The designers who made clothes for Prince have released a fashion line inspired by the iconic singer, who passed away in 2016.
Designers Cathy Robinson and Lori Marcuz, of the Toronto-based company Call & Response, have teamed up with Prince’s estate to release jackets, hand-dyed tunics and vests.
The line is said to coincide with the release of Prince’s Super Deluxe Edition “1999” box set, which came out in 2019. Robinson and Marcuz, who actually never met or spoke to the legendary artist, began making clothes for him in 2011 up until his death.
During that time, his assistant would contact them for certain jackets, shirts and vests, and they would send a box over for him to go through.
“Everything was always a push,” Marcuz told Vogue in 2018. “They would call at midnight or text, and it was like, ‘We’re on, let’s go.’”
“It was tiring. You had no time,” Robinson added. “You would get frustrated. But any artistic sense of yourself was completely realized. It was magic.”
The prices of the new Prince line range from $175, which is the cost of the hand-dyed tunic, up to $2,600 for a “Purple Paisley Trench” coat.
There’s also a black trench for $2,400, a bomber jacket for $2,000, a black vest for $500, a women’s leather jacket for $1,500 and a men’s leather jacket for the same price.
On a website that’s set up for the line, Robinson and Marcuz said the clothes they made for Prince was based on a new musical direction he was heading towards at the time.
“Starting in the early 2010s, as Prince’s music morphed into a rawer, more rock-oriented blues sound, his dress code followed suit,” the site reads. “Prince had started wearing an evolving collection of textured, distressed jackets that resembled the ’60s wardrobes of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone.“
The fashion duo also explained how they started working with the Purple One.
“We got this call: Can we put a box together? And we put just about anything we could think of in the box, and shot it off,” Robinson explained. “And we got a call — fairly late night — saying he loved the clothes, and he’d like to buy them all, and would we be interested in working with him in the future?”
