For luxury fashion houses collaborating with a cool brand means winning the loyalty of new and younger consumers. A cool collaboration, cleverly marketed and packaged, can result in garments and accessories that can produce an instant buying frenzy in consumers.
A good example can be the collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Supreme, launched while Kim Jones was the Creative Director of the menswear collections at the French fashion house. Jones combined again high fashion with streetwear yesterday on Dior's Men's Pre-Fall 2020 runway. Showcased on the eve of Art Basel Miami Beach, the collection in the sunny pastels of Miami's glamorous Art Deco District, featured two collaborations, one with Shawn Stussy and the other with Air Jordan.
The founder of American clothing brand Stüssy designed a graphic logo in his trademark style, that then was replicated on knits, shirts, hats and bags; at times the logo was also embroidered and covered in beads, in an attempt at elevating street styles to couture.
The Air Dior shoes consisted instead in high-tops (made in Italy with the same leather of Dior's bags) with the iconic swoosh recombined with the Dior logo.
While this collection won't be available immediately, the collaborative partnership between Italian fashion house Prada and adidas is going to be released today. It consists in 700 numbered limited-edition bundles comprising the Superstar shoes and a Bowling Bag (available exclusively through the online retail channels of both brands for around $3,170). The bundle will be followed by a white, black, and silver version of a Prada x adidas sneaker in March 2020.
But it is not just luxury houses that are looking for business partners with street cred. For quite a while now auction houses have been trying to educate and attract new art collectors. Yet, perfectly knowing that there aren't many relatively young and extremely wealthy people who can and want to afford a rare painting or sculpture, the auction houses have started offering objects that are rather different from your average work of art.
In January this year Sotheby's auctioned a complete collection of Supreme skateboards while Christie's has currently got the biggest Supreme auction ever (until December 10th). Expected to generate over $350,000, it includes Supreme skateboards dating from 1998 to the present day (some of them in collaboration with artists like Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst) and other items including a pinball machine, a mini bike and a Louis Vuitton monogram trunk.
But also the world of art and design is looking at other ways to combine culture and subcultures: at the end of November the Triennale in Milan opened Skatepark OooOoO by Korean artist Koo Jeong A (through 16th February 2020).
Part of "PLAY!" a wider project curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and focused on the importance of playing, this is not your average art installation, but it is a real skatepark.
The idea behind the events scheduled for "PLAY!" is that playing generates culture and great culture creates a healthy society.
Installed on the ground floor of the Triennale, the skatepark is an immersive and multi-sensorial landscape that should physically and mentally stimulate visitors. At the skatepark cultures and subcultures converge, creating a new and dynamic dialogue.
Painted in fluorescent colours that shine through the darkness and accompanied by a soundscape by Glasgow-based electronic composer Koreless, the skatepark can be used by amateurs and professional skateboarders, visitors can just look or join in, while children and teenagers can take part in dedicated workshops to learn how to skateboard.
Koo Jeong A has been working since the '90s on projects that reinvent spaces through site-specific installations and she created her first skatepark in 2012 on the island of Vassivière in France, in collaboration with L'Escault Architectures. Her installation at the Triennale also features her drawings.
The project is a development of the Triennale's 1954 children's labyrinth, and of its 1964 exhibition dedicated to the importance of freetime.
Skate culture will also be studied via other events involving photography, fashion, cinema, graphic design, architecture and music, but the organisers of this event also consider the skateboarders using the structure as living art installations: they perform pirouettes in the air like classical ballet dancers and, while painters trace colours on canvas with their brushes, skaters use their boards and speed to draw invisible shapes in the air.
By opting for a project inspired by street cultures, the Triennale reminds visitors that intriguing art doesn't have to be something hanging on a wall that can only be stared at.
Last but not least, the access to the installation is free and that's what makes this collaboration between art, design and street cultures infinitely cooler than all the other collaborations between luxury houses and streetwear brands – it doesn't borrow from the street to create exclusive products for the very few, but takes a urban element and places it inside a museum to elevate it to art, recreating through it a public space that can be enjoyed by everyone.
Image credits for this post
Images of Skatepark OooOoO by Korean artist Koo Jeong A at The Triennale Milano © Triennale Milano – photo credit: Gianluca Di Ioia