Streetwear and its fans have taken the world by storm. In 2020 alone, streetwear sales raked in USD185 billion, making about 10% of the entire global apparel and footwear market.
In a bold step forward, Moët & Chandon have teamed up with Yoon, the co-founder and creative director of fashion label, AMBUSH, to redesign the iconic Moët Impérial. This effectively makes Yoon the first artist in 152 years to redesign the bottle since the House’s signature champagne was born in 1869.
Starting out as an experimental line of jewellery that captured the aesthetic of Tokyo, a fashion-forward city with hypebeasts at every corner, AMBUSH grew into a brand that now offers unique apparel, accessories and art releases on a steady basis that rivals the output from big names like SUPREME and BAPE. They have teamed up with brands such as Louis Vuitton (Kim Jones), sacai, UNDERCOVER, Off-White, SHU UEMURA, Nike, CONVERSE and more, all while maintaining the brand’s ethos of being genre-defying and experimental.
AMBUSH founders, Korean-American fashion designer Yoon Ahn and her husband Japanese hip hop artist and music video director Verbal, were listed as two of Business of Fashion’s Top 500 people influencing the global fashion industry for four consecutive years from 2015.
“I was thrilled to be given carte blanche to re-design the bottle of Moët Impérial. It was a great challenge given its recognisable and iconic codes, but I also saw it as a great opportunity to bring my own aesthetics to this iconic champagne,” said Yoon.
Injecting her minimalist aesthetics into the redesign, Yoon has changed the gold neck of the bottle to a deep shade of black, contrasting it with a new embossed label in white, to produce an eye-catching design that suggests a blank slate, like a window into a future filled with possibilities.
The Maison’s choice of the co-founder and creative director of the fashion label, AMBUSH, was driven by the recognition of Yoon’s pioneering spirit as a “rule-breaker” who shares with the House, a profound respect for time-honoured traditions of craftsmanship and transmission of know-how, and a mutual desire to put contemporary creation in the service of preserving nature.
Apart from bringing her creative vision and modern sensibility to this collaboration, Yoon also chose the World Land Trust to be the beneficiary of this project. “On my visit to Epernay, I saw the devotion of the people at Moët & Chandon to nature and to their precious terroir. This inspired me to select the World Land Trust to receive the support of the House, so that together we could help preserve other terroirs around the world.”
Moët & Chandon will donate a portion of profits from the sale of limited-edition Moët & Chandon x AMBUSH bottles to the World Land Trust, an international conservation charity that protects threatened natural habitats where rare and endangered species still survive. An example of a place like this would be Fundación Jocotoco in Ecuador.
“We are grateful for Moët & Chandon’s generosity in helping us preserve the Canandé Reserve in the Ecuadorian Chocó Forest, a place as biodiverse as the Amazon rainforest but far more threatened,” said Jonathan Barnard, CEO of World Land Trust. “Only 2 percent of this forest remains today, still inhabited by 10 percent of animal species found nowhere else on the planet. The support from the Moët & Chandon x AMBUSH collaboration will have a direct impact on stopping the deforestation of the Chocó, not just for the sake of its fragile species, but also to combat one of the causes of climate change.”
The Moët & Chandon x AMBUSH limited-edition bottle will be available at participating outlets and e-retail partners in Malaysia and at The Good Stuff online shop.
