MONA X GAIL SORRONDA

Close-up portrait of a woman with braided hair and reflective sunglasses on a red background

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    Creative Direction

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    Textile Design

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    Merchandise

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    Fashion Design

A gallery known for the BOLD asked a designer known for the darkly beautiful to make them something. Gail reached out to us to help design it.

Gail Sorronda is one of the most distinctive designers in the country. "Definitely one to watch" - Karl Lagerfeld. Dark, romantic, almost entirely black and white, with duality running through everything she makes. So when MONA approached her for a gallery tee, the job wasn't to bring our own style to it. It was to get properly inside hers. My friend Luca and I went deep on gothic art, ecclesiastical mark-making, memento mori, the kind of imagery that's been carrying the same weight for a few hundred years.

iPad displaying a magazine-style cover featuring a woman in sunglasses on a dark textured surface
iPad displaying a magazine-style cover featuring a woman in sunglasses on a dark textured surface

What came out was Summer Was Hell. An upside down rose, solarised so the black reads as light, tied with a delicate bow and framed by thorns. Blackletter type, no colour, nothing extra. Gail described it as romancing the shadow, and that was the whole test for every decision we made. Every element had to hold two things at once. Pretty + grim. Very Gail, very MONA.

Full-body portrait of a woman standing against a red background
Full-body portrait of a woman standing against a red background
Portrait of a woman wearing sunglasses and hoop earrings against a red background
Portrait of a woman wearing sunglasses and hoop earrings against a red background
Bus stop advertisement display featuring a fashion poster in an urban street setting
Bus stop advertisement display featuring a fashion poster in an urban street setting

It was stocked in the MONA store for about a year and sold out five times. They restocked it five times. For a gallery gift shop, a piece of merch that people keep coming back for isn't merch anymore, it's something they actually wanted to own. Still my favourite kind of brief: no media buy, no campaign, just an object good enough that people paid to walk around wearing it.