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“If you are just learning about Pyer Moss, we forgive you!” read the back of designer Kerby Jean-Raymond’s Pyer Moss shirt when he famously met Anna Wintour in 2018. Sure, you should know about the brand but, really it’s all about the designer himself who was just tapped by Reebok to become the artistic director of a new division at the brand called Reebok Studies_.
Different than the collaborative partnership Jean-Raymond and Reebok have cultivated in the past year, as artistic director of Reebok Studies_, Jean-Raymond will bring in fellow designers and celebrities for special projects and collaborations to “push ideas forward,” he told Business of Fashion.
Karen Reuther, Reebok’s vice president of creative described Jean-Raymond as a “thought partner.”
“It really is about future lines, future collections, future potential collaborations, exploring activations, searching for new talent —it’s a space [where] we don’t want to limit creativity,” Reuther added.
Through this new partnership, the Pyer Moss designer hopes to help Reebok “have a pulse on what’s going on in fashion and in music and in activism” something very few people in this space know better than Jean-Raymond. When the designer debuted his inaugural Reebok by Pyer Moss collection, “American, Also,” he assembled a cast of all-black models to model the red, white, and blue range with phrases like “As USA As U” written on a pair of joggers and a choir singing Kendrick Lamar in the background. He previously teamed up with Erykah Badu for a show centered on mental health awareness, traded in his Art Basel experience to head to Standing Rock, and held Pyer Moss’ fifth anniversary show in the Weeksville neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the country’s first free black communities.
The freedom to marry his culture and heritage with Reebok’s own is the driving force behind the designer and brand’s longstanding relationship, or as Jean-Raymond puts it, “productive marriage” and hopes to give other creatives the same experience.