Playfully bold celebrity designer Christian Cowan approached 2023 New York Fashion Week with a challenge: create a line inspired by … Doritos.
The partnership with Doritos actually wasn’t a huge challenge for Cowan because he quickly drew inspiration from his beloved childhood snack and told Showbiz Cheat Sheet, he even tried something new with his designs.
“It’s so cool. First and foremost, I’ve got to say this is not some PR thing. I have been eating Doritos since I was a kid. So, it’s really nice when something can come together organically. It’s something that you genuinely love and you love each other,” he said.
“And they were all so amazing creatively in doing anything that I wanted that worked,” Cowan noted about working with Doritos. “And so I was really inspired. They’ve unleashed like triangle mania in this Super Bowl commercial. It’s hysterical. It’s so much fun. Which as a Brit, I love a great comedy and it’s like Jack Harlow kind of quitting rap to do triangle music. It’s so funny and I love it. It’s triangles everywhere, the whole way through it.”
Christian Cowan worked with a new shape for New York Fashion Week
Massively inspired by fashion from the ’60s, Cowan leaned into the signature snack shape, revealing this was his first foray into working with triangles in his designs.
“I was just kind of allowed to take my inspiration from this triangle mania idea and bring it into my fashion show,” he said about his TRY ANOTHER ANGLE collab. “Which is also really fun because weirdly, I hadn’t really done anything triangle shaped before. But to me, triangles are very evocative of the ’60s and all this fashion that was around. That was always a big inspiration of mine. So it made total sense.”
“And so we really translated it in lots of different ways,” he explained. “Ways that have humor to them but are also chic. We’ve done it in dress form, in really outrageous looks, but then also the accessories you can wear. It has been a really fun project to do and I’m just so excited to show the world.”
The runway is infused with a mix of colors and fabrics
Cowan infused Doritos colors into the designs, but also added many of the fabric touches known from his brand.
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“So I guess the Nacho Cheese would be orange,” he mused. “But then if you think about it, there’s Cool Ranch, which is blue, and there’s the Sweet and Tangy Barbecue, which is black. So there are these different code colors, which are not hard colors to work with, but they’re fabulous colors.”
“So that’s how it was really easy in terms of the colorways. And also for me, when I do a collaboration, I always like to make sure it’s genuinely harmonious for the fan bases of not only my own, but also the fan bases of Doritos who necessarily might not know me yet. I want them to see it and see the thing they love within it. So, we kept the color palette,” he said.
“And then in terms of fabrics, I think that’s really where I brought in my signature use of materials. So I use a lot of feathers. Feathers had to be part of it. Crystals had to be part of it, otherwise, it wouldn’t feel like a Christian Cowan collaboration,” Cowan said. “But then also balancing that with lovely satins or leathers or just things that make it also feel chic. So it’s not just, campy, campy, campy. It’s kind of a bit of a balancing act.”
Where can you score a piece of Christian Cowan’s triangle-inspired New York Fashion week designs?
Cowan added pieces that everyone can wear and access on his website. “The really fun part of this collaboration is there’s not only the really high fashion, kind of like crazy looks that would be harder to reproduce,” he said.
“But we’ve also done more merchandise-style pieces. So, for example, we created this fabulous hoodie, but it’s not just a boring hoodie,” he described. “It’s a really lovely oversize fit that we kind of pattern made. But then the pouch where you put your hands in the hoodie has been made into a Doritos triangle. It comes all the way up to the neck.”
“So it really takes inspo from the Doritos. It just makes so much sense and I feel like a fan of Doritos could wear it but I also know that someone who’s a fan of our stuff and doesn’t know about either one or the other could still wear it … it’s great.”
For fans wanting to try another angle, limited edition merch inspired by the runway looks will be for sale exclusively on Christian Cowan’s website, while supplies last.
