“The art and fashion worlds have been colliding for years due to the natural synergy between the creative industries.” So Mario Eimuth tells us, who along with his brother Thorsten run the E-commerce platform Stylebop.com. These two worlds are very much colliding in their latest project launching tomorrow: CADA goes ART – a jewellery collection designed by three contemporary artists.
The brothers launched German-based Stylebop in 2004, and who doesn’t love a family affair. It hosts over 250 luxury menswear and womenswear brands. The digital market is so saturated that it’s often tough for E-commerce brands to differentiate themselves, which is what makes this unique collaboration so interesting.
The fashion and art industries are full of big personalities (to put it lightly), so often successful partnerships can be a bit tricky to orchestrate. This is what makes the CADA goes ART with Stylebop collaboration so interesting – they managed to get not two, but three, creative parties to successfully work together. German fine jewellery house CADA enlisted the artists Aaron Curry, Andy Hope 1930 and Jonathan Meese to create their own capsule collections of fine jewellery. This resulted in 53 pieces of wearable art, launching December 9 exclusively with Stylebop.com.
The project was born out of CADA founder Herbert Kopp’s love of art. A long time collector, he brought the artists and the brothers together. Stylebop.com was the perfect platform for these creations because the brothers are collectors themselves, and passionate about art. “Aaron Curry and Jonathan Meese are two of my personal favourite artists, whose work I have in my own collection. Each of the three artists has such a unique aesthetic, so to see it translated through a wearable fashion collection is quite incredible,” Thorsten tells us.
This is by no means the only time artists have ventured into the world of jewellery – looking into the archives our favourite are the creations Alexander Calder made for his friends and family (particularly relevant at the moment thanks to his Tate Modern blockbuster exhibition). Mario explains that “More and more in recent years, we have been seeing a blurring of the fashion and art worlds. The collections of luxury fashion houses are often seen as art, and as a retailer you curate those collections for your customer,” and actually bringing in these artists is “a very real and very genuine coming together of art and fashion”.
We picked out the vital statistics of the three contemporary artists and how it translates into their capsule collections.
Aaron Curry
Eclectic is an understatement when it comes to Aaron Curry, a Los Angeles-based artist that takes his influences from things as unexpected as mid-century sculpture to contemporary graffiti. Curry designed a line of cocktail rings in various colours of gold with precious gemstones, and they are as abstract as it gets. We asked Curry where he got his inspiration from, and he told us “it really started from doodles. Then I began thinking about what space this ring/object, this little sculpture, occupies. I thought of them as melting forms with a surface that has been bombarded with these little formations made of jewels, like asteroids falling from the sky.”