Matchesfashion brought its website to life for a weeklong shoppable pop-up in celebration of Frieze Los Angeles.
The last time the London-based retailer had a notable presence in L.A. was in February 2020 for Frieze, when Matchesfashion held a cocktail event with Birkenstock on-site at the art fair in the backlot of Paramount studio.
This year, Matchesfashion stepped it up.
With the fair relocated to Beverly Hills, the team took over Simon House, a midcentury modern home in Beverly Hills’ Trousdale Estates, for a series of events. (Matchesfashion also had a gallery space inside the fair, showcasing 12 contemporary and emerging artists, in collaboration with Alexander May, founder and creative director of Sized.)
“We wanted it to feel very special, really curated, working with lots of the designers that we love,” said Jess Christie, chief brand officer of Matchesfashion. “What we noticed, as things started to open up, is people wanted to shop physically but in a more considerate way. We wanted it to feel intimate, personal, but also quite fun.”
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The house was reimagined to appear as Matchesfashion’s London Townhouse, the retail space at 5 Carlos Place. But the selection on display had the L.A. shopper in mind: a “savvy, quite global” traveler, often working in a creative field, said Christie, noting California as one of the retailer’s biggest markets.
“It’s different brands and designers that we feel the customer will really like,” she went on, at a cocktail party held in partnership with Alexander McQueen. “It’s a mix of discovery of quite established brands like McQueen, but then Cecilie Bahnsen — which has done so well already with the L.A. customer.”
What else has been selling so far?
“The McQueen preorder,” she said, specifically the brand’s black bomber jacket, as well as a bright pink suit on display. “Alighieri jewelry, too, has done well.”
French singer-songwriter Soko performed for the crowd, which included Benny Blanco, Tara Deveaux, Beck, Ron Finley and Troye Sivan.
Among the notable happenings all week, Matchesfashion held an event highlighting the work of A Vibe Called Tech, a London-based creative agency founded by Charlene Prempeh.
“We were really thinking about what was missing and needed, and we landed on this idea of diversifying the creative industries,” said A Vibe Called Tech’s creative director Lewis Gilbert of launching in early 2020. “When George Floyd was killed and the Black Lives Matter movement happened across the world, it really highlighted for us that it was needed more than ever before.”
A Vibe Called Tech works across creative fields (clients include Gucci), as well as tech.
“It’s almost a new platform where people say it’s democratic,” Gilbert said of the tech world. “Same with NFTs, they say it’s a new space that’s democratic, but at the same time, the top 10 earners are all white men. We need to make sure we are not going down the same rabbit hole we’ve done before, where we’re not diversifying things from the get-go. That’s why tech is a focus for us. We see it as an opportunity to make changes in the world.”
The week’s programming also included a brunch with consultant-turned-designer Zoë de Givenchy; a lunch with Hilde Lynn Helphenstein — the artist, gallerist and art-meme master known as @jerrygogosian to her 104,000 Instagram followers; an evening with famed tattoo artist Dr. Woo (bringing out Chris Pine), and a dinner with L’Objet’s Elad Yifrach and the Haas brothers, twins Nikolai and Simon, to celebrate their second collaboration, a collection of objects and dishware.
While the first partnership dove into a world of creatures and monsters, the second line — inspired by the state of the world amid COVID-19 — showcased objects with human expression and connection.
“It started two weeks into the pandemic,” explained Yifrach. “I was in Europe and the Haas brothers were here in L.A., and we checked in with each other on FaceTime. Two, three weeks into it, we were so frustrated….We said, ‘Let’s just go into a fantasy place and imagine how we want to see the world emerge from the pandemic.’”
That night, surrounded by friends, they were doing just that, he added.