COS And Studio Swine Take Fashion’s Art Obsession To New Heights In Miami

If the time difference between London and Miami hadn’t messed enough with your head, what unfolded in the optical white space at Temple House on Tuesday night during Art Basel had that covered. A bright, white tree towered inside the chalky hall as Scandinavian heritage retail giant COS opened the doors to its collaboration with the London-based artist duo Studio Swine. From the tree’s descending branches, milky white bubbles expanded like blooming flowers, only to fall and burst into ashy smoke as they hit the heads of guests gathered under the crown, each bubble spreading its own fragrance in the room, echoing the scents of Miami Beach. “We wanted to create a moment, like the cherry blossom in Japan, which only lasts one week a year. People come out together and experience this ephemeral thing that reminds you of the passing of things,” Alexander Groves explained the following day, his partner Azusa Murakami by his side.

"They delve into the past and present of the city where nature is still felt so vividly amongst the art deco buildings and their glitzy nightlife"

The young artists behind Studio Swine, the couple first created the installation with COS for Salone del Mobile in April this year. “It’s joyful, but there’s a tinge of melancholy in there as well,” Groves reflected. “We like that there’s something clean and mechanic about it and the architecture of it, but it’s also quite messy. It plays with natural phenomena: fluid moving around, the bounce of it, the mess on the floor.” The event marked COS’s first event at Art Basel and cemented the brand’s ongoing devotion to the art scene and its emerging talent. “From day one we’ve done a lot of research on art and created our seasonal directions in-house,” its creative director Karin Gustafsson explained. “That’s not unique in the fashion world, but that’s the approach we’ve taken. Art is what makes us think and therefore we felt quite early that it would make sense for us to do collaborations.”

In a time when any self-respecting designer is joining forces with artists – or the estates of dead ones – for COS, working with artists isn’t about translating art into garments for retail purposes, however. “So far we haven’t felt that we wanted to collaborate on a project, but rather collaborate in a sense of giving back to the art world that gives us so much inspiration,” Gustafsson pointed out. “It’s a way for us to talk to our customer.” With the brand’s minimalist aesthetics and meticulous attention to technique and fabrication, COS has long been favoured by the art crowd. Somehow the fuss-but-no-fuss sensibility of its clever Scandinavian clarity just speaks to the vernissage-attending segment of urban consumers, and seeing Groves and Murakami – young, beautiful, sophisticated – clad in the brand’s clothes, it made sense.

The duo, who met at the Royal College of Art, had visited Miami several times for inspiration, going to museums such as the contemporary collections at Pérez, and the natural history centre at HistoryMiami, delving into the past and present of the Floridian city where nature is still felt so vividly amongst the art deco buildings and their glitzy nightlife. “It was really surprising how the nature is so incredible. I’ve seen so many flocks of birds, I’ve seen natural sponges washing up on the beach, pelicans… it’s incredible,” Groves effused. “We’ve been smelling the city,” he laughed, “and chose scents that could evoke certain aspects of it. There are different smells at night that come out from the plants, and the quiet and the dark heighten your sense of smell.” He waxed lyrical about the notes they conjured up, from pepper to fig, cut leaves and chopped hardwood, and “a bit of tobacco for Cuban influence.”

For Studio Swine, branching out into the fashion industry felt as natural as fashion’s current obsession with art. “In COS, you can feel the engagement with art and design and the creative industries, and it’s very genuine,” Murakami noted. “They’ve given us a total open brief and been very supportive in everything. Neither of us really wanted to do something that was just a branding exercise for a week and then be gone and create a lot of waste. We wanted to do something that had longevity and was timeless: a piece of art that can come out again and again and continue to tour around and be relevant,” she said. “We don’t have a hierarchy of disciplines,” Groves added. “The question we ask ourselves isn’t: what discipline is it?’ It’s: is it good and interesting and engaging in terms of the times?”