At the end of each year, London-based concept store APOC collates a satisfyingly eclectic – and delightfully weird – alternative fashion gift list, comprising clothing, jewellery and accessories from its energetic roster of emerging, avant-garde designers.
A riposte the the season’s unfettered consumption, the various pieces on offer are created using deadstock materials, or upcycled existing styles, to create the limited-edition drops. Each piece is created by the artists and their teams in-house, rather than in factories, while some pieces are entirely one-off.
APOC Store’s alternative fashion gift list
The typically vivid array of pieces spans Soft Skin Latex’s colourful latex handbags, each adorned with an enormous bow (no need for wrapping), Gnastiy’s own sculptural handbags, which appear crafted from molten metal (the brainchild of Chinese designers Vicki Tsang and Di Yi), or Invasive Modification’s made-to-order hybrid boots, which combine a satin-lace body with shiny plastic ’kitten heels’ (the designer is based in Tbilisi, Georgia, a rising fashion city).
Other highlights include the colourful hair pieces of Tomihiro Kono, a Japanese hair artist who has worked with the likes of Junya Watanabe. Here, sections of hair are adorned with animé eyes, cherries or hearts. ‘Wearing a wig also enables us an instant transformation,’ Kono wrote in his book Personas 111, released last year. ‘It is fun to create multiple characters that exist in ourselves – it is almost like choosing your outfit of the day from your wardrobe.’
APOC Store was founded by Ying Suen and Jules Volleberg in the autumn of 2020, stocking what it calls ’progressive and consciously created pieces’. Its name is an amalgam of ‘Anthropocene’, ‘epoch’ and ‘apocalypse’. ‘We live in the Anthropocene, a time when human activity dominates the world we live in with enormous consequences,’ they say. ‘As a result, a new generation of creatives has emerged who care about the world and want to make a difference.
’Every year, we always tried to get a special gift for our loved ones, ideally something unexpected and something they wouldn’t get themselves,’ Volleberg told Wallpaper* last year. ‘We wanted to do a launch of special products that are made with minimal impact, mostly by the designers themselves in their own studios, and often from remade or deadstock materials.’
Discover the APOC Holidays 2023 collection at the APOC Store website.
