DKNY Taps Paul Pope for Illustrated Narrative Fashion

Back in October, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that its next exhibit would feature comic book superheroes and explore their relationship to fashion. Taking this theme and running with it, DKNY hired celebrated graphic novelist and manga illustrator Paul Pope to collaborate on a capsule collection.

The resulting designs are interesting — not quite what one would expect from DKNY — but very cool. From the press release:

The line fuses the world of comics and fashion by creating a cohesive narrative which emerges through prints and graphics on clothing to create a truly unique application of this art form.

The scene is New York City, circa 2089, 100 years from the date of DKNY’s creation. The story, like much of Pope’s influential work, sets a futuristic love story against the collision of nature and industry. The prints are updated camouflage, and the graphics on tees, jackets and hoodies melds sci-fi with the prehistoric.

Possibly reacting to the resurgent obsession with Andy Warhol in the past couple of years (his prints and name have been repurposed as marketing material for everything from tote bags to Levi’s to Barney’s windows), Pope says of his new venture:

I see this line as a way of stealing Pop back from Warhol. We’ve seen comics endlessly pillaged in the high art world and adapted to film, for better or worse. We’ve seen comics images quoted in fashion and copied in street art. Comics has a cultural currency all its own. But this is maybe the first time an actual cartoonist has been given the chance to launch his own brand, to build it from the concept on up, to do it within the bounds of an established label such as DKNY Jeans.

The 15-piece line won’t hit stores till September 2008, but Nylon Magazine has the exclusive first images of the collection here.