Three designers reinterpret one jacketfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

I'll tell you a story. So three designers take on the same jacket with wildly different results. The jacket in question is the blue French work jacket. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, this jacket was designed for French laborers that needed something durable, needed something practical for real worse. Functional, simple, unpretentious. And it symbolized this democratic ideal of what workwear should be. So brand number one is LaMonte Saint Michel and their blue cotton work jacket is the blueprint. It remains almost unchanged from the early 1900s. Still uses blue cotton moleskin that's meant to be functional, durable and it wears beautifully over time. But if you really think about it, this story of practicality, of utilitarianism, that's the story that this company told in 1913. Because if this company tried to keep up and still tell the story of modern worse, their jackets will look dramatically different a hundred years later. But today, this is a modern company. The big idea that they are trying to communicate is heritage, tradition, timelessness. This is now a story about legacy. And now we get to brand number two, Momotaro, which is a denim company from Japan. So what they do is they recognize the tradition, the classic French silhouette. And what they do is they remix it. They've swapped out the cotton moleskin for a sashiori fabric and this fabric has its own historical origins in Japanese worse. And it was the classic fabric for farmers, for laborers, later used in martial arts as well. And that classic French blue is now a Japanese indigo and that natural dyed indigo also has a traditional worse history history in Japan. No it's really important to note that although they're a Japanese company, they didn't just randomly put Japanese elements in there. This is a very intentional process, replacing functional elements for other functional elements. And in doing no, you preserve the spirit of worse, but with other cultural elements. And the result is that you are telling a global story of worse. A global story of farmers, laborers from all over the world. And now we get to design number three, Joy Mao. And it plays with this idea of illusion versus reality. It's blue. It's got these functional pockets. It's made out of cotton twill, and it's got these paint splashes on it. I hate to say it, but we've seen this stuff before. I mean, what is the point? But if you take a look closely at these paint splatters, you realize that they're not paint. It's embroidered. Because these paint splatters make us think of something that's carefree, messy, not intentional. But in her work, these splashes are meticulously embroidered. And the big idea that she's trying to get across is that labor in fashion is frequently overlooked and really undervalued. And she's literally showing us the gap between what we see, the superficial image that we see, and the actual act of worse. A really thoughtful, smart execution. But ultimately, who makes the best tier jacket is an irrelevant question. It's about which ideas resonate the most with you. Is it the preservation of history? Is it telling a global story of worse? Or is it telling a story about invisible overlooked labor? Even though these are all blue work jackets, it shows us the capacity for design to tell very different stories in something that looks so similar.