Everyone jumping everyone else’s train
First things first
Thank you to all who read, shared, and sent me notes after the last newsletter - the one about my experiences as a Korean American in this country. I expressed a side of me that I haven’t tended to all that much over the years, and it means so much for me to feel encouraged to put it out there and talk about it. If you missed it, you can check it out here.
I’m in a slighty weird headspace - I received my second vaccine dose yesterday and am still a little loopy. So apologies if this installment is a little more disjointed than normal.
Collaboration at its (north) peak?
If anybody wants to know the state of fashion collaborations - where two brands get together to make something, it might be summarized by Gucci x The North Face x Pokemon. Or perhaps the recent moment that two different New York City stores released exclusive Vans sneakers on the same day. Once a form of co-branded creative cross-pollination, the fashion collaboration is now mainstream.
I mention Vans because the ability to customize Vans was embedded into their early business model. It was a way to grow the brand, according to Steve Van Doren - son of the company’s original founder:
Nobody knew who Vans was or what our brand was about, so we did almost anything to help put a pair of Vans on somebody’s feet, and that included offering customs.
Vans isn’t known for its technical innovations. Its biggest selling shoes date back to the 60’s and 70’s and often combine canvas uppers with vulcanized rubber soles. This low tech both makes it perfect for other brands to order custom collaborations and makes them necessary to keep the brand relevant. They are prolific collaborators, having announced no fewer than 14 collaborations so far this year.
A definition and a throughline
The very word “collaboration” is filled with creative promise - the idea of two perspectives coming together to make something bigger than its whole. I probably should be a little more specific about what a collaboration is, which is tough because it’s not just one thing. It can be:
A licensing of imagery for a product (for instance, an apparel company licensing artwork from a band, visual artist, or movie studio)
A custom run of a product with the brand’s logo and color choices (for instance, this Kinto travel tumbler from my friends at 3sixteen that you should buy right now)
Two brands taking active roles in designing a new product (or variant of an existing product)
In fashion, at least one of these kinds of collaboration has been around for a while. I personally don’t know if this was actually the first one, but the one that seems particularly relevant to today’s world dates from the early 1980’s. It was when designer Vivienne Westwood met artist Keith Haring in New York City, and was inspired to use his art in the clothing she sold out of the shop she ran with London impresario Malcolm McLaren. As Vivienne Westwood’s own online history summarizes it:
Witches, AW 1983-84 -Visit to New York, met Keith Haring. His art looked like magic signs and hiroglyphs [sic]. Therefore – collection “Witches”. – Hip Hop, styling of garments stop-frame look, white trainers customized with three tongues, pointed Chico Marx hats.
As wild as that sounds, the images I’ve seen are pretty in line with what you’d expect from a Keith Haring collaboration today - clothes that feature his artwork.
But back then, the idea of re-contextualizing art into fashion must have felt much more radical at the time, when the walls between art and commerce felt much higher.
Meanwhile, in Japan
One person who may have been paying attention to that collection was Hiroshi Fujiwara, someone whom I’d describe as an influencer’s influencer and a fan of Vivienne Westwood’s at the time. He’s been a DJ and music producer, perhaps one of the first hip-hop DJs in Japan. It was a music form he discovered during a visit to mid-80’s New York City - sent there by McLaren himself.
Fujiwara was inspired to create his own brand, Good Enough. Once it folded, he realized he could optimize his creative energy by running a design agency, which became Fragment Design. This arrangement allowed other brands to deal with production, marketing, sales, and operations. He became a tastemaker known as what what former Nike CEO once termed a “stylist-designer,” in other words - a guy that could refine ideas and piece them together in a way few others could. In the early 2000’s, he applied these skills as a pioneer in working with brands and artists like Burton (the snowboarding company) Levi’s (Fenom), Eric Clapton, and Nike (HTM). As big as they were, he could make their products really hit.
Eventually, the Fragment logo would appear on these collaborations as a sort of streetwear IYKYK (if you know, you know - shorthand for something that has too much nuance or backstory to explain easily, if at all) - and yup, it recently appeared in Pokemon Go. His style is understated and tasteful - as an example (and slight digression), one of my favorite running shoes is a version of Nike’s 70’s era LD-1000 runner he did in 2014. They’re very simple - an LD-1000 upper on a contemporary Roshe sole unit. But they don’t look particularly retro even though someone who knew their sneakers would recognize the platform and the period-correct “fat belly” swoosh. It uses a more modern mesh to match its futuristic sole. The only Fragment branding is an almost imperceptible print on its midsole. Like I said - if you know, you know.
In the early days, most of Fujiwara’s projects were targeted towards a Japanese audience - a fertile ground for experimentation. In certain corners of the fashion world, it’s like a paradise of educated consumers that can support small brands in a way that makes them able and willing to take risks.
But he wasn’t the only one leaning into the possibilities of collaboration. Around the same time, designer Junya Watanabe was starting a collaboration with Levi’s - customizing their signature apparel with cryptic messages. This was the first purchasable collaboration I personally clocked, back in 2002 - a trucker jacket and pair of jeans screen printed with a poem of sorts. The whole thing came with an absurdly large blue plastic hangtag that explained the project. It stated:
Something real
Something that has history, that has a traditional shape
Our way of originality
A new feeling for basics
The salesperson rolled her eyes a bit (twenty years later, I can still hear her faux-seriously intoning “what is morality”), but seeing them felt like a new door - a world of possibilities on the other side. To me, this is still a promise of collaboration - seeing something familiar through a different lens.
Merchandising
If we might be tempted to conceive of the modern-day collaboration as something crafted in Japan, it was good-old American merchandising that unlocked its true commercial potential.
A couple other things were unfolding when that Junya Watanabe collection debuted - former Calvin Klein designer John Varvatos inked a partnership with Converse in September, 2001 that brought the famously utilitarian shoe company (in some ways, Vans is a younger, West Coast version of Converse) into more of a fashion space for his new eponymous brand. Remember those laceless Chuck Taylors that were everywhere at some point? They came out of that partnership.
At about the same time, Supreme started its relationship with Nike SB - the upstart, skateboarding wing of the Nike empire that was only available at skate shops at the time. SB had made a skate-specific version of the Nike Dunk - originally an 80’s era basketball shoe intended for college play that was the subject of much adoration among hardcore Nike collectors (including those in Japan - the love for the model there generated a Japanese exclusive release of its original colorways in 1999).
As part of the rollout of the new SB model, Supreme got their own exclusive models. Supreme x Nike SB Dunk Lows released in fall of 2002 and were basically Dunk SBs done up to resemble iconic Jordan colorways - complete with elephant print mudguards.
Even though they’re tame by today’s standards, mashing up Jordans with Dunks was an unheard of concept at the time. In fact, shoes like this ushered in a new fount of sneaker creativity. Supreme and Nike delivered what Hundreds co-founder Bobby (Kim) Hundreds described in his 2019 memoir, This is not a T-Shirt (2019, Farrar, Straus and Giroux):
Collaborations make sense because they require different minds to come together and create something original. It’s not just about Virgil Abloh and a Nike Air Presto. [That] shoe is an embodiment of progression, a new idea that didn’t exist before.
But collaborations exist for other reasons too, which he later explains in the same book:
The objective of any collaboration is not only to better tell your story but also to build onto your brand in a meaningful way. Collaborations should enhance your brand, tell another side that people don’t know about. Make you multifaceted instead of one-dimensional.
If there’s an instance of a US store having a custom Nike shoe before then, I haven’t heard about it. But regardless, it helped put a downtown skate shop with a cut and sewn program on the map.
Kim also talks about how The Hundreds has a release calendar that includes collaboration drops that are spaced out carefully. It makes me think that collaborations have become more important as marketing - a way to keep a brand constantly in the spotlight - than the actual thing themselves.
Which reminds me of something that pre-dated all of this - the infamous “Merzcar.” It was a run-down Mercedes into which a label owner sealed a copy of his recent CD release from noise artist Merzbow in an attempt to sell it as a limited edition collectible in 1994. Nobody was interested, and the car was subsequently junked. But yet the story lives on in underground legend, outliving its physical manifestation and underscoring the perceived collectibility of Merzbow records.
Often, stories travel farther than products. When Paul Van Doren started Vans in 1966, he knew he had to find a way to keep growing his customer base. Custom shoes worked then - and in a very different way - still work now.
More reading:
The first fashion collaboration I ever knew was through designer Helmut Lang - he commissioned artist Jenny Holzer to launch his fragrance line at the Florence Biennale in 1998, and they subsequently worked together on store installations and advertising. It seems weird to think of now, but I remember store staff discouraging tourists from taking pictures of her installation inside his Greene Street boutique. Emma Hope Allword wrote a handy recap of their collaborations over the years for Dazed.
Your musical moment of zen
The Cure, “Jumping Someone Else’s Train” (1979)
"seeked"?