Boiler Room and Umbro have teamed up to release their latest football inspired club collection. Reflecting the freedom, colour and vibrance of rave culture in the UK, it’s presented as the ultimate kit to wear from dawn until dusk, football to festival field.
An independent music platform and cultural curator, the collection follows a series of iconic collaborations Boiler Room has released with P.A.M. and Valentino in previous years.
Designed to celebrate the early days of rave when music, fashion and football collided, the seven-piece collection features a black pinstripe tracksuit available as a drawstring short and jogger set with co-branded red vinyl gloss detail. Accompanied by a black and neon yellow oversized tee with a 3M Boiler Room x Umbro back print and matching OG sweat towel, to keep you cool from centre-pitch to centre stage.
Hero styles from the collection take the form of football jerseys, in a neon green long-sleeve goalkeeper style and black short-sleeved option, printed with an x-ray design symbolising underneath we’re all the same, one world, one community, one team.
“Umbro is such an iconic brand, we thought it would be fun to come together to design a uniform for Boiler Room. What does our team look like? It’s constantly changing but it’s always open, energetic, & diverse. A hyperlocal crew with a global mindset,” says Amar Ediriwira, Boiler Room’s Creative Director.
British nightlife photographer, Ewen Spencer captures the campaign’s imagery, worn by an electrifying crowd during the final performances of Jyoty and DJ EZ at Boiler Room London.
The Boiler Room x Umbro collaboration is available from 30 June available exclusively on the Boiler Room website.
Following this year’s CSM BA show, menswear designer Eden Tan was accorded the top honour of the L’Oréal Professionnel Young Talent. His collection, On Borrowed Fabric, places heavy emphasis on sustainability and circular production.
A Roll of Denim, image courtesy of Rebecca Maynes Photo
Of Malaysian-Chinese and British heritage, Eden Tan was born and raised in London, a city celebrated for its highly innovative fashion and creative communities. His latest collection draws from his hobby of tinkering and developing new techniques, bringing renewed life to garments and fabric found in charity shops. On Borrowed Fabric follows a material’s journey from creation, to obsolescence, and ultimately, recreation.
Utilising trompe l’oeil techniques, folds and a handful of slits, Eden had constructed a series of six looks that had been made entirely from one fabric roll -still attached to the garment.
A Roll of Latex, image courtesy of Rebecca Maynes Photo
“I don’t think my work is that deeply rooted in fashion culture, I just like to find a quirk in a piece of material and really elaborate on that,” Tan explained, “the motivation for the collection was the possibility of making clothes which could be as easily reprocessed into new garments as if the fabric had never passed through my hands.”
Tan references Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought experiment, as a core principle he held during the creation process. “Basically, a scientist puts a cat in the box with a bunch of chemicals and puts a lid over it. We won’t really know if the cat is dead or alive until we open the box. This represents a paradox of quantum superposition, one I want to demonstrate in using the same roll of fabric that remains seemingly untouched though work has been done.”
A Roll of Jersey, image courtesy of Rebecca Maynes Photo
Evidently, upcycling and rebirth are crucial themes at the forefront of Tan’s graduate collection, yet the designer is under no illusion that this project is going to save the planet. “I know it’s not a practical solution to fast fashion, but being as sustainable as possible and preserving the integrity of materials will always be important to me.”
A Roll of Silk, image courtesy of Rebecca Maynes Photo
“My work is never indulgent, it’s always restrained.”
And what’s next for Eden?
“The truth is I’m taking the whole year to not worry about the deadlines someone else has set for me. This project is over and it was a success, and I now want to take each day as it comes.”
This June, Saatchi Yates presents ‘Bathers’– a summer group exhibition celebrating the rich tradition of Bathing scenes in the history of painting.
The exhibition presents a collection of contemporary art, alongside renowned Post-War and Historical Masters including David Hockney, Paul Cezanne, J. M. W. Turner and Pablo Picasso.
Also presenting in the show are contemporary stars Hurvin Anderson, Peter Doig, Henry Taylor, Eric Fischl, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, showcasing an artistic prowess that reflects the breadth and diversity of the Bathers theme.
Pieces by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Damien Hirst, and Auguste Rodin will also be on display.
Speaking on the exhibition, Martin Gayford says: “Bathers in painting are both varied and fundamental to the human condition. The combination of unclothed bodies and water can evoke guilt-free primordial innocence: a sin-free Eden. On the other hand, the same visual ingredients can suggest the consequences of Eve and Adam’s Fall: guilt, lust, death.
He continues “in either case, the subject combines in one neat package two of the major preoccupations of artists for many centuries – landscape and the nude. It is no surprise that bathers have preoccupied painters for so long, and it is likely that the combination of water and human bodies will continue to intrigue them far into the future.”
Six of Saatchi Yates gallery artists including Danny Fox, Benjamin Spiers and Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa, will pay homage to this tradition, each one exploring the Bather in their own unique artistic methods and styles.
Bathers follows Saatchi Yates’ well-regarded Tesfaye Urgessa solo show in Miami in November 2022. The show also follows on from Macabre – the selling exhibition co-organised with Christie’s London in October 2022, featuring works by Otto Dix, Lucas Cranach, Andy Warhol, and Francis Bacon.
The exhibition will be available for viewing from June 1 until August 10. Admission is free. Additionally, there will be weekly curator-led tours every Saturday throughout June.
In collaboration with stylist Phoebe Arnold for streetwear brand Aries, David Ledoux has released Gnarly, a compelling documentation of youth culture, captured in the Basque country in the southwest of France. The cloth-bound hardback will feature 118 black and white lithographic-printed photographs, capturing sun-kissed portraits of free-spirited young surfers and skaters in the south of France. Ledoux’s imagery pays homage to what it’s like to live, surf and skate on the coast near Biarritz.
Image courtesy of David Ledoux
Aries’ vibrant essence blends seamlessly with Ledoux’s photographs of the carefree surf community in France’s Basque country, reflecting the brand’s deep connection to London subculture and founder Sofia Prantera’s adolescence in the 90s.
Ledoux’s successful photography career spans both reportage and fashion, authentically capturing communities in a state of invisibility, filled with raw energy. reflects his keen sense of discernment and sensitivityThrough the years, his work has captured the eyes of iconoclastic publications like Vice, GQ and Dazed and Confused.
Image courtesy of David Ledoux
Phoebe Arnold first discovered Ledoux’s work on Instagram in 2020, falling in love with his effortlessly bona fide approach to photographing the community around him. She proposed a collaboration, when Ledoux called the stylist with the news he was moving to Portugal. “It felt like fate,” recalls Arnold. “We met on a surf beach and road tripped together from Aljezur to Biarritz in his caddy van.”
Image courtesy of David Ledoux
Aries’s Soho flagship store is currently housing an exhibition which showcases selected images from Gnarly alongside a never-before-seen film documenting the book’s creation process.
Aries has also partnered with White Claw to create a capsule collection of tees, sweats and shorts featuring Ledoux’s images.
The brainchild of Cyril Foiret, Maison Meta is behind some of the world’s first AI-generated fashion campaigns and collections. Across global brands like Moncler Genius, REVOLVE, and Pangaia, the creative studio is pioneering a new phase of fashion tech and the way brands interact with an increasingly digital clientele. In April, it launched AI Fashion Week at New York’s Spring Studios, showcasing selected submissions from 133 digital artists and designers worldwide.
Maison Meta invited the public to take part by voting for the collections they liked the best on its website.
Image courtesy of Alena Stepanova
For some participating designers, the competition was an opportunity to explore sci-fi couture. Futuristic silhouettes and techy fabrics were paired with dystopian makeup looks, set within a desert or a runway underwater. Alena Stepanova and other designers instead presented intricate ready-to-wear garments, focusing on stacked layers, detailed knitwear and embroidery.
Image courtesy of Rachel Koukal
Rachel Koukal highlighted diversity in her collection ‘Soft Apocalypse’. In a series of images, she featured a culturally-diverse group of mostly curvy models, walking amidst a backdrop of sand dune, clad in otherworldly shapes and materials. In an interview with Vogue Business, Koukal explained that she wanted to create a size and body-type inclusive collection, one that she felt was lacking in the fashion industry. With MidJourney, an AI software allowing designers to prompt their creations through text, Koukal was able to feed her own images and re-prompt them to give her any imagined body she wanted, as well as new designs.
Image courtesy of Anya Klyueva
This week, Maison Meta unveiled the top 10 AIFW finalists, including Anya Klyueva and Ope, who will be judged by a panel of industry experts that includes Dame Pat McGrath, Vogue Japan’s head of editorial content, Tiffany Godoy, Céline casting director, Natalie Hazzout, and Erika Wykes-Sneyd of the Adidas Studio Web3, among others. The chosen three winners will then have their AI-generated designs produced and sold by REVOLVE for the real world.
While still nascent, it seems that the future of fashion will be increasingly intertwined with generative AI, paving the way for new creative endeavours and global collaboration. Physical runway shows in future seasons are currently in the works for Maison Meta’s creative team, with products designed from previous collections said to be going into production. Maison Meta is also working on an incubator programme with REVOLVE to help designers launch their brands.
This April, Aries opened its first ever store in Soho, London. Designed in-house and in collaboration with Brinkworth and Wilson Brothers, the Aries Soho store will showcase Aries in-line collections in full for the first time in bricks and mortar and will function as a curated concept store and art space.
Photo courtesy of Aries
The store will feature exclusive brand collaborations, brought to life with installation pop-ups, as well as a rotating concept trading with collaborators, friends and like-minded international partners, from clothing and music to books and art, allowing visitors to immerse themselves into the Aries world.
With its own entrance on Bridle Lane, Parisian-born coffee shop Paperboy will also open its first official outpost in London, exclusively serving the brand’s own signature sandwiches and coffees, in collaboration with Aries and Dark Arts Coffee.
It’s also announced that the store will be housing exhibitions, alongside seasonal collections and store exclusives. Its rails will be rotating between pop-ups by South London’s leading vintage re-sell brand, JerksTM and London-based luxury unisex jewellery brand, Bunney.
Photo courtesy of Aries
Founded by Italian-born Sofia Prantera of Silas and Holmes fame, Aries was born out of an ongoing love of trash culture, outsider art, graphics and illustration. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in the early ‘90s, Sofia has been an integral part of the skate and streetwear community for over 25 years with three successful brands under her belt.
Photo courtesy of Aries
The Aries Soho store officially opened its doors Monday 17th April 2023.
Dior has announced Mumbai’s Gateway of India as the location of the fashion house’s Pre-Fall 2023 presentation on March 30. This will be the first time a European luxury maison stages an official calendar show in India. As part of Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s commitment to support and collaborate with Mumbai-based talent, the collection will feature pieces embellished with intricate embroidery by Chanakya, an atelier and craftsmanship school for women in Mumbai.
The show plays tribute to the visionary spirit of Christian Dior and his successors who had a profound admiration for India. As the first-ever female creative director of Dior, Chiuri’s partnership with Chanakya evolves the brand’s feminine identity and values. The non-profit organisation was founded by Monica Shah and Karishma Swali and seeks to empower female artisans from low-income backgrounds with skills that enable them to earn a livelihood within the fashion industry -an ethos which resonates strongly with the feminist message that Chiuri has actively pushed forth through collaborations with female craftspeople, image-makers and artists within the fashion industry.
Chiuri wrote in an Instagram post: “It was through this relationship with Chanakya that I was able to learn so much about the artisanal embroidery techniques, which are still found in each and every Indian region, and the unique ability of the Chanakya Atelier to put them in dialogue with the fashion industry.”
Under Chiuri’s wing, the presentation will showcase India’s rich technical knowledge within the field of craft and fashion. And with the luxury sector in India expected to explode over the next decade, the country is quickly becoming a destination for global brands looking to expand their footprint.
The collection will be available in stores from late April, featuring an array of evening coats, silk dresses and sari-inspired skirts.
The CHANEL Fall-Winter 2023/24 Ready-To-Wear Collection pays tribute to the brand’s iconic white camellia motif. Imagined by Virginia Viard, this season is described to be afloat with asymmetrical silhouettes traversed by the camellia motifs, an eternal code of the brand.
The show took place in Paris’s Grand Palais Éphémère. At its centre, a larger-than-life white camellia and cinematic images of Japanese actress and House Ambassador Nana Komatsu, a spectacle directed by Inez and Vinnodh.
Komatsu evolves within a set inspired by William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, “It’s the idea of a Japanese woman in Paris, with a spirit of light-heartedness and freedom,” tells Inez and Vinnodh. “In the way she moves in the video there is a sense of wonder, a sense of displacement and belonging.”
As precise as it is profound, the makeup palette mirrored the collection. Featuring black, white and pink tones with washes of silver on the eyelids and layers of mascara on bottom and top lashes for a fluttery effect. On the lips, nude touches of rouge to complement a sheer complexion with a matte finish.
Image courtesy of CHANEL
Virginie Viard had intended for the collection to be delicate and in motion. “The energy of the merry-go-round of wooden horses that provides the setting for Inez & Vinoodh’s film, with actress Nana Komatsu as the heroine, gave me the idea for the Bermuda short suits and the asymmetries,” she reveals.
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