Ask any Pokémon fan what's on their diaries and you will get one answer – the release date of Rob Letterman's film "Detective Pikachu" (you're warned, it looks super adorable and unbearably cute).
So it was only natural for French designer Christelle Kocher to turn to Pikachu as an inspiration for her Koché collection, showcased atop Shibuya’s Tsutaya bookstore during Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo.
The show mainly featured designs from her A/W 19 collection presented during Paris Fashion Week, but, in between, there were several new pieces designed in collaboration with Nintendo's Detective Pikachu series.
The capsule featured both streetwear pieces such as her trademark collaged soccer jerseys, logo-covered baseball caps, and more elegant dresses with yellow lace silhouettes of Pikachu appliqued on a black background.
Kocher is also the artistic director of Maison Lemarié (owned by Chanel and known for its fabric flowers and feathered decorative elements, the maison is among the last ones representing the art of the plumassier), so in a way Kocher tried to take in this case a popular icon and elevate it to Haute Couture (is this the first time a video game character goes couture?), while forging new bonds with the Japanese culture.
For some of the pieces in this collection she worked indeed with local patternmakers and produced some of the looks in Japan (this connection strengthened also when it came to the runway casting, with local models selected from the streets).
This dichotomy in the collection between street styles and more elegant dresses reflected the cross-generational power of Pokémon: with over 100 video games for different consoles and platforms, plus animated series and films, collectable card games and the successful PokémonGo phone app, Pokémon has gone from strength to strength since 1996, transforming and mutating, adapting and winning new fans.
It is certainly not difficult to find garments with Pokémon characters for children, but Pokémon mania has been trending also with grown-ups, turning into an unstoppable phenomenon.
In 2016 Prabal Gurung partnered with the Pokémon company and came up with a nine-piece capsule (sold exclusively through Jeffrey New York) with motifs, details and colour palettes inspired by the cutest Pokémon characters.
Jeremy Scott's S/S 19 collection featured intarsia sweaters with Pikachu; GCDS' S/S 19 collection also included cartoonish jumpers and boots inspired by Pokémon; Bobby Abley Men's A/W 19 designs seemed worthy of the best Pokémon trainers out there and included Pokéball ponchos and tracksuits with Squirtle, Charmander and Pikachu among the other characters.
Last year Hiroshi Fujiwara's Fragment Design also released designs featuring Pokémon prints, while, in February 2019, 10.Deep referenced instead Pokémon villains Team Rocket in its T-shirts and hoodies. At the time of writing this post there are rumours about a Pokémon x adidas collaboration being in the works (in case you will be looking for shoes to wear with your Koché wardrobe…).
The most interesting thing about such collaborations is the fact that there seems to be a growing number of brands and companies (some of them from the luxury market) interested in getting into licensing agreements with companies behind popular cartoons and video games and use them for products destined to older consumers (up until a few years ago such licensing agreements were mainly sought by companies doing products for children).
Kocher is not new to collaborations as her multi-year agreement with the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club also proves and, in this case, the designer tried to be consistent with her passion for the video game (that she used to play as a young girl), her knowledge of French lace and the new incarnation of Pikachu as an edgy and cool video game and film character.
That said, Koché is a luxury label so the Pikachu-themed designs may not come cheap, this means it may prove difficult to "catch them all" for the Pokémon fans. Time will tell if they become popular, but this latest collaboration continues to prove that the luxury market is constantly developing ideas and products for younger consumers (or for cross-generational consumers in the case of Pokémon…). Anybody up for Jigglypuff-inspired couture ball gowns?
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