Fashion's Finest Works Are Coming From... a Van Gogh Museum?
Producing back-to-back bangers is not an easy task, unless you're the Van Gogh Museum. Beyond housing Vincent Van Gogh's most famous works, the Amsterdam art destination is somehow behind some of the coolest fashion collaborations of the past few years.
The most recent example is BAPE x Van Gogh Museum, a partnership that feels surprisingly fresh given the age of each participant.
The results are pretty good, if not one of BAPE's best collections in recent memory.
Painterly takes on BAPE's signature shark hoodie splice Van Gogh's Almond Blossoms with BAPE camouflage, making for the most mature BAPE merch in recent memory.
And several graphic tees crisply combine art into redesigned Ape heads and a Baby Milo using Van Gogh's Sunflowers as a pillow.
The collaboration, which drops on May 31 on BAPE's website, even come packaged in poster cases, making them that much closer to wearable art.
It all has no business looking this fresh, considering that BAPE's oeuvre often feels stuck in 2010 and Van Gogh died over two centuries ago.
But this is by now a pretty classic formula: Van Gogh + heritage streetwear brand = sauce.
Recall the Van Gogh Museum x Vans collab (Van Gogh Vans? It doesn't get any more fitting than that alone), for instance.
The linkup was released in 2018 to immense acclaim. In it, classic Vans skate shoes were artfully adorned with Van Gogh's most famed works. Pieces like the Self-Portrait as a Painter are a remarkably fitting accent for Vans Authentics, turns out. Something about a classic skate shoe being a perfect canvas for an old master, for sure.
The skate shoe brand previously collaborated with New York's MoMA and LA's MOCA museums on similarly well-printed kicks and clothes but the Vans Gogh partnership was special, doubly so considering the specificity of the museum at hand.
Around the same time, the Van Gogh museum partnered with Japanese label UNUSED for a covetable assortment of all-over-printed shirts while local brand Daily Paper released impressively attractive Van Gogh collections only a year later. And only a few years back, the Van Gogh x Pokémon team-up was so hot that its release had to be reassessed after it drew landmark crowds.
But why does everything Van Gogh touch turn to gold (or sunflowers, in this case)?
For one, none of these collaborations come off as uninspired mash-ups. The clothes and merch all feels like a natural blending of each partners' POV. Van Gogh inspires the third-party to art it up, while the latter suffuses its specific brand of product with instantly recognizable Van Gogh illustrations
It certainly helps that Van Gogh is such an imminently recognizable art-world titan that his works immediately lend credibility and recognizable cool to whatever they touch. There's a reason that those immersive Van Gogh exhibits tour the world, you know.
And maybe there's an element of the participating brands simply wanting to step up their game in the presence of a master. Who could've known? A couple hundred years after his death, Van Gogh became a legit streetwear player.
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