his remarks and use them to their advantage by making his words into merchandise to sell for their upcoming West Hollywood sandwich shop, Something About Her. Ariana and Katie reached out to artist Carla Furey with about a week’s notice to come up with a hand-drawn T-shirt design.
“I thought it was exactly what needed to be done,” Furey tells Rolling Stone. “I love the power in that, and to do it for the sandwich shop, which is like something that is coming out of such a deliberate place with so much love and intention, I thought putting those two things together was awesome.”
Furey, a 33-year-old Los Angeles resident and longtime friend of Ariana’s, got to work without much guidance. The women trusted her and gave her the freedom to be creative and come up with her own interpretation of what Sandoval’s now-infamous statement, “Yeah she kept her T-shirt on, it was really hot,” could look like.
“I had no context outside of the fact that, unsurprisingly, some shitty things were said. I was just told he said something dismissive about like, how she fucked him in a T-shirt, and they wanted to make a shirt based on the rude comment he made with a hard rock kind of vibe,” Furey says. “When I heard that, I called him a sack of shit.”
The Vanderpump Rules cast members weren’t sure which specific episode of the reunion Sandoval’s comments would appear in, or if it would make it into the cut at all, so they gave Furey a general forewarning that they wanted a design prepped for the middle to the end of May. They weren’t certain of the timing but they were sure they wanted a T-shirt ready to go so they could promote it the night Sandoval’s comments aired on national television and they could capitalize on the moment, turning heartbreak and negativity into profit.
As an artist, Furey says she’s always dabbled in illustrations, but didn’t take her craft too seriously until the pandemic hit in 2020. Then she started taking up more independent art projects. Her work for Something About Her has been the most widely-seen and prominent art she’s publicly distributed. The T-shirt reads “Fuck Me in This T-shirt” in distressed, red letters and includes Ariana’s face with bleach blonde hair, her eyes rolling in the back of her head, and her hands pulling apart a grilled cheese sandwich.
“I only did one sketch for this. I didn’t have any other ideas,” she says. “Of course, if they didn’t like it we would have gone back to the drawing board. But we went with the first image I made.”
She wanted to incorporate a sandwich on the shirt since the profits were going to the sandwich shop and she also wanted to draw Ariana’s eyes rolling because it felt sexual. Initially, Furey says she considered doing the design in just black and white to convey the hard rock aesthetic Ariana and Katie asked for. But ultimately, she realized using color, including the red lettering, would “breathe more life” into the T-shirt.
“It’s not subtle by any means,” she says. “Red is such a great color. Aesthetically, obviously there’s power in it, and having some color was also going to ground it a little bit and feminize it.”
Furey pointed out that if you look closely at Ariana’s hands on the shirt, she’s wearing a pair of broken handcuffs which are meant to be a double entendre, signifying both a sexual connotation and also the fact that Ariana has broken free from her relationship with Sandoval and his demeaning comments about their sex life.
“As cliché as that is, I think when you’re in a relationship that no longer serves you or doesn’t do you justice, I think letting go of that feels like you’re breaking free for a lot of people,” Furey says. “And I think that’s why the shirt has resonated and has done so well, because unfortunately it’s not a singular or a unique experience to hear such casually cruel things.”
Overall, Furey thinks that’s another reason the news about Scandoval has dominated the entertainment news cycle and ignited so many people across the world to pay attention. They want to see Ariana succeed and come out on the other side of her breakup from Sandoval, Furey says, because they relate to experiencing that hardship and having a desire to triumph post-heartbreak.
“Anytime anybody’s had something happen to them like that, I think we kind of fantasize about being able to say the thing you want to say, or being able to reclaim things that are said to you, and rise above it,” Furey says. “And I think that’s really cathartic for people to see her able to thrive because of and in spite of [her breakup].”
In one episode of the Vanderpump Rules reunion, Ariana and Katie said they made $200,000 from selling merchandise for their sandwich shop that hasn’t opened up yet. This was as of the end of March, after only a couple of weeks. Now as of late June, the profit margins are projected to be much higher. According to Furey, the business owners told her the T-shirt has outsold all of their other merch “by far.” Furey still has yet to get her hands on the T-shirt she designed because its massive popularity resulted in it being instantly sold out.
“It’s done so well that it kind of broke the website and they had to change vendors and websites,” Furey says. “So we’re backlogged.”
The quickness to capitalize on Sandoval’s derogatory comments about Ariana and use it to financially fuel the opening of Something About Her was “such a brilliant move,” says Furey. The incredible success of Something About Her’s merchandise was already apparent before the Vanderpump Rules Season 10 reunion, but now with their new “Fuck Me in This T-shirt” apparel, Ariana and Katie have solidified their independence and ability to open their restaurant on their own.
“There was this desire for people to support and they wanted to put a visual to it, and to have the thought to have it fund the sandwich shop was just killer,” Furey says. “They don’t need investors now. I think that the fans will love that place even more, knowing that they were a part in making it happen.”
Being involved in this women-run business is also motivational to Furey, who says there are women in charge and making decisions at every turn when it comes to Something About Her. It’s not surprising to her that it’s Ariana at the helm, who has always been an encouraging support system to the people around her.
“Ariana has always been her friends’ greatest champion,” Furey says. “That’s what she does. It’s, like, peak women-supporting-women, which makes it a great pleasure and a privilege to work on these projects.”
After making the “Fuck Me in This T-shirt,” shirt, Furey also designed the shop’s “better halves” crewneck sweatshirt which she says she had more direction from Ariana and Katie regarding what their specific vision was for the graphic. The crewneck, which comes in soft pink and a shade of white described as “bone,” depicts one part of a sandwich that is neatly put together and aesthetically pleasing on a white plate with blue trimming which reads “the better halves” juxtaposed against a messy, molded-looking half of a sandwich with a knife sticking through it above the plate and stuck to an imaginary wall. The artist says this specific design was fun for her to create in terms of the process, because the “intricacies of the beauty in the sharpness of that kind of feminine perfection” against the grosser-looking sandwich was a drastic contrast.
“That had always been a comment or a joke that had been thrown around in the comments sections online,” Furey says. “Katie said she wanted it to look like a beautiful, diamond half of a sandwich and then just a disgusting, sorry excuse for half a sandwich stabbed on the wall in the back. Then Ariana said, ‘Just make it gory and disgusting.’”
According to Furey, Ariana and Katie paid her triple her going rate for her designs. She also says while they don’t have plans in the immediate future to work on any new merch since they’re still trying to keep up with the demand from their most recent drop, the Something About Her business owners eventually want to work with Furey again on new designs to sell for the store.
The fans’ response to Furey’s artwork has come at a wonderful time for her, she says, since she recently moved back to Los Angeles and is in a moment of transition. For the first few days after the T-shirt was released for purchase online, Furey says she spent most of her time fielding messages from people who noticed she was the artist behind the shirt. It’s been inspirational for Furey to see how much people like the design and, in turn, enjoy her artwork. She says the whole experience has been life-changing.
“It just kind of all fell into place,” Furey says. “I think artists in general kind of suffer from some level of imposter syndrome and I think it’s also easy to get in your head when you don’t have a lot of feedback, plus I know that my style is very specific. So to get all of this amazing feedback from people who I would probably never have otherwise had eyes on my stuff is incredible.”
