As part of our new summer US project States of Independence we've invited our favourite 30 American curators, magazines, creatives and institutions to takeover Dazed for a day.
Time to get trippy: radical record label-meets-club experience Fade to Mind are staging a mid-week takeover at Dazed. That means party recordings from NYC to your laptop, Kingdom’s top 10 Vine singers, exclusive bootlegs to download and more from the unstoppable crew.
Deeper then our need for utility is this nagging millennial, generational crisis regarding the fear of Armageddon. This rabid need to prepare for the worst was pre-emptively identified by Kosuke Tsumura when he started Final Home in '92 – 8 years before Y2k insanity, and 20 years before the premiere of Doomsday Preppers, a reality show on National Geographic channel that chronicles the lives of average Americans prepping for the end of the world.
The line is made up of mostly nylon coats/jackets containing several pockets made for stuffing, with newspaper, with food for storage, for down pillows made to convert your coat into puffer, protecting you from climate change. One parka featured a zipper that went all the way up completely covering the face – when I visited Final Home in Japan in 2000 the clerks informed me that at the time of death it could double as a body bag. Patterns have included an all over print of white lotus referencing The White Lotus Clan which spearheaded a massive Chinese revolution in order to invoke the end times which they believed couldn't happen until the then government was overthrown, making it safe for Buddha's return.
It's a marketing strategy rarely seen on the high street: it's presented as necessity. It's not an option. It's not a marketing ploy. It's like a life raft or a hand holding on to you as you are dangling off the edge of a cliff. It's irresponsible not to own a Final Home jacket. Kosuke trumped all marketing by appealing to not only the individuality of the user, which is a key tenant to Gen-X marketing, but by appealing to our deepest needs and anxieties.
Watch the video for a collaboration between Revolver and Final Home, below – as soundtracked by The Claw (Total Freedom, NguzuNguzu and Kingdom)
