Sneaker Collab

Mudac and Swisss­neaks will take part in Lausanne en Jeux !, a Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympic Games’ programme and will celeb­rate the cultural and soci­olo­gical history of sport, focus­ing on an iconic object that has spread way beyond the world for which it was initially created to invade our daily lives and our urban­ity: the sports shoe.

Sneak­ers, to use contem­por­ary termin­o­logy, are without a doubt the object that best repres­ents the hybrid­isa­tion of luxury and streetwear. Next to easily access­ible main­stream designs, a whole scene that features re-editions, designs drawn from archives, collab­or­a­tions between brands (Anna Wintour and Nike, Kanye West and Adidas, Damien Hirst and Converse), bears evid­ence to an increas­ingly detailed, and even aggress­ive command of the distri­bu­tion and devel­op­ment of a rich and creat­ive culture, based on dialogue and shar­ing.

This move­ment of amal­gam­a­tion and of break­ing down barri­ers between social classes should be weighed against our contem­por­ary life­style. The concept of inter­con­nec­tion has been a part of the DNA of several gener­a­tions in our glob­al­ised soci­et­ies. The creat­ive poten­tial of this culture has only recently been exploited by the world of luxury. Thus, as has been its habit in the last few years, the world of fash­ion had its «trans­fer window» at the begin­ning of 2018, send­ing a wave of excite­ment through every fash­ion week. Several pres­ti­gi­ous brands have announced the arrival of new artistic direct­ors at the helm of their creat­ive studios: Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuit­ton, Kim Jones for Dior Homme, Riccardo Tisci for Burberry. These three design­ers all embody a grow­ing phenomenon for fash­ion houses, i.e. that of blend­ing together high fash­ion and streetwear, as evid­enced by the grow­ing collab­or­a­tions between pres­ti­gi­ous houses and sportswear brands. In 2017, in a similar move­ment, the monu­ment of French luxury Louis Vuit­ton teamed up with US brand Supreme, a global icon of skate­board culture.

This trend of artistic direct­ors going from fash­ion house to fash­ion house has now taken a differ­ent turn, which should be viewed within a more global perspect­ive on a soci­etal level, fash­ion having always played a cent­ral role in cultural rela­tions. The explo­sion of rap and the emer­gence of skate­board culture have helped distrib­ute these refer­ences and aesthet­ics in the world of luxury and fash­ion in general. Although for decades, this subcul­ture freely diver­ted the dress style of the wealthy, to the great displeas­ure of luxury brands, nowadays, the latter continu­ously elicit meet­ings – with vary­ing degrees of success – between their world, the world of urban­cul­ture and sports.

The Sneaker Collab exhib­i­tion aims to bear evid­ence, in a global and immers­ive way, to the posit­ive power of the sneaker phenomenon by evok­ing its emer­gence in the 1980s with the Jordan Air brand as well as more recent collab­or­a­tions and projects. Sneaker Collab hopes to demon­strate how sneak­ers, a culture as well as a way of life, have triggered a shock­wave that has reached the worlds of fash­ion, music, images and ulti­mately all levels of contem­por­ary creation and urban culture.

Focused on collab­or­a­tions, the exhib­i­tion also finds its raison d’être in histor­ical aspects, return­ing to the most memor­able projects that have turned this branch of popu­lar culture into a symp­to­matic object of our times. Genu­ine instru­ments of market­ing strategy, these collab­or­a­tions have contrib­uted to trans­form what was noth­ing but a sports shoe at first into a cult object that has gone way beyond its initial func­tion to become a fash­ion access­ory.