Madbury Club

With a new space in Brooklyn, The Madbury Club is living out a dream conceived in a dorm room.

By Josh Davis for Sweet. Photographed by Brayden Olson

 

Although it’s got major campaigns for companies like Sprint, Nike, and Native Shoes under its belt, The Madbury Club is more like a school group project gone amazingly right than it is an outright creative agency.

Based in New York City, the group consists of eight guys—photographers, videographers, graphic designers, and writers among them—assembled by Phillip Annand in 2010, when he was an American Studies major at Rutgers University. In Annand’s words, the group started out as “just some friends goofing off and making films, because someone had an idea and the tools were at our disposal.” 

The Madbury Club was originally intended to be more of an editorial venture, documenting the life and times of eight wide-eyed, scatterbrained, even slightly goofy friends. But the group quickly shifted gears when, despite facing competition from bigger, more established creative agencies, they won a pitch to shoot campaigns for Footaction in 2011. Those companies had the resources to maximize their creative potential: spacious, floor-long offices, waiting rooms, conference rooms, and company cards. In contrast, The Madbury Club was largely just operating out of Annand’s college dorm room—it had high-speed internet, at least.

From the dorm room, the team moved to meeting at Annand’s family home in Lawrenceville, NJ, then to working (and, in part, living) in a three-bedroom apartment in Lower Manhattan. The team moved back to New Jersey after that, working out of an “an asbestos-laced room in a warehouse in Hoboken,” before finally deciding to create something that felt more permanent in September 2015.

After working out of dorm rooms and sketchy warehouses, The Madbury Club has a permanent home.

The result was .M158: the official office space of The Madbury Club—or, as Annand refers to it, “the passion zone.” In their new home, the guys have already designed an experimental photo lab for Nike, their own clothing line, and even a handmade custom, handmade birch desk with shelving space built into the legs. 

The guys have plenty of room to think—and shoot around.

In other words, .M158 is part photo studio, part woodshop, and sometimes even an impromptu basketball court—seems the guys have finally found a clubhouse to call their own.

What Can Supreme Teach You About Italian Design?

More than you might think. The brand’s new collection features one of its most high-profile collaborators to date—Italian design icon Alessandro Mendini. Here’s everything you need to know about him.

By Josh Davis for Sweet. Photography courtesy of Atelier Mendini and Supreme New York.

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Whenever Supreme drops a collection, there’s some sort of commotion, often in the form of lines blocking foot traffic in downtown New York City. The same will be true for its latest range—which releases online today. But this time, the excitement has been spawned by something much more than your run of the mill streetwear hype: it’s all about Alessandro Mendini.

Alessandro Mendini himself.

If the name has you scratching your camp hat, here’s the rundown: the 84-year-old Italian creative is not only one of the most decorated architects of his time, but also one of the most renowned thinkers across furniture design and magazine editing. The man has pieces in more than a dozen permanent museum collections—and, somehow, the guys at Supreme convinced him to design clothes for them, too.

Mendini was born in Milan in 1931, and has spent his entire life there. He originally studied architecture at the prestigious Milan Polytechnic, but soon picked up other forms of art. He began designing objects during his time as an editor for Casabella, a progressive Italian architecture and design magazine.

A little background here: Mendini’s first objects were inspired by a movement called Arte Povera, which was concerned with the idea of using organic, even impractical materials. He wanted to challenge the function-first mentality that Modernism established in the years beforehand (and did so for the rest of his career).

One prime example of his modus operandi would be his oversized, wooden Lassú chair from 1974—which he set on fire outside of the Casabella office. Through the rest of the ’70s, Mendini continued his creative hot streak, although less literally. He co-founded Studio Alchimia with his friends in 1976, which was a collective that championed bright, conflicting shapes and colors in design.

It laid the foundation for the Memphis Group, the oft-imitated (and innovative) Italian creative collective of the ’80s. In 1978, Mendini designed what is likely his most famous work, the Proust chair: an ornate piece of furniture painted with small, meticulously-placed dots, playfully mimicking the pointillist painting style of artists like Van Gogh and Seraut.

Over the course of his career, Mendini has put his spin on a long list of projects: he designed a majority of the Groninger Museum in The Netherlands; a mall in Lorrach, Germany; and enough objects to fill both to capacity. They’re all distinctly Mendini-esque—tied together by bold color palettes and graphic shapes. 

For this new project, Mendini revisited two of his past works, one named “Senza Titolo,” and the other from a collection called “Set for Man: Shoes, Gun, Hat” applying the patterns to a range of hoodies, T-shirts, jackets, and accessories.

The more you know about the artist’s work, the more his collaboration with Supreme makes sense. It goes deeper than both parties having cheeky, challenging designs. Through his bright, complex, concept-heavy work, Mendini influenced a new wave of designers to transition to a new way of thinking about design: his work was radical, anti-structural, anti-establishment; ultimately very punk rock. All things Supreme knows extremely well.

Have a Healthy Fear of Hype!

In a trend-driven streetwear scene, Thomas Welch’s Winwel label wants longevity.

By Josh Davis for Sweet. Photographs by Thomas Welch

Since officially launching in November 2014, streetwear brand Winwel has earned co-signs from established style outlets like Hypebeast and Complex, along with a stamp of approval from the hottest retailer in Japan, United Arrows. But having grown up obsessed with streetwear, founder Thomas Welch is wary of the industry’s pitfalls—specifically, fizzling out after a hot start.

Although he’s already five seasons into designing his minimal brand—which began as a T-shirt project during college—Welch doesn’t want to rest on his laurels, and remains focused on being able to make five more collections, and then some. To do that, each offering has to be more successful than the last, which isn’t easy to ensure when you’ve got a full-time job, and no formal design training.

As his best collection yet hits the web, we talked with Welch about the process of building a brand from scratch, and what he’s most proud of so far.

OK Thomas, so what does "Winwel" mean?

The name is a reference to me and my best friend from middle school, who’s actually my roommate now. I got the idea from the company that my dad worked for at the time, which was a combination of the first three letters of each owner’s last name. Winwel was that combination for our names—it just sounded dope. I can’t even remember what the other options were.

How would you describe the look of the brand to someone who hasn’t seen it?

If I had to compare my brand to anything, it would be [Swedish contemporary label] Our Legacy meets Thom Browne and Stüssy. It’s T-shirts combined with contemporary design; it’s the spectrum of streetwear for guys.

What have you learned from watching brands like that?

Well, I’m not trying to take over the world in two years. I’m scared of having too much hype. I’d rather take the slow approach. Really, I’m thinking 10 years ahead—I’m not in it for a quick buck.

Well, that sounds great. What did you start making first for Winwel?

Originally, I wanted to do hats. I always had this idea of what I wanted to make, but there was never really the right spot to do it. It kind of fell in my lap: a friend from Dallas who was moving to New York City told me that he was friends with the people who run the Knickerbocker factory in Ridgewood—half a mile from my apartment. I met the crew at Knickerbocker, and they were down to do hats. It’s cool because now, I know the name of everyone that’s working on my stuff, from those sewing the samples, to production.

So you learned all about manufacturing on the fly?

Yeah, I’d go to the factory on weekends and just watch them make stuff. The owners are all super excited to answer questions. Honestly, some of the workers there were still learning to sew at the time, so I learned alongside them.

Speaking of production, how do you run a clothing brand without any design training?

The way that I design—and the way that I know other designers work—is by working off of my favorite garments. If the inspiration is a Mackintosh coat, but I want to make an overcoat with a big lapel, I’ll find a big lapel and incorporate it. It’s kind of like the way producers sample music.

Is Winwel a brand for everyone?

I don’t think people are falling into the whole brand name thing anymore. Nobody goes into Louis Vuitton, Gucci, or any of those stores and cops all of that stuff. Guys want the expensive, flashy shoes, but a cheaper T-shirt and beanie. That’s kind of how Winwel works, I’m making expensive outerwear, but I don’t inflate the prices of my other pieces as a result of that. I’m selling tees and beanies at standard streetwear tee price: they’re between $32–$50.

Here, Welch walks us through his five favorite items from the collection.