© by Sixpack France / Photography & Art Direction //DIY
»SixPack France has spent many years being considered as a youth-oriented, teenage brand. We now aspire to become a post-youth brand – but definitely not post-teenage, mind you, morelike neo-childish, or ancient childish, fuelled by the hallucinogenic eye Baudelaire described as the young child’s look on the world, and particularly on things like toys and curios. No more are we afraid of what we crave for. No more are we scared to revive childhood’s idiosyncratic, singular feelings. This is how we’ll escape from boredom: taking children and teens as role models – the more exhiliratingly gauche they are, the better.
We’d like people to purchase and use SixPack France goods as a way to make them their very own things, and to convert them as images or sensations or short pieces of writing, as secret passages to some forgotten realms. Their stories and memories should be living inside the SixPack France fabrics. Our clothes should activate something intimate and hard to express in any other way. They shoud allow fetishizing one small detail, stripe, pocket, button or seam as a minuscule door to a fresh, fluid mindworld. Building up a personal utopia, walking up a synaesthaesic path to an early lost erotic moment. Touching a cloth is also seeing, hearing, smelling. Reaching forbidden waters. Let’s go swimming.
SixPack France believes in the dream of never-ending youth, but not as an escapist refuge, more like a way to look back, and live back all the early things of life and civilization – early as in early Christians or early house. It’s not about carefully and nostalgically recreating some idealized past. It’s about acting as melancholia-drenched archeologists who would steep on unfinished grounds. The brand spirit is a room with moving doors, doors open to psychedelic vertigo, erotic dread and deep inner and outer exploration. We don’t despise the short-lived, and we enjoy mystic naivety very much. We now ought to do what we thought we shouldn’t do while teens: being uncool, ignoring codes, accepting and listening to what’s really exciting us deep inside, enjoying everything in which we feel a sincere instinct. Being able to own the means of our desires, and imagining a new form of counter-culture.
SixPack France envisions its clothing collections as sensory prisms, as precipitates of fleeing sensations and memory textures often more intense than the real facts they’re supposed to be related to. It is the advertising agency of lost causes, the archive center of our lives’ echoes, the clothing collection of vague recollections. A simple, unformal anthology of cut-up epiphanies.«
SIXPACK FRANCE Website
SIXPACK FRANCE »DUST TO DUST« SPRING/SUMMER 2011 COLLECTION LOOKBOOK
SIXPACK FRANCE »DUST TO DUST« SPRING/SUMMER 2011 COLLECTION LOOKBOOK
© by Sixpack France / Photography & Art Direction //DIY
»SixPack France has spent many years being considered as a youth-oriented, teenage brand. We now aspire to become a post-youth brand – but definitely not post-teenage, mind you, morelike neo-childish, or ancient childish, fuelled by the hallucinogenic eye Baudelaire described as the young child’s look on the world, and particularly on things like toys and curios. No more are we afraid of what we crave for. No more are we scared to revive childhood’s idiosyncratic, singular feelings. This is how we’ll escape from boredom: taking children and teens as role models – the more exhiliratingly gauche they are, the better.
We’d like people to purchase and use SixPack France goods as a way to make them their very own things, and to convert them as images or sensations or short pieces of writing, as secret passages to some forgotten realms. Their stories and memories should be living inside the SixPack France fabrics. Our clothes should activate something intimate and hard to express in any other way. They shoud allow fetishizing one small detail, stripe, pocket, button or seam as a minuscule door to a fresh, fluid mindworld. Building up a personal utopia, walking up a synaesthaesic path to an early lost erotic moment. Touching a cloth is also seeing, hearing, smelling. Reaching forbidden waters. Let’s go swimming.
SixPack France believes in the dream of never-ending youth, but not as an escapist refuge, more like a way to look back, and live back all the early things of life and civilization – early as in early Christians or early house. It’s not about carefully and nostalgically recreating some idealized past. It’s about acting as melancholia-drenched archeologists who would steep on unfinished grounds. The brand spirit is a room with moving doors, doors open to psychedelic vertigo, erotic dread and deep inner and outer exploration. We don’t despise the short-lived, and we enjoy mystic naivety very much. We now ought to do what we thought we shouldn’t do while teens: being uncool, ignoring codes, accepting and listening to what’s really exciting us deep inside, enjoying everything in which we feel a sincere instinct. Being able to own the means of our desires, and imagining a new form of counter-culture.
SixPack France envisions its clothing collections as sensory prisms, as precipitates of fleeing sensations and memory textures often more intense than the real facts they’re supposed to be related to. It is the advertising agency of lost causes, the archive center of our lives’ echoes, the clothing collection of vague recollections. A simple, unformal anthology of cut-up epiphanies.«
SIXPACK FRANCE Website
SIXPACK FRANCE »DUST TO DUST« SPRING/SUMMER 2011 COLLECTION / 3RD VIDEO TEASER CREATED BY STUDIO //DIY
© by Sixpack / Design //DIY / Music »Taste The Ozone« Spectrum (Courtesy Sonic Boom) 1st Video Teaser on CQC / 2nd Video Teaser on CQC
SIXPACK FRANCE Website
SIXPACK FRANCE »DUST TO DUST« SPRING/SUMMER 2011 COLLECTION / 3RD VIDEO TEASER CREATED BY STUDIO //DIY
© by Sixpack / Design //DIY / Music »Taste The Ozone« Spectrum (Courtesy Sonic Boom) 1st Video Teaser on CQC / 2nd Video Teaser on CQC
SIXPACK FRANCE Website
SIXPACK FRANCE x TOM OF FINLAND T-SHIRT COLLECTION / LAUNCH: 26TH JANUARY 2011
© by Sixpack France
SIXPACK FRANCE x TOM OF FINLAND COLLECTION
Tom of Finland is Finnish. Crazy, huh?
Tautology and irony aside, this fact is significant. Lost in the Far North, the young Tom of Finland, born Touko Laaksonen, started drawing statuesque and fantastical men early on, unaware that decades later his drawings would become idealized images for men who prefer dick.
But not any men: a specific community, born right after World War II, like the bikers’. Same uniform: motorcycle boots, rocker-style leather jackets and caps.
And same background as well: army veterans, like Touko. Hard-boiled Americans, often S&M-oriented, forming a highly restricted members-only private club.
Bikers and leather men, two parallel worlds that wouldn’t necessarily come together, if not through unconscious imitation: by the early 50’s, gay bikers’ clubs had already come into existence. Counter-cultural hypermasculine brotherhoods on two counts: against the fairy fruity gays and against a society too hung up on rules. Doubly interesting for Sixpack France, the Avignon-based house advocating all forms of insubordination and disobedience.
Threefold even, since this new ode to testosterone and mustache trends, for which Tom of Finland would become the staunch defender, is born of pencil on paper. A pencil to erect a myth. A myth and dicks, sex, and a culture glorifying bodies. Assertion and satisfaction. Assertion of beauty amongst men. Men proud of their bodies and no longer hiding. Rebels without any other cause than their love for other men. Joyful satisfaction, on a motorcycle saddle rather than between silk sheets...
A pencil to translate a vision, a proliferation of details, surreal realism: Tom’s men are wet dreams who will gradually become reality. Twenty years before Glenn Hughes was even wriggling to the sound of the Village People on every TV set, or Al Pacino infiltrated the leather scene in William Friedkin’s Cruising. But how on earth did Tom, all the way back in Helsinki, get the hang of this very underground phenomenon? That is the question. Perhaps one day, at the advertising agency he was working for, Tom came across the July 21, 1947 edition of Life magazine and its infamous photo spread of the Hollister biker rally turned orgiastic riot. Maybe that was the trigger: Tom simply felt an affinity with these fringe-dwelling groups of the American way of life…
Because Tom of Finland, without having ever traveled there, appears to be immersed in the American mythologies, combining collective unconscious and personal psyche. Extreme virility, refusal of established rules, private dream and social reality. His world and their world, of indifferent revellers, magnificent man-whores and itinerant backpackers seeking endless pleasure, much like Kake, his comic books’ hero.
Kake travels the length and breadth of the gay path, like a homo hobo, a fanny cowboy looking for these archetypal buckled fellas making his sap rise: lumberjacks and workers, businessmen and servicemen, all hung like Greek gods.
Muscular chests and thighs in the image of Mr Clean’s, neatly trimmed porn star mustaches on faces as square as their torsos, and gigantic cocks: it’s a complete orgy in Tom’s head. Striking homoerotism. As opposed to Hajime Sorayama’s female robots - for which Sixpack France has already been the herald - or even Namio Harukawa’s domineering women, this erotic art has gone from paper to true reality. Extremely rare embodiment, private reveries becoming worldwidely fashionable.
Tom of Finland has drawn a myth. Tom of Finland, a hedonistic illustrator.
The SIXPACK FRANCE x TOM OF FINLAND collection will be launched 26th January 2011 and available online at SIXPACK.FR or at CITADIUM in Paris.
SIXPACK FRANCE Website
SIXPACK FRANCE x TOM OF FINLAND T-SHIRT COLLECTION / LAUNCH: 26TH JANUARY 2011
© by Sixpack France
SIXPACK FRANCE x TOM OF FINLAND COLLECTION
Tom of Finland is Finnish. Crazy, huh?
Tautology and irony aside, this fact is significant. Lost in the Far North, the young Tom of Finland, born Touko Laaksonen, started drawing statuesque and fantastical men early on, unaware that decades later his drawings would become idealized images for men who prefer dick.
But not any men: a specific community, born right after World War II, like the bikers’. Same uniform: motorcycle boots, rocker-style leather jackets and caps.
And same background as well: army veterans, like Touko. Hard-boiled Americans, often S&M-oriented, forming a highly restricted members-only private club.
Bikers and leather men, two parallel worlds that wouldn’t necessarily come together, if not through unconscious imitation: by the early 50’s, gay bikers’ clubs had already come into existence. Counter-cultural hypermasculine brotherhoods on two counts: against the fairy fruity gays and against a society too hung up on rules. Doubly interesting for Sixpack France, the Avignon-based house advocating all forms of insubordination and disobedience.
Threefold even, since this new ode to testosterone and mustache trends, for which Tom of Finland would become the staunch defender, is born of pencil on paper. A pencil to erect a myth. A myth and dicks, sex, and a culture glorifying bodies. Assertion and satisfaction. Assertion of beauty amongst men. Men proud of their bodies and no longer hiding. Rebels without any other cause than their love for other men. Joyful satisfaction, on a motorcycle saddle rather than between silk sheets...
A pencil to translate a vision, a proliferation of details, surreal realism: Tom’s men are wet dreams who will gradually become reality. Twenty years before Glenn Hughes was even wriggling to the sound of the Village People on every TV set, or Al Pacino infiltrated the leather scene in William Friedkin’s Cruising. But how on earth did Tom, all the way back in Helsinki, get the hang of this very underground phenomenon? That is the question. Perhaps one day, at the advertising agency he was working for, Tom came across the July 21, 1947 edition of Life magazine and its infamous photo spread of the Hollister biker rally turned orgiastic riot. Maybe that was the trigger: Tom simply felt an affinity with these fringe-dwelling groups of the American way of life…
Because Tom of Finland, without having ever traveled there, appears to be immersed in the American mythologies, combining collective unconscious and personal psyche. Extreme virility, refusal of established rules, private dream and social reality. His world and their world, of indifferent revellers, magnificent man-whores and itinerant backpackers seeking endless pleasure, much like Kake, his comic books’ hero.
Kake travels the length and breadth of the gay path, like a homo hobo, a fanny cowboy looking for these archetypal buckled fellas making his sap rise: lumberjacks and workers, businessmen and servicemen, all hung like Greek gods.
Muscular chests and thighs in the image of Mr Clean’s, neatly trimmed porn star mustaches on faces as square as their torsos, and gigantic cocks: it’s a complete orgy in Tom’s head. Striking homoerotism. As opposed to Hajime Sorayama’s female robots - for which Sixpack France has already been the herald - or even Namio Harukawa’s domineering women, this erotic art has gone from paper to true reality. Extremely rare embodiment, private reveries becoming worldwidely fashionable.
Tom of Finland has drawn a myth. Tom of Finland, a hedonistic illustrator.
The SIXPACK FRANCE x TOM OF FINLAND collection will be launched 26th January 2011 and available online at SIXPACK.FR or at CITADIUM in Paris.
SIXPACK FRANCE Website