If anyone could take an art school studio, plop seven near-naked, tattoo-speckled boys in front of blank canvases, give them blank paint brushes and have them “perform” the act of “blank painting”, and actually make it work, (i.e. not bore the shit out of us), it’s gotta be Terence Koh.

Photographs of the launch event shot for EVB by Elizabeth Lippman

This past Friday, EVB fought torrential wind and drizzle and trekked over to New York City’s Cooper Union to catch a glimpse of the Terence Koh for Converse 1HUND(RED) Artists Chuck Taylor All Star launch. In typical Koh fashion, the event was exclusive, contextually odd and rather intimate (I think we knew everyone in the room… some of them, well, quite intimately). A select group of Downtown NYC so-and-so’s and who’s-who’s mixed, mingled and marveled at the spectacle that was Koh’s presentation of his vision of the iconic Converse Chuck Taylor.
Of course we staked out a spot equidistant between the booze and the boys and had perfect viewing of the arriving guests facial expressions. Ranging somewhere between befuddlement and childlike wonder, guests greeted friends and friends-for-the-night with kisses, bee-lining to the bar to prime their pumps for a night of possibility. While a few brave souls shed their inhibitions and danced to selector A-ron Bondaroff and his gang’s bizarre, albeit hilarious mix of early-90s house hits and chopped up opera records, most played voyeur on the sidelines.

Finally, after an hour of sizing up eye-candy and awaiting the evenings honoree to arrive, in walks the Koh Bunny, draped of course in a festive fur vest, stretch pants and his (now) signature shoes (everything white, natch). Cameras rushed to Terence, quickly snapping pics as he played the coy centerpiece - it was like that scene in La Dolce Vita when Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni arrive at the tea party in her honor, battling off reporters and photographers with effortless style and grace, except whiter and whole lot weirder.
As a contributor to the 1HUND(RED) project, which donates a percentage of the net sales towards helping fight AIDS in Africa, Koh took a decidedly reductive approach to his shoe design. “I wanted to keep the DNA of the Chuck Taylor intact, while reducing the seams, and smoothing out the shoe’s surfaces as much as possible”.

As with the design, the stock list is also quite minimal. Available Saturday November 21 at select stores worldwide. So, if you’ve got $150 bucks rattling around your pockets, are between a size 7 and a 13 (that’s SHOE size) and you’re gagging for a pair, we’d suggest getting your pretty little asses down to Opening Ceremony in New York or Los Angeles because these will be gone like bunnies in winter.

Let the frenzy begin…

Last 5 posts by Saheer

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