Call me a cynical woman belabouring the obvious, but the truth behind a lot of the latest allegedly cutting edge products and collaborations between unlikely entities happening in the fashion industry are dictated by nothing else but money.
A few examples? In June Luxottica announced a collaboration with high profile blogger Scott Schuman, from The Sartorialist. A man whose adverse behaviour at people wearing glasses (not sunglasses) usually materialised in his look of pity and contempt and who would only shoot them if they looked cool (i.e. only if they were Japanese or sported a beard), Schuman has now realised that maybe there is nothing wrong with taking pictures of bespectacled people, especially if you get paid for doing so.
Unfortunately, he still feels embarrassed at the idea, that's why he calls glasses "opticals", considers them as "accessories" rather than as a proper aids to enhance one's vision, obviously only takes picture of stylish people (who probably don't need to wear them 24 hours a day...) looking good in "opticals", and he'd rather be filmed with a pair of random glasses in his hand rather than on his face. Watch the video for the project and have fun (note: the comments have been disabled otherwise they would have been hilarious) and don't forget to wear your most nerdish glasses possibly held together with thick tape while you're near The Sartorialist - he will probably turn into ashes like a vampire in the sunlight, but it will be totally worth it.
The second embarrassing collaboration is Karl Lagerfeld's obnoxious cat Choupette fronting a holiday makeup range for Shu Uemura ("Shupette" - yes, how clever) and getting a deal for a sort of diary book that will include notes of her personal vet and maid (Choupette: The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat, set to be released on Thames & Hudson in September, obviously with photographs by Lagerfeld himself), the sort of book probably hastily compiled by a ghost writer with tight deadlines in three days (hopefully he/she was paid for doing so). We all felt these two things were absolutely needed in our sad lives.
If you don't find silly enough The Sartorialist's discovery of people wearing glasses and immoral enough the way a cat is pampered like a queen while people out there are starving, the next collaboration is what you're waiting for.
As you may have heard, Adidas teamed up with Marina Abramović for a film project celebrating the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Totally reeking of money and desperation, the project was allegedly made to highlight the importance of teamwork and came out in the form of a short film (accompanied by scary music suggesting suspense and relaxing pretentiousness) conceived as the re-staging of a project performed in 1978 by Abramović and former partner Ulay and focused on the efficient method of transporting stones from one end of a room to the other.
Shame that in a controversial and rather sad edition of the World Cup - that closed yesterday with Germany winning against Argentina - in between overpaid footballers generally misbehaving and acting violently on the pitch and one player per team being hailed as THE hero, the message was completely lost.
So tragic that Adidas splashes money on such useless things in collaboration with Abramović, a woman otherwise best known for discovering the obvious and glorifying it (yes, when you transport bricks in a team you finish the job in a quicker way...but there are further hilarious suggestions that are part of her method in this video for The Guardian), while their workers in Cambodia (Adidas moved production there as the cost of wages increased in China) are still struggling to get a fair wage.
Maybe next time it would be interesting to splash less money on sponsorship deals with footballers (Adidas pays players such as Argentina's Messi over $3m a year) and ask Abramović to state the obvious about human exploitation (what about a film on the theme "one can't work well on bad labour conditions and with low wages"?)
Apparently we - the final consumers - should all be reacting with global excitement and huge expectations about such clever products and collaborations. But maybe the time has come to open our eyes a bit more and start reacting with a more critical attitude to such ridiculous campaigns, products and collaborations constantly thrown our way.
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