'My main goal was to empower our customers to express themselves, whether it was combining our looks with other designers’, or by creating their own.' - NicolaPelly
were just in!” We got close to Peter Gabriel as well. He used to buy a lot of our clothing, and then he’d come back after his tours and buy more, because it all fell apart when he crowd surfed. It was the beginning of MTV—the early ’80s—so we opened at a perfect time, because everybody was in search of interesting clothing for their videos.
INTERVIEW: In shaping the retrospective, were there particular moments or aspects of Parachute’s evolution that you really wanted to highlight? PELLY: We wanted this to be a story—not about fashion—but about design. We wanted it to reflect what was going on with our customers outside of the store as much as possible. I had a very big archive, something like 800 garments left over. We’d find interesting-looking garments in our travels, and we’d combine various aspects of them. We were very keen on military clothing because it’s so strong and functional—the zippers, the pockets, everything.
PELLY: Well, it’s much more in-depth. Pulling the exhibition together was a huge job. The museum’s curator immersed herself in Parachute—she knows more about the brand than I do by now. At some point, we realized we had enough material to do something more. We managed to get the best people onboard, so the quality and the design is absolutely fantastic. There are more in-depth articles in there, and it follows similar themes as the retrospective.