Brain Dead is having the moment

Among the smaller brands in an increasingly crowded street landscape, Brain Dead is emerging as one of the most creative and active on the scene. 

In the last month the Los Angeles-based brand - which Slam Jam has been buying since its first season - has presented the lookbook of the latest Winter 2019 collection shot inside the Olivetti Complex in Ivrea and has announced a pop-up store that will open today November 26th, in Ripa by Porta Ticinese 103, in Milan. The store will remain open throughout December and will sell new products exclusively, emphasizing the brand's connection with the city of Milan which is now - after the opening of Patta, the relocation of Stussy and the next opening of Supreme - a point of reference for the main street brands.

As if that were not enough, yesterday Brain Dead presented another capsule in collaboration with The North Face. Composed of nine items and inspired by the 60s and 70s, it will be released on December 6th, and will be available at the pop-up store in Milan. The capsule is cashing in on positive reviews from the community, for its psychedelic creativity that enriches the style of The North Face. In the words of Brain Dead designer Kyle Ng:

"With this collaboration, we wanted to reimagine the concept of the expedition as more of a state of mind. Adventure through ideas".

A conceptual streetwear 

The lookbook of the latest Winter 2019 collection was taken inside the Olivetti Complex in Ivrea, which with its modernist architecture was one of the main centers of European industrial design and contemporary thinking from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The Complex represented an urban-industrial project in which the human being and his well-being occupied the center of the production process. The corporate culture that Adriano Olivetti strived to create and condensed in his book-testing "City of Man", led the brand to become one of the main names in the field of industrial design of its time. The entrepreneur employed painters, poets and intellectuals in his company, alongside engineers and designers, because he believed that culture should be combined with industrial production, aesthetics with functionality. Among the brand's most iconic creations, there are the Lexicon 80 and Lettera 22 typewriters, along with the famous Olivetti Program 101, the first Italian computer that, with its 44,000 units sold, also became the first mass-marketed computer in the '60s. The lookbook of the collection therefore plays with the juxtaposition of a colorful, playful and intellectually lively workwear to a modernist architecture whose aim was to undo the barriers between factory work and intellectual activity.

The fact that Brain Dead has decided to tackle a subject as layered and dense as that of "Olivetism", as Danilo Campanella called it, confirms once again the intellectual vocation of streetwear created by the brand. Since its inception in 2014, Brain Dead has built its identity on the unexpected and niche cultural reference, the call to the underground world, subculture and counterculture, with a focus on the world of punk and skateboarding. In the words of co-founder Kyle Ng: 

“We love art, music, cult cinema, rare printed ephemera, bootleg anything, handmade toys and weirdo stuff in general and we wanted to create platform to make and curate projects and produce product that relates to our world.”

La collezione Winter 2019 prende ispirazione dal workwear ed è composta da felpe e pantaloni decorati con grafiche all-over, camicie zip-up, giacche e cargo pants in corduroy, oltre che calze e marsupi. Pezzi chiave della collezione sono le Chore Coat in tela che si presentano in versioni monocrome con decorazioni grafiche in bianco e nella colorway Colorblock Canvas. È soprattutto in questi capi che la funzionalità e il design pratico dell’abbigliamento da lavoro vengono re-immaginati in chiave moderna, grazie alle decorazioni firmate dall’illustratore e artista Leon Sadler, già reduce di collabo con Nike e Givenchy, che pone al centro dei suoi lavori il tema dell’identità.

Brain Dead's Winter 2019 collection is already available from the brand's online store. The opening event of the Brain Dead pop-up store will be held on Wednesday 26 November in Ripa di Porta Ticinese 103, in Milan.