MONA X GAIL SORRONDA

Woman standing beside a vintage car in a desert setting with pink smoke behind her
Woman standing beside a vintage car in a desert setting with pink smoke behind her

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    Title: Creative Director

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    Skill: Textile Design

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    Skill: Merchandise

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    Freelance

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.

Woman wearing sunglasses driving a vintage car in a desert environment
Woman wearing sunglasses driving a vintage car in a desert environment

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.

Rear view of a vintage car driving toward a large cloud of pink smoke in the desert
Rear view of a vintage car driving toward a large cloud of pink smoke in the desert
Close-up of a car wheel kicking up dust in the desert with pink smoke in the distance
Close-up of a car wheel kicking up dust in the desert with pink smoke in the distance
Woman jumping in the desert with pink smoke rising behind her
Woman jumping in the desert with pink smoke rising behind her

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.