Josef Albers, Daniel Buren and Hiroshi Sugimoto x Hermes
The Hermès scarf was born in 1937 as a project of Robert Dumas who was fascinated by innovative textile printing techniques. Dumas soon became passionate about creating designs and constantly searched for new arrangements and endless combinations of colours.
The Hermès Editeur was born of this fertile ground, extending the bridge between craftsmanship and contemporary arts, and had previously worked together with talented artists Josef Albers and Daniel Buren in creating a special collection of scarves with the French luxury fashion house.
For their third edition, the Hermès Editeur has called upon the talent of Hiroshi Sugimoto, an important Japanese artist whose artworks provided a profoundly moving aesthetic experience for many.
Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948, and moved to the United States in 1970 to study photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Sugimoto attempts to highlight and expand our perception of such abstract qualities as time, light, space, movement, spirit - and the nature of reality itself. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, as he was also the recipient of the Mainichi Art Prize in 1988, the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001, and in 2009 he was named the Praemium Imperiale Laureate in the category of Painting.
Couleurs de l'ombre or Colours of the Shadow is the title of the project that Sugimoto designed and it has taken him 10 years to complete. As Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès Artistic Director recalled: “When I visited his studio in Tokyo, Hiroshi Sugimoto showed me his project Colours of Shadow. I remember it very clearly: at the centre of a large, light-filled room, rising like a column from floor to ceiling, there stood a crystal prism of immaculate clarity. This was an experimental device whereby, every morning, the sunlight passing through the prism would create a world of colours, projected like shadows on the white walls of the studio. A chromatic epiphany in Polaroid that the artist suggested we could capture on our silk scarf. Out of this came 20 subtle variations, all different, printed in giant format. The importance given to colour and abstraction, two notions close to my heart, made it perfectly coherent with the two previous editions by Hermès Editeur.”
According to Sugimoto, “The entire project constituted a kind of observational apparatus, the observations only began once the apparatus was completed. And were I to include my observational findings in the work, then it would have been an endless project— especially since observations could very well continue after I am gone.” Hermès, Couleurs de L’ombre by Hiroshi Sugimoto is currently exhibited in Singapore from the 23rd January 2013 to 2nd March 2013 at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Visit www.stpi.com.sg for more information.
With a new collaboration coming out in June 2015, Hermès Editeur, a continuing collaboration project of the fashion brand, is promising a high-quality level result. From extremely limited editions of scarves to polaroids, the upcoming collaborations is highly anticipated by the audience.

Richard Prince x Louis Vuitton
Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer, the first rephotograph to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold atChristie's New York in 2005.
Louis Vuitton asked Richard Prince for collaboration in one of their upcoming collections and the American artist’s paintings come into life months later. From dresses, shoes, jewellery to everyday accessories, Richard Prince is featured all over Louis Vuitton for a result that exceeds the expectations of the fashion world.

Daniel Buren x Louis Vuitton
Louis Vuitton goes mod for their S/S 2013 campaign and they’ll have you thinking that your seeing double. The campaign features models Athena Wilson, Nastya Kusakina, Janice Alida, Magdalena Jasek, Ruby Jean Wilson, Tian Yi, Ji Hye Park, Nykhor Paul, Ajak Deng and Bria Condon looking pretty in Damier checks and other prints the French fashion house has created for spring. The checkered backdrop was created by French artist Daniel Buren who also did the set in Louis Vuitton’s spring show in Paris back in October. The images are lensed in New York by Steven Meisel.
Daniel Buren (born 25 March 1938) is a French conceptual artist.
Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting colored stripes in an effort to integrate visual surface and architectural space, notably on historical, landmark architecture.
Among his chief concerns is the 'scene of production' as a way of presenting art and highlighting facture (the process of 'making' rather than for example, mimesis or representation of anything but the work itself). The work is site-specific installation, having a relation to its setting in contrast to prevailing ideas of an autonomous work of art.

Laurence Xu