Dior Men Fall 2022 by Kim Jones in collaboration with the Jack Kerouac Estate, UK
London - Aligning itself with popular online aesthetics like Dark Academia, Dior’s latest menswear collection is a celebration of modern literature. Created in collaboration with the Jack Kerouac estate, the collection takes the American novelist’s work as its starting point.
Known for his beatnik style and influence on modern fashion, Jack Kerouac was a contemporary of Christian Dior in the 1950s. Now, 70 years later, creative director Kim Jones is drawing on Kerouac's storytelling to attract Generation Z and older consumers alike. Bridging the fields of literature and fashion, the catwalk has been styled to look like an extended scroll in reference to Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road. Elsewhere in the collection, leather jackets have been hand painted with the cover art of Kerouac’s earlier novels.
Although the fashion industry has often collaborated with visual artists, partnerships with literary figures and estates have been less common. With growing literary fandoms on Book Tok and other social media platforms, however, there is scope for fashion houses to experiment with Longevity Marketing and the revival of print media.
Global – Free-to-access platform Yellow Trip Road aims to provoke and promote conversations around mental wellbeing by uniting the mediums of music, fashion design, NFTs and virtual art.
Hosted online, people visiting the cross reality (XR) virtual sanctuary navigate woodland, desert, space and ocean settings as a way of exploring and supporting mental health initiatives. Accompanied by a black dog – symbolic of depression – users’ experience is described as a sensory metaphor of life through which people can seek to heal or lose themselves.
Collective Enjoy Being in Transition (EBIT), which includes creatives Glen Luchford, Soo Joo Park, DJ John Digweed and Wilson Oryema are behind the platform, together with virtual fashion pioneers The Dematerialised and NFT provider AnamXR. Yellow Brick Road emphasises its mental health mission through the provision of limited-edition virtual streetwear NFTs that can purchased through the platform, from which 10% of sales go to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Building on digital-first and drug-free mental healthcare experiences, such as those provided by the Trip app, Yellow Trip Road demonstrates how numerous sectors and creatives can align to create decentralised forms of wellness support.
Yellow Trip Road by EBIT™ and AnamXR, in collaboration with THE DEMATERIALISED, Global
