Did Joe Fresh Make My Favorite NB Collab Ever??
“Yo, when's the last time you read anything, man?” - Sincere (Nasir Jones)
It’s funny, DC doesn’t get the credit we deserve for pairing New Balance and streetwear together but we’ve been doing it for as long as I remember seeing the grown-ups get fly.
Using that as the framework for this post, this collaboration between Joe Fresh Goods & NB is the perfect culmination of my interests. First, we take New Balance. As I mentioned, the DMV & New Balance have had a long-standing relationship. There were two pieces of footwear that most teen to adult men in the area kept in their closets, Nike Boots and a pair of New Balance. Don’t get me wrong, basketball shoes were huge here as well because of our intimate ties with basketball (see There’s Something in the Water if you have questions) but New Balance was a chill staple, the 990 model more specifically.
There was a time when designer fashion was reserved for the wealthy before streetwear curbed popular culture. Thanks to Hip-Hop, fashion has taken quite a turn over the past 30 years. We saw famous artists create and partner with brands to give their audiences a new outlook on style. I suppose the trend goes back to the 80s with Dapper Dan’s customization of Gucci products or WuTang completely hijacking Ralph Lauren as their own (the Loheads had it on lock). Either way, it changed the way we interacted with fashion.
The reason why design is important is because it gives us a framework for how clothing can be used. Nothing about a tee shirt or a sweater is new but the design elements that it incorporates, or the color palette that it draws inspiration from create a new language for brands and designers to speak directly to an audience.
JoeFresh, for instance, is among the new class of designers shifting how we interact with products. Joe Fresh is a creative director with a massive catalog of brand partnerships from Nike, to New Balance and even McDonald’s, to name a few. He’s unique in the sense that each partnership speaks to a different piece of culture, whether it’s a cultural reference point or a classic film, enter Belly. I won’t dive too deeply into the cultural relevance and massive impact that Belly (dir. Hype Williams) had on hip-hop & film lovers but the artistic importance of the film is why this JoeFresh collab with New Balance stuck out to me so much.
Early in the film, Hype establishes some of the craziest and most fun angles in cinema by almost using the environment of each scene as a character to speak to the mental state of the characters occupying it. In one particular scene, Nas, Hassan Johnson (Wee-Bay for my Wire fanatics), and a few other characters take up space in DMX’s house as they decompress from a caper. As they sit and the camera pans the room to establish who DMX is in relation to these other guys, some of the most vivid and striking images are displayed in the background, as if Hype wanted you to focus more on the images than on the film’s plot. The images are so vivid (see the references I have placed below) that they almost don’t seem real, almost as if they exist only in film wonderland.
Through my fascination, I had to find out what these images were and who was responsible for making them and to my surprise, the photographer responsible (still to this day) doesn’t receive the flowers he deserves but doesn’t worry, I will go much more in-depth on my love for these images at a later point. The brilliant photographer who crafted the images in question, Thierry Le Goues, from his “Soul” series. And actually what drew me to this specific collaboration was the coloring. To me, Joe Fresh took direct inspiration from le Goues and knocked it out of the park because of that.
Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think in the comments.
photo by Thierry le Goués from the series ‘Soul’