Designers

This past February, Sotheby’s auctioned off a ton of original work by contemporary superstar-artists like Andreas Gursky, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, with proceeds benefiting The Global Fund AIDS relief program. Damien Hirst has since released a limited number of t-shirts featuring prints of the original work done by these artists for, well, a lot less than the original work went for (with proceeds still going straight to The Global Fund).

Available at Damien Hirst’s website: Other Criteria

[via highsnobiety]

At the PSFK Conference New York 08, Jeff Staple of Staple Design talks about the process he went through to develop new shoes for the Nike Considered range. He discusses how a company that doesn’t come from the green arena can make moves to get sustainable and avoid the backlash.

The project was code name Ecotech, environmentally sustainable shoe. Richard Clark was getting no love from Nike. You have a $15billion company with 2000 shoes with no regard to the environment at all. So if we set resources to make one shoe to save the environment, what do the other 1999 styles say? He needed to come together with a brand of radicals within Nike, had to go to an outside agency which was Staple Design because we’d been doing work with them before. So having to change hears is a very different paradox to work with. We had to change people’s opinions one person at a time. We developed a shoe – these were early sketches. What does it have to do? What are the checkpoints to allow us to call it environmentally sustainable? Goes from materials to manufacturing, production, even through sales and marketing. Everything has to be green. And these are some of the images (SHOWS PICTURES). Ended up calling it Nike Considered. In our space downtown, we did the launch for it. Nike has to deal with the backlash. We don’t want to come off as saviors, turn into bad PR. People think we’re trying to brush away what happened with our labor issues. It was gorilla, grass roots. It was about innovation and technology and doing something good with that. But it wasn’t saving the world. We converted our space into a workshop so that my mission was to dispel any doubt people might have had, what’s hiding up Nike’s sleeve? We laid it all out. There is not glue, toxins, adhesives, every piece is renewable, no air freighting. We had to show and prove. We nailed shoes to the wall split them open, and proved it to everybody. Here is Air Jordan next the green one. It’s all about high performance, $200 footwear, and then buy the next one. But this one, #23, the final Air Jordan, is completely made with Considered sensibilities in it. But there’s no PR behind it at all. It’s the evolution from that to that. The idea is to get people into this culture is to buy it and discover it on their own. So the evolution from what we did in 2002 to now 2008, people in the NBA now playing in a green shoe. You can say what you want about Nike, but it is an amazing thing. If you can turn a big ship just a little bit, it’s amazing what the ripple effect can be.

The full video from this panel will be available soon on http://psfktv.blip.tv

Karl Lagerfeld has been up to some crazy stuff since taking the helm of Chanel, jumping head first into more arts initiatives and marketing campaigns than we can keep track of. We’ve reported on some of them, such as the microsite where you can tour Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment, the documentary film following the designer’s every move, and the collaboration with Zaha Hadid on a mobile art museum.

But for new media marketing folk and video game fans who don’t really follow the fashion industry, today’s Lagerfeld news might be the most interesting. It’s just been announced that the designer will be playing a role in the newest installment of Grand Theft Auto, where he’ll DJ on air at the game’s K109 The Studio station. Rockstar Games has produced an animation of Lagerfeld (above), and players will be able to listen to him spin as they play the game.

From WWD:

Players can pick from multiple radio stations for the soundtrack, ranging from licensed songs to new ones. Lagerfeld picked his favorite electronica and dance music and peppered the selection with some of his rapid-fire commentary.
“They had written a politically incorrect dialogue,” the designer said. “I loved it, [particularly] in a time when everybody wants to be so politically correct when they talk.”
He didn’t have to dig too deep to find his music selection. “Music is part of the life of fashion, too,” he said. “Through the famous sound stylist Michel Gaubert, I’m very much ‘au courant’ and know what’s going on.”

WWD: Karl Spins for Grand Theft Auto 

We’re big fans of Rei Kawakubo and the fashion empire she’s built without ever compromising her crazy creative visions. She’s kind of like the godmother of modern Japanese fashion. Constantly breaking the rules, her Comme des Garcons label and its various offshoots somehow continue to sell, allowing Kawakubo to take ever more chances.

So we were pretty delighted to hear that this fall, Kawakubo will be the guest designer for H&M, producing a line of men’s, women’s, and even some children’s clothes. There will be a unisex fragrance in the mix too, which isn’t surprising given that fragrance is one of Comme des Garcons’ fortes. Like other designers before Kawakubo, this capsule collection will be a great way for Comme des Garcons to raise name recognition and build a consumer base outside of Japan.

Rei Kawakubo says:

“I have always been interested in the balance between creation and business. It is a dilemma, although for me creation has always been the first priority. It is a fascinating challenge to work with H&M, since it is a chance to take the dilemma to its extreme and try and solve it.”

H&M creative advisor Margareta van den Bosch says:

“Rei Kawakubo has been at the top of our wish list for a long time and we are thrilled that she has chosen to collaborate with us.”

The collection will be unveiled in early November at the grand opening of H&M’s second store in Tokyo, and will roll out in global markets a few days later.

[picture from Comme des Garcons autumn 2008 collection]

Related PSFK article: Inside Rei Kawakubo’s Head

With the upcoming summer Olympics in Beijing and a growing consumer market, sportswear brands are fiercely battling it out in China to find the right mix of Western and Chinese elements in their designs. The Wall Street Journal profiles the efforts of Nike and Adidas, two of the biggest players who are experimenting with new design elements such as Chinese characters, images, colors and athletes to find that uniquely “Chinese” style.

Nike has recently introduced a new line called 1984, which commemorates the first year China participated in the Olympics under the Communist government. Nike is also playing on nationalistic sentiment with its slogan of 起来前进 (”rise and advance”), a phrase frequently used to describe China’s development over the past 50 years. In terms of spokesmen, Nike’s face for the Olympics is Liu Xiang, the gold medal hurdler and one of the most familiar faces on the streets of Shanghai. Other sponsored athletes are the Milwaukee Bucks’ Yi Jianlian, tennis player Li An and swimmer Wu Peng.

Adidas, who has spent more than $80 million to become an official partner of the Olympics is the official outfitter for China’s medal winners and ran a competition to design the athletes’ attire. The director of Adidas Creation Center in Shanghai says that having a design center in Shanghai “enables us to be closer to the Chinese consumer, to understand emerging trends within sports and to design and develop concepts on shorter timelines.”

Balancing Chinese cultural elements with Western design is a delicate act that has resulted in embarrassment and nationalist backlash before in China. However, for sportswear brands in China, the risk is worth the potential reward. Terry Rhoads, managing director of Zou Marketing, a Shanghai-based sports-marketing firm, explains that the companies “will do whatever they can to tell the story, ‘we were the partner in China’s greatest sporting moment…It’s a huge battle.”

WSJ: Stylish Sportswear With Designs on China

[via Next Great Thing]

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.

In WWD yesterday, there was an interesting look at how the fashion industry has embraced branded entertainment in recent years. While fashion in film is nothing new, lately there’s been a sharp rise in both indie labels and mainstream fashion houses producing their own shorts to serve as marketing vehicles.

Some of the more well-known, highly publicized examples of this include:

• Kate Moss in a slinky, ethereal black-and-white Agent Provocateur series called “The Four Dreams of Miss X”
• Prada’s animated short called “Trembled Blossoms” that debuted at NY Fashion week, and features wood nymphs and bugs that metamorphose into sandals and handbags
• Erin Fetherston’s short films that star silver screen actors Kirsten Dunst and Zooey Deschanel, shot by photographer Ellen von Unwerth

Why are fashion designers picking up the camera to showcase their clothing in motion pictures? Surely it has something to do with their inherent creativity, and their desire to express this creativity through multiple channels; in many ways the runway can be a pretty uninspiring canvas for showing off one’s designs. Then again, the motive might be less artistic and more monetary. Short videos are quite the powerful marketing tool nowadays, to say the least — and cheap, too. While a runway show lives for 30 mins at the most, and may be viewed a couple thousand times online, a short video can be created for mere pennies (of course, costs can run into the hundreds of thousands), uploaded to YouTube, gather millions of views around the globe, and live on forever.

WWD: Reel Style: Fashion on Film (subscription req.)

These idea reports from PSFK are designed to give the reader inspiration and new ideas to help them in their work. In our busy world where information is so readily available, PSFK has curated our selection of the data out there and mixed this with original reporting including exclusive interviews. We developed these documents so that you can read them while on the plane or train or just any moment where you can take a break and delve deeply into the latest ideas and trends.

In the PSFK Retail Ideas Report Vol 1 2008, PSFK asks emerging designers who showed at the New York alternative fashion show Capsule where they get their inspiration from; we spotlight new ideas at leading retailers such as IKEA, Apple, Target; we look at the impact of ‘Free’; and also look at the environmental trends driving change in retail.

PSFK Ideas Reports are available digitally for only $100 per title. A set of five costs just $200. Read more about them here including information on how to get a free copy of PSFK Arts & Culture Ideas Report Vol 1. For details of our other reports, read more about them here.

PSFK Idea Reports

Chang Le Road in Shanghai is known as the place to find fashionistas and young hipsters in China. And driving the new fashion trends are young, entrepreneurial Chinese designers who have set up boutiques or joined together into design collectives along the tree-lined street in the former French Concession.

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, Lorraine Justice, head of the school of design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic, describes this new wave of Chinese fashion:

“They’re not totally Italian with high drama and not Japanese with understatement over strong basic structure…The Chinese deconstructionists are unique. There is a pragmatism and experimentalism and a visual impact. This is why I see Chinese fashion becoming another great icon for the fashion world. There is an energy.”

The clientèle at Shanghai’s boutiques is a mix of Shanghai locals, expatriates and travelers from Taiwan, Hong Kong or China’s inner provinces. While some bargains can be found, prices for items like fashionable trench coats can easily be double the average monthly salary of a recent Chinese college graduate. However, the market is still small and the store fronts of the boutiques seem to change every few months. As one Chinese designer, Alex Ying Jianxia, explains:

“Ah, yes, in China there are not so many who would be comfortable wearing this look,” Ying said. “It is hard to wear, but when it works, it looks great.”

[via IHT]