Visionaire creators, Stephen Gan and Cecilia Dean, decided to devote the latest issue of their fashion and art album to 10 Kidrobot dolls designed by a range of world’s top couturiers.
“Stephen Gan walks by the Kidrobot store on Prince Street all the time, and he was like, ’God, they are so great, let’s do something with them’,” Visionaire editor Cecilia Dean told FWD.
As a result, Visionaire’s editorial team acted as recipient of 10 sketches of haute couture toys and lesion between the designers and Kidrobot’s factory in Asia.
According to Dean, the whole process was “incredibly labor intensive”.
“If the designers wanted to hand-sketch something, they should be able to do that, ” she says. “But when we got it we had to scan it into the computer and trace every single piece and assign it a Pantone color. Everything had to be broken down into a silk-screenable format. Our design team spent days on end working on one toy.”
But the hardest part was, probably, the process of stamping each pattern onto every toy of the 4,000 limited edition individually.
“Most Kidrobot toys take maybe ten stamps,” explains Dean. “Our toys took over 200 stamps each — 250 for the multilayered Versace design. Kidrobot said these are by far the most complicated designs they have ever dealt with. They kind of freaked out when they saw the level of complexity we were asking for, but they did a brilliant job.”
The issue is released in two sets: black and red. The black set includes toys by Karl Lagerfeld, Donatella Versace, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Louis Dumas for Hermes, and Valentino. The red box contains dolls designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, Hedi Silmane, Viktor & Rolf, and Miuccia Prada. Each set comes with four tiny accessories, such as a flower, a cell phone, martini and a camera, that can be clipped into the dolls’ hands.
Visionaire subscribers will each receive one box set. The remaining exemplars can be purchased for $175 in a set of five via www.visionaireworld.com or at Rizzoli bookstores.
The second Toys issue is scheduled for March, featuring ten more Kidrobot dolls customized by designers such as John Galliano, Helmut Lang and Rei Kawakubo for Commes des Garcons.