the tagline from the Dover Street Market mailer reads: "A new brand featuring perennially popular Comme des Garcons styles in black. The brand will continue for about eighteen months."
40 years of Comme des Garcons, and a temporary label "to last as long as the recession lasts" (Adrian Joffe, from WWD.com).
it's perhaps one of the most striking features of Comme des Garcons projects that they meld visual oddity along with market savviness and a finger on the pulse of popular consumption in the same body. PLAY was pretty bland, but half a floor in Dover Street Market and a white box in Paris suggests it's sold enough polos with miscut hearts to last awhile. the H&M collaboration popped off the shelves at Oxford Circus the same morning it dropped. as much as one feels like throwing stones and crying "cop out", it's a consistently well executed piece of marketing genius, without losing much of the edge that Comme des Garcons has exuded over its history. the closest comparison (although much younger by far) is the t-shirts that Jun Takahashi's Undercoverism machine puts out.
interesting, then, that while news from Yamamoto-san is all bleak and black, this new line in the same dark hues is a direct and almost-defiant response to the economic downturn. again it isn't groundbreaking stuff, but cloaked in the usual slightly stilted diction accompanying Comme des Garcons lines, it hopefully remains intriguing enough to work.
kitonomics in action awaits?
No comments:
Post a Comment