FOCUS: ANDREA CREWS

Born in Palais de Tokyo, in the middle of an explosion of collaborative creativity and a stack of garments, Andrea Crews is a fashion collective, established in 2002. Since their first days the label has always been about collaboration, and as a firm supporter that disciplines interpenetrate each other, Andrea Crews nurtured this belief through its “Fashion Art Activism” manifesto and creative collective. Technology is so significant nowadays that we cannot imagine ourselves not using gadgets in our day-to-day life. Andrea Crews is taking control of the world around us redefining a new notion of today's entrepreneur figure. Electronic chips, computers, smartphones and newspapers together with a mix of sportswear and workwear in a range of grey-beige retro-futuristic machines. Spring Summer 2019 collection ‘Hardware to Software’, an immersion into the digital world and its ambitions where mixed and overlapped sportswear and workwear meet reflective materials and propose an alternative way of defining the business man’s style. A business world is changing rapidly, and fashion adapts to its speed. Depicting a man “who knows how to surf”, the designers imagined a combination of sportswear and workwear to dress what they call the “Millennial entrepreneur”, be it a startuper, a hacker or a trader. With various materials and their extensive combinations reproducing the exteriors of computers, the clothes featured reflective flashes and pastels of grey necklines, mixed with a range of colour in grey-beige of retro-futuristic machines or t-shirts illustrating Edward Snowden or Assange as icons. But most of all, what is remarkable when it comes to Andrea Crews is its approach to producing: the label has long been upcycling, or even highjacking old clothes into new ones, mixing influences and styles for modern aesthetics, way before it became popular. Indeed, before launching its ready-to-wear line, in 2012, the crew has been making unique garments from old ones for ten years.