Via April 2017 | Page 50

Starting off, two very relevant brands that are key to this topic- Virgil Abloh’s Off White, and Gosha Rubchinskiy. Both of the mentioned designers have recently collaborated, be it surprisingly, with age-old sports brands Fila, Kappa and Umbro. Diamond logo shorts once found in school ‘spare-kit’ cupboards have been re-designed, re-vamped and re-branded to retail at £400+; So a high end price tag thrown at typically lower quality products- odd isn’t it? Well, it may not actually be as ridiculous as initially anticipated. These collaborations act as a binding process, or be it a symbol of how far fashion has come.

In years gone by, brand-snobbery would direct you away from brands more commonly found in Sports Direct; it’s not shallow, thats just how it was and to some extent still is. We, as a whole want the best quality and fit; for some this works in direct relation to price-points- the highest inevitably the better. So, what better way to combine two genres with overbearing stigmas, than quite literally throwing them together?

Loud, over-sized logos has been embellished in differing orientations to remove any and every boundary that luxury designers could build - a boundary to keep a collaboration centred towards their own brand. To think, sportswear brands have been featured in Fashion Weeks from New York to Paris this year; 10 years ago you certainly wouldn’t have expected anything of the sort. Fashion is changing in a big way.

THE MERGERS