When I was a teenager the Kipling brand was quite popular in Italy. Its bags were practical, functional and above all affordable and young girls used to collect the little monkey key rings that came with them.
The Antwerp-based brand had also launched a sort of international club and through it you could get in touch with other teenagers, finding in this way new friends all over the world.
I remember having something like 30 pen pals scattered all over Europe and beyond, from Belgium to Japan, at one point and, since the Internet didn't exist yet, this was one of my favourite past-times and proved an exciting way to learn more about other cultures and also a fun way to practice a few foreign languages.
As time passed and new brands arrived on the market Kipling lost, at least in my home country, the allure it originally had, a few flagship stores closed down and, for years I wondered why a brand that had been so popular couldn’t try and renew itself a bit, maybe collaborating with young and exciting designers.
I was therefore happy to see Kipling launching last year a collaboration with Belgian Cathy Pill for the S/S 09 season. The collection featured three lamb leather bags in three different abstract and colourful prints that seemed to evoke Pill’s pixellated motifs.
I was even more intrigued though to see in the shops the results of the collaboration between the accessory brand and Girls From Omsk.
Kipling asked GFO’s designer Valéria Siniouchkina and graphic designer/illustrator Phillippe Koeune to recreate its basic bag line and design an exclusive GFO bag line and a small apparel line.
Siniouchkina and Koeune managed to infuse in the bags from the limited “Monkeys Over the City” and “Kipling Meets Girls from Omsk” lines all the fun of their own brand, using their bold colour clashes and urban prints and coming up also with new mascots, a green swinging monkey and a sort of flattened and slightly squarish rainbow-coloured monkey.
GFO's S/S 09 collection is inspired by a an imaginary journey from Austin to Tashkent, a cultural patchwork of emotions that is reflected in the patchwork graphics used in GFO’s clothes and in the bags designed for Kipling. The latter, in four models ("Middle", "Minute", "Molecule" and "Multiply") going from the tiniest to the largest are available in black nylon/vinyl patchwork or in a 2/4 colour nylon patchwork.
Nowadays Kipling also has its own Facebook page, which I guess could be considered as a modern version of its original pen pal club, though I must admit I really miss all that by now old fashioned letter writing and excitement when receiving post and packages from far-way countries.
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It is utterly right. I admire your thoughts and perception. Hope to see new updates from your soon. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Term Paper | March 10, 2010 at 01:14 PM