Taschen

Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS

£60.00

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In 2016, sportswear manufacturer Nike and fashion designer Virgil Abloh joined forces to create a sneaker collection celebrating 10 of the Oregon-based company's most iconic shoes. With their project The Ten-which reimagines icons like Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Air Force 1, and Air Presto, among others-they reinvigorated sneaker culture Virgil Abloh's new designs offer deep insights into engineering ingenuity and burst with cultural cachet. Drawing on the genius of the original shoe using lettering, ironic labels, collage, and sculpting techniques, Abloh plays with language and sculptural elements to construct new meaning. Inspired by the wit of Dadaism, architectural theory, and avant-garde happenings, he analyses what makes each shoe iconic and deconstructs it into an artistic assemblage, making each shoe into a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture, and a wearable all at once. Icons traces Abloh's investigative, creative process through documentation of the prototypes, original text messages from Abloh to Nike designers, and treasures from the Nike archives. We find Swooshes sliced away from Air Jordans and reapplied with tape or thread, Abloh's typical text fragments in quotation marks on Air Force 1, and All Stars cut into pieces. We take a look behind the scenes and witness Abloh's DIY approach, which gives each model in the Off-WhiteTM c/o Nike collection its own unique touch. The book documents Abloh's cooperative way of working and reaffirms the power of print. For its design Nike and Abloh partnered with the acclaimed London-based design studio Zak Group. Together they conceived a two-part compendium, equal parts catalog and conceptual toolbox. The first part of the book presents a visual culture of sneakers while a lexicon in the second part defines the key people, places, objects, ideas, materials, and scenes from which the project grew. Texts by Nike's Nicholas Schonberger, writer Troy Patterson, curator and historian Glenn Adamson, and Virgil Abloh himself frame the collaborative work within fashion and design history. A foreword by Hiroshi Fujiwara places the project within the historical continuum of Nike collaborators

The Adidas Archive: the Footwear Collection

£100.00

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100 years ago the brothers Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler made their first pair of sports shoes. Hundreds of groundbreaking designs, epic moments, and star-studded collabs later, this book presents the first visual review of the adidas shoe through more than 350 models including never-before-seen prototypes and one-of-a-kind originals To further develop and tailor his products to athletes' specific needs, Dassler asked them to return their worn footwear when no longer needed, with all the shoes eventually ending up in his attic (to this day, many athletes return their shoes to adidas, often as a thank you after winning a title or breaking a world record). This collection now makes up the "adidas archive", one of the largest, if not the largest archive of any sports goods manufacturer in the world-which photographers Christian Habermeier and Sebastian Jager have been visually documenting in extreme detail for years Shot using the highest reproduction techniques, these images reveal the fine details as much as the stains, the tears, the repair tape, the grass smudges, the faded autographs. It's all here, unmanipulated and captured in extremely high resolution-and with it comes to light the personal stories of each individual wearer. We encounter the shoes worn by West Germany's football team during its "miraculous" 1954 World Cup win and those worn by Kathrine Switzer when she ran the Boston Marathon in 1967, before women were officially allowed to compete; custom models for stars from Madonna to Lionel Messi; collabs with the likes of Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Raf Simons, Stella McCartney, Parley for the Oceans or Yohji Yamamoto; as well as the brand's trailblazing techniques and materials, like its pioneering use of plastic waste that is intercepted from beaches and coastal communities Accompanied by a foreword by designer Jacques Chassaing and expert texts, each picture tells us the why and the how, but also conveys the driving force behind adidas. What we discover goes beyond mere design; in the end, these are just shoes, worn out by their users who have loved them-but they are also first-hand witnesses of our sports, design, and culture history, from the beginnings of the Dassler brothers and the founding of adidas until today

Arts & Architecture 1945-49

£45.00

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Ambitious and engaged, Arts & Architecture magazine celebrated change and innovation across politics, society and especially culture. This selection from the magazine's first five years features the complete covers.  It focuses on the groundbreaking Case Study House Program, one of the most unique and influential events in the history of American architecture.