A new line of designer clothing, featuring Cure graphics and authorized & approved by Robert, will be released today. Prices will range between $12 and $798. On sale now here, and at Dover Street Market NY, London & Singapore, Commes Des Garcons Korea, & Slam Jam. They will also be available at Noah Clubhouse in Tokyo on Dec. 1st.
Update: If you are interested in any of the items, you might want to act fast, as some sizes are already sold out.
From Dazed: How a heartfelt email to frontman Robert Smith turned into a new capsule collection
“I started listening to everything I could get my hands on,” says Brendon Babenzien. The designer is describing how he became obsessed with The Cure after an older, cooler friend – as is always the case – played a song for him at a house party in 1984. The moment converted an impressionable Babenzien into a lifelong fan. Now, through his New York menswear label Noah, he has collaborated with the English band on a capsule collection, set to release in-store and online at Noah NYC and Tokyo as well as at London’s Dover Street Market this Thursday.
“As soon as I was calling the shots in my own company, it was really the first music collaboration I could think of that would really make me happy, that I could be really proud of,” the designer says of the collaboration, which sees a host of Noah staples, such as graphic t-shirts, hoodies and Harringtons emblazoned with versions of The Cure’s iconic cover art. “What I knew of Robert Smith, historically, I would have guessed that he would say no to something like this. So I wrote this heartfelt email, kind of explaining who I was and why this would be important to me – assuring him that we would do our best to do the right thing with it and it wasn’t going to be this huge commercial project.” To Babenzien’s surprise, Smith quickly got on board. “We also wanted to expose a younger audience to the band – anyone who hasn’t listened to their music before, we’re hoping that this will bring them to it a little more.”
Babenzien grew up in East Islip, a picturesque but nondescript town somewhere between Montauk and the Hamptons. Aesthetically different but similar in feeling to Crawley – the town in West Sussex that gave birth to The Cure – it inspired the same sense of angst-meets-ennui in Babenzien that was a hallmark of the British outfit’s early work. “Where I grew up, it’s beautiful and I love it now as an adult,” he says. “But when you’re a kid it just feels mundane because you can’t access any of the things that interest you. The small group of people that I was friends with that felt out of place where we were from, the music just kind of made sense to us.”
Through an outsider mentality and rigorous aesthetic approach, The Cure’s Robert Smith tapped into that, creating work that both captured and transcended the bleak banality of British suburbia to resonate with pretty much any teenager in a pre-internet era who felt disconnected or different. Babenzien was one of them, and that love of the band has stayed with him in the years that have passed since.
You can read more at Dazed, the NOAH NY blog, High Snobiety, Fashion Network, Hypebeast, i-D, and Esquire. Thanks, Van and Aaron.
