Fashion brand SPORTMAX unveiled its Spring Summer 2023 Womenswear Collection, that declares freedom from oppressive ideas, conformity, and monolithic truths, on Wednesday, September 23rd, during the recently finished Milan Fashion Week. The collection titled Bouba and Kiki, was inspired by the Bouba/Kiki effect – the study that investigated the relationship between speech sounds and visual shapes and objects. The bouba/kiki effect was first observed by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929, he conducted the experiments on the island of Tenerife where participants were asked to identify which abstract shapes were called “takete” and which were called “baluba.” In 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler’s experiment, asking American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India to identify which shapes were “bouba” and which ones were “kiki”. In both groups, most people selected the curvy shape as “bouba” and the jagged one as “kiki”, supporting the original thesis that the human brain indeed attaches abstract meanings to shapes. Bouba and Kiki is an invitation to embrace dualisms, mixing the alien with the familiar.
SPRING SUMMER 2023 COLLECTIONS
For the season, Sportmax interprets silhouettes, colors, textures, movements, and the sounds of daily life through the innocence of a child’s eyes. The collection, that constantly plays with dualities such as the geometric and organic, the natural and artificial, and the ultra-casual and extravagant, celebrates brazen creativity and the concept of CAMP – an aesthetic style and sensibility based on excess, irony and disruption of social norms.
“Minimal looks are also born from this contrast and turned into a second skin. Patterns that cloak the body with a hypnotic and luminescent energy, alternate with the heightened volumes of techno-couture skirts, matched with ultra-cropped tops. Streetwear materializes, reinterpreted ironically under the guise of evening wear, with “longer-than-life” sleeves and hems mimicking the sweeping trains of the 21st century red carpet. A vivid palette alternates between acid tones, pastels, deep colors, and touches of optical white and pure black are interspersed throughout. Prints underscore the theme of sensorial stimulation through psychedelic motifs and tactile padding-effect textures.” – Sportmax
