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Avant-garde conceptual publication Visionaire has always been about art meeting design, and after releasing the first Visionaire x Gap T-shirt collaboration during Art Basel in Miami Beach and the second during Frieze New York, Visionaire cofounders Cecilia Dean and James Kaliardos thought that the next one should be unveiled during a fashion event. So, on September 4, just in time for New York fashion week, Gap and Visionaire will release the third installment of their T-shirt collaboration with a special installation at the Gap on 34th Street in New York.

 

The starting point for The Gold Collection, which will consist of 15 T-shirts featuring work by various artists produced in a limited run of 500 each, was the Forever issue. “It was an issue of Visionaire that was made entirely out of metal,” explained Kaliardos. For the shirts ($34.95 each), they selected artwork from the issue by Vik Muniz, Alexis Rockman, James Nares, Peter Saville, Philip Taaffe, Adam Fuss, Simon Periton, Pierpaolo Ferrari, François Berthoud, Ugo Rondinone, Mark Romanek, Blommers/Schumm, and Fifty Shades of Grey film director Sam Taylor-Johnson.

 

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Ever the experimentalists, Kaliardos and Dean made sure to step outside the box for this project. “We wanted this time to play with many different techniques with the gold as possible,” explained Kaliardos. “So we have foil stamping, and we have dot screen, and we have triple-gold ink printing.” One T-shirt depicts Nares’ signature brushstroke in the form of a gold circle; another by Rockman, who constantly paints animals in his work, shows a painting of a porcupine-pig hybrid accompanied by the phrase “P is for Porcupig”; and Muniz’s is covered entirely with an image of multicolored puzzle pieces.

One of the T-shirts, which shows an illustration featuring symbols and directions for handling art conceived by artist John Baldessari, is a preview of Visionaire‘s upcoming Art issue. “We didn’t want to reveal any of the artwork from the actual issue,” said Dean. “But it’s called Art, and so I thought it was kind of funny that his T-shirts are all symbols of packaging for shipping art, and being on a T-shirt, with a person wearing it—it’s sort of like you’re treating yourself as a work of art, and that’s very much what the issue is about.”

 

The next installment of the Visionaire x Gap T-shirt series, which will debut in October, was conceptualized with the cooler months ahead in mind and will feature an image by the legendary editor Diana Vreeland. “We’re doing sweatshirts as well, which we’re really excited about,” said Dean. “That’s going to release at Frieze in London.”

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