Cartoon superheroes take over fashion
This summer, menswear gets animated
One of the best lines in Black Panther comes when Shuri (Letitia White) laughs at the sandals her brother T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is wearing: “What are thoooose?!” she says, a reference to the popular meme of a man mocking a police officer’s clumpy work boots. T’Challa’s reply wasn’t “Alexander McQueen, darling”, but it could have been, because that’s what they were. Costume designer Ruth E Carter modified the McQueen footwear to look like “a Royal sandal, in a dated Roman way”, later winning an Oscar for costume design for her work on the movie.
Superheroes and fashion: you could stage an exhibition examining the parallels and influences between the two; how dressing up conceals our true identities, bestows us with secret powers, yadda yadda. Indeed, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art did exactly that in 2008, displaying Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man costume alongside one of Thierry Mugler’s armoured suit and cape combos. Ka-pow!
This month, Audemars Piguet launches a Black Panther watch, the first in an ongoing Marvel collaboration, and an unexpected move for a high-priced Swiss watchmaker best known for precious metals and avant garde designs. (Or perhaps not. Isn’t that Wakanda all over?)
One of 2020’s hottest watches was Omega’s Speedmaster “Silver Snoopy Award” 50th Anniversary chronograph featuring a skipping, space-suited Snoopy and an £8,000 price tag. Bamford Watch Department and Timex have also released sought-after Snoopy models. Swatch launched a Mickey Mouse x Keith Haring collection, while the hipster Milan brand Unimatic produced a SpongeBob SquarePants model.
Elsewhere, this new wave of comic book-led fashion has seen Loewe collaborate with Studio Ghibli, Gucci x North Face with Pokémon Go, Filson launch a Popeye range and Kith work with The Simpsons. In February, Gucci unveiled a capsule collection emblazoned with Manga’s Doraemon, the blue robot cat from the 22nd century.
The emperor of comic book clothing for grownups is Uniqlo. Its UT line is dedicated to limitededition graphic prints, producing hundreds of T-shirts each season featuring the likes of Super Mario, Batman and The Simpsons’ Duff Beer, alongside collabs with artists including Kaws, Daniel Arsham and Takashi Murakami. Its creative director is Tomoaki Nagao, aka Nigo, founder of A Bathing Ape and co-founder of Billionaire Boys Club. Its first two collections this year honoured manga Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and cartoonist Jason Polan. “Art and fashion were always close,” Nigo said recently. “Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress and so on. Each generation finds a new way to express that relationship.”
The current boom could be attributed to simple psychology. In crappy times, cartoons remind us of something that makes us happy. As Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki put it: “There has never been a work of art created which didn’t somehow reflect its own time.”
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