A Collaboration We Hope Only Lasts 15 Minutes: Andy Warhol and Converse Shoes
Next month, Converse will team up with the Andy Warhol Foundation to create some of the tackiest footwear in recent memory: sneakers with iconic Warhol images, like the Campbell’s soup print, plastered onto their sides. The banner of cultural try-hards the world over, Warhol’s pop-prints have taken on a corporate life of their own, gracing commodities from Perrier bottles to skateboards and breeding in their owners an erroneous sense of cultured self-importance.
This latest collaboration weds two eminent brands to create a particularly heinous festival of name-recognition. Andy Warhol, whose endless corporate tie-ins have regrettably lasted considerably longer than fifteen minutes, has rapidly become one of the readiest signifiers of aspirational high-culture sensibilities (vying for the top spot with that Jack Kerouac quote re: Roman candles, the scourge of pretentious Facebook profiles), and his invocation has a hanging-a-poster-of-that-Hokusai-woodcut-in-my-dorm-room-to-signify-my-erudition air about it.
An exercise in the worst kind of tastelessness, the Chuck Taylor All-Star Andy Warhol Collection will be available in stores and online beginning February 6. We hope that their fame will last five minutes at most.
Courtesy of Converse.
Courtesy of Converse.
