What do you get when you pair Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo and her label Comme des Garçons (the epitome of fashion at its most avant-garde) with Italian designer Alessandro Michele's very specific brand of maximalism at Gucci? A shopper tote bag made for Hypebeast heaven AKA Dover Street Market. A Gucci press release announcing the bag said that Kawakubo and Michele decided to "experiment together," melding their respective aesthetics together in an intriguing and unexpected way.
"Based on the foundation of a Comme des Garçons shopper, this unique piece is personalized with a Gucci vertical green-red-green Web stripe," the release notes. "The shopper, which uses craft brown paper featuring a distinctive plastic ‘shell’ that gives it a contemporary, industrial appearance sits in curious juxtaposition to Gucci’s storied stripe with its equestrian and artisanal history. The result is an idiosyncratic Made in Japan item that combines codes from the two houses."
Coincidently, King Hypebeast (if you will) Virgil Abloh and his label Off-White beat out Gucci on The Lyst Index's Q3 2018 hottest brands. Global fashion search platform Lyst considers search data, sales and product mentions on social media, tracking the way each can impact a brand's sales. Because Abloh had such a busy summer — he designed his first mens' collection for Louis Vuttion and his own label, collaborated with Ikea, debuted swimwear, and dressed Serena Williams for the US Open — it was hard not to see his one of his collaborations as you scrolled through social media. Now it seems, Gucci has taken a page out of Abloh's book (the label has worked with artists before since Michele joined in 2015, but this is the first designer collaboration of this magnitude).
Pricing hasn't been announced yet, but the bag made its debut first last week in Japan and is expected to available internationally on December 6.