To celebrate this important anniversary, the historic Monza-based company has chosen American artist Joshua Vides.

Thirty-three years old, from Palo Alto, California, Joshua Vides is a visual artist who, from his experience gained from working in well-known streetwear brands, creates his CLSC brand that quickly becomes a global benchmark, distributed in more than 400 stores worldwide.

When he posted his first custom sneaker, a Nike Air Force 1 painted in a way that optically looks like the head of a black-and-white comic book, on social media in 2017, he found a personal, identifiable voice and his name exploded into the world. In 2018, he decided to expand his work to visual art, creating a space called Reality to Idea that takes his graphic idea toward the construction of entire worlds, real parallel realities obtained through his unmistakable manual mark.

Since then he has collaborated with many luxury and streetwear brands, as well as with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Google.

The meeting with Colmar came at the beginning of 2022 and immediately developed thanks to a deep connection that led to the birth of a collaboration that, starting from the brand’s historical archive, focused on some best-selling garments on which the Californian artist intervened manually through his recognizable pictorial stroke.

“I usually start collaborations without a specific idea in mind. I don’t like to overthink it. I give myself the freedom to react to the stimuli of the moment and create the concept on the spot. In this particular case, I thought about what an artist has in common with an athlete: the idea of constant creativity in finding solutions, the best possible ones, to react to failure. The satisfaction of winning after failing several times, of standing on a podium and getting back up after a defeat.”

Joshua Vides

The collection designed by Joshua for Colmar’s 100th anniversary consists of a total of ten garments that trace and redesign the brand’s culture and know-how. The iconic pieces are two jackets and a reversible padded vest: printed in black and white on one side (where Vides has redesigned a jacket over the iconic 1249 down jacket) and total black on the other, where, on the other hand, the very first Colmar logo from 1923 (with a dove gliding over the water) is reproduced on the back as a blow-up and in a graphically revised form. The legendary jacket made in the 1970s for the Blue Avalanche and renamed Ceffa by champion Erwisn Stricker is reinterpreted in a cashmere and wool Jacquard knit that also celebrates the company’s years and birthplace, as if it were a real ski race bib.

Completing the capsule are two caps with a trompe l’oeil design of ski goggles, a total logo scarf, a sweatshirt and a pair of cotton pants gauzed on the inside, and a t-shirt full of gold medals around the neck that reproduces a historic photo of Croatian ski champion Ivica Kostelic. The Colmar logo was specially redesigned in JV style in black and red because the artist, transcending from his iconic black and white, indulged in variations on the theme in the brand colors: the Colmar white, red and blue.

“As one of the many champions and athletes who have inhabited Colmar’s history, I also feel like a competitive person, and I think it shows through my artistic practice. When I saw reflected in Colmar such a profound idea of striving for achievement, I felt strongly inspired.  And it all started from there.”

Joshua Vides