Fila Fjord, Fila’s new premium line, staged its debut presentation today at Pitti Uomo in Florence’s Borghese Palace. The line’s co-creative directors are Scandinavian designer Astrid Andersen, who showed her collection on Saturday at London Fashion Week Men’s, and GQ Style fashion director Elgar Johnson.
With its languid silhouettes and unisex vibes, Fila Fjord is a departure for its parent label Fila. “We wanted it to feel more elevated and take it in a different direction that was more mature and sophisticated,” said Andersen, who explained that the goal was to evolve the concept versus approaching it from the opposite direction. “We wanted to find a way for it to stay relevant.”
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“Streetwear has become so extreme,” Johnson added. “It used to be something you wore when you wanted to feel relaxed, but now the people who wear it look really uptight.”
The collection features two shoe styles. The first was a “disrupted” take on Fila’s popular Disruptor sneaker (the brand’s Disruptor 2 style was crowned FN’s 2018 Shoe of the Year), which placed a sandal upper (a style that was drawn from the1970s Fila archives) on the Disruptor sole. “It’s a reaction to that,” said Andersen. “We wanted to do something that would sit with the rest of the collection.”
The other shoe was a sneaker, an update on the Trilobite from the Fila archives. “That’s the amazing thing about the Fila heritage, it was already there,” Andersen said.
In keeping with the overall concept, the Fila logo is also vastly downplayed. “Logos were everywhere, so we wanted to have something different and make it as subtle as possible,” Johnson concluded.
Click through to view the entire Fila Fjord fall ’19 collection.
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