The name "Amazon" doesn't certainly conjure up visions of highly conceptual design pieces: we collectively turn indeed to the e-commerce giant to find extremely good deals and bargains for all sorts of needs. While there may be some interesting interior design pieces on offer from various vendors, for what regards fashion, Amazon's taste and style still needs to be improved.
For example The Fix, Amazon's in-house affordable accessories label available exclusively to the retailer's Prime customers, may have to be "fixed", and possibly purged of low quality copies of products by more famous fashion houses and brands.
Yet in the last few months Amazon seems to have been taking some steps towards a serious colonisation of the fashion industry. While the leader in online retailing recently collaborated with Calvin Klein on a series of events in the States, it also launched this week its first European pop-up women and menswear shop.
Based in London's Baker Street, the shop stocks several brands including Love Moschino, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Puma, Levi's and Vans, and Amazon Fashion's own labels (Iris & Lilly, Truth & Fable, Find).
Merchandise and brands have been rotating everyday offering consumers fashion pieces aligned with the A/W 18 trends, ath-leisure and partywear (the latter will be the star this weekend). Other highlights have so far included stylists available in shop and assorted debates and discussions like an event by Vogue beauty (it's only natural for Vogue to jump on the Amazon bandwagon as it seems to be one of those rare places at the moment where money is flowing...).
Products can be purchased in the shop or virtually using Amazon's SmileCode technology (open the Amazon shopping app on a mobile device, select the camera option, search for a product, then scan the SmileCode) or tablets placed around the pop-up space that can provide access to the complete range of items available on Amazon (the one in the shop is a selection "curated", as they say nowadays, by the Amazon Fashion team).
The pop up shop (open until Saturday) is a way to strengthen Amazon's connection with its offline consumers, but the e-commerce giant has got other tricks up its sleeve.
Amazon Japan has indeed opted to go down the futurist conceptual path as it recently enlisted for its "At Tokyo" selection Anrealage's futurist innovator, designer Kunihiko Morinaga.
Consumers can read an interview with Morinaga and check out and buy the products he recommends on his "My Amazon" curated page that includes a Moleskin notebook, Montblanc ballpoint pen refills and a pot pourri by Florentine Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella.
Morinaga also added to his selection two essential items for his job that make him look more like an investigator than a fashion designer: a magnifying glass to study the texture of his garments and a UV torchlight, indispensable to enhance or change the colours and patterns on Anrealage's designs and play with his favourite themes (lights Vs shadows).
Amazon's Anrealage selection includes functional garments such as T-shirts and patchworks shirts, jackets and bags, but, surprisingly enough, it also features two conceptual designs by the Japanese brand.
For the occasion the cube t-shirt and trench coat from the S/S 09 collection were redesigned and recreated with an Amazon Fashion logo.
As you may remember, that collection was inspired by basic geometric forms such as a cube, a sphere and a pyramid and revolved around the possibility of modelling a garment over a three-dimensional shape and then applying that garment to the human body to see what it would look like (View this photo).
Seen in this new incarnation, when refolded in a cube shape, the trench coat and shirt uncannily look like Amazon packages (a rather successful example or fashion détournement...).
The operation makes you think a lot: while for a brand like Anrealage being featured on Amazon means reaching out to more people, for Amazon this collaboration opens a view on a less banal type of fashion. So far the e-commerce retailer understood the importance of trendy garments and accessories and of being associated with popular and famous brands, but Amazon Japan has rapidly moved onto conceptualism and extremely futuristic designers.
Was this decision dictated by a will to genuinely democratising conceptual pieces (the "box" T-shirt and trench coat retailed at around €170 and €424 and were soon sold out) or could this be for Amazon just another way to make more money or get closer to real designers to study them a bit better and implement a more advanced fashion design algorithm?
Keeping an eye on the next Amazon developments will reveal the answers to these questions and maybe the wider plan of the e-commerce retailer.
In the meantime, it is interesting to note how Amazon's London-based pop-up almost coincided with Virgil Abloh opening his Wizard of Oz-inspired concept store in Mayfair's Bruton Street selling his S/S 2019 menswear collection for Louis Vuitton that seems to feature luxury copies of cheap Wizard of Oz shirts and textiles sold on Amazon. Maybe the e-commerce giant is genuinely preparing to lead fashion, rather than follow it.
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