Patrick Fant Will Make You a Nice "Mossy Oak Break-Up" Casket

Patrick Fant is looking for a crossover fashion/funereal hit. He makes "themed burial products," as he puts it, and his company, WhiteLight, in Dallas, TX, is the first business in the country with a patent to make logoed caskets. Your Uncle Bill was in the Screaming Eagles and you want to put the insignia on his steel casket? WhiteLight can do it with its "photo laminate" process.

And now Fant thinks New Yorkers are ready for the next step: camouflaged caskets.

"I'd love to do fashion camouflage caskets. That would be so cool," Fant says. "Funeral directors won't be amused. They don't shift gears easily. But the consumer is the one who embraces new themes." The consumer in mind is the New York hipster in urbanized, fashionized camouflage shirts, skirts and sneakers who one day is going to die, and may just want to die in the same style that he or she lived. WhiteLight developed a camouflaged casket two years ago using a licensed hunting camo pattern, "Mossy Oak Break-Up," and began selling the caskets mostly to the families of outdoorsmen.

"That casket is called 'Memories of the Hunt,'" Fant says. "There are roughly 300 of them in the ground now. We sell them mostly in the Midwest and South, particularly Michigan and Texas."

"Memories of the Hunt," a green steel casket with its sides laminated with camouflage and icons of elk, deer and wild turkeys, costs $2750, and can be shipped by overnight air freight. The interior crepe comes in "Rose Tan."

Fant hit upon the idea of personalizing caskets while arranging for his aunt's funeral back in 1997. "Everything about her services was so plain. I wanted to create something to identify her but didn't have anything," he says.

The closest Fant has come to selling a camouflaged casket of any kind in New York City is selling the hunting camouflage casket to a Plattsburg funeral director, Steve Drown. Drown says that logoed caskets are "the greatest thing since Coca-Cola," but adds, "I don't know if there is camouflage crossover potential."

Yet there may be. Richard Lequerique, a funeral director with the Buckley Funeral Home on the edge of the fashion district, seems pretty openminded about the idea. Of course, he's seen a lot in his 35 years as a funeral director; he once figured out a way to legally bury someone in a pet cemetery (hint: cremate them first).

"In terms of making a fashion statement with a camouflaged casket, you can't really figure out the psychology behind such a decision," Lequerique says. "But it never ceases to amaze me what people want." Lequerique wouldn't put a camouflaged casket in his small show room, but says he would gladly put it in his casket photo book. He adds, "The funeral business takes a while to catch up to new ideas. We're not fashion-driven in terms of casket sales. People are driven by what they have to spend."

Would fashion-conscious New Yorkers go to their graves in camouflaged caskets?

"Honestly, the idea makes me laugh," says Liz, a 22-year-old shopping on W. Broadway, sporting a tight orange-red-and-black camouflage tanktop, piercings and short, spiky blonde hair. "But fashion has always been about doing the next bizarre thing that no one else has done. Someone'll probably do it."

Ian, a compact 27-year-old clothing and textile designer in Park Slope who is pretty sure he owns no camouflage, but might, says, "Personally, I think you're out of your gourd to be buried in such a way. But there are people freaky enough to do this."

Over in the East Village, a fellow named John and his buddies, all twentysomething ex-NYU guys in jeans and baseball caps, shake their heads. "Camouflage on caskets would just be a trend," John says. "Trends pass, but death is forever. There's no way New Yorkers would commit such a faux paus as to be buried in a camouflage casket."

It all goes back to what Lequerique says about psychology. How important is your fashionable self-image, even in death?

"Caskets are something at the end of the evolution of the 'me' generation, of self-indulgent generations," says Fant. "Such generations will want to do something different and unique with their own death."