After announcing it in late December 2023, Italian luxury fashion house Fendi has dropped its three-way collaboration with Japanese streetwear icon Hiroshi Fujiwara and The Pokémon Company (TPC). The crossover is expensive as hell, but that’s not all that surprising since this is Fendi, a high-end designer with nearly a 100-year legacy. The handbag, jewelry, accessory, and clothing designs are all super cute, centering on the evolutions of the Gen I Dragon-type monster Dratini. These are for the fiercest, richest housewives of the Kanto region.
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You can check out the collaboration over on Fendi’s website, where a statement reads, “Hiroshi Fujiwara’s FRGMT plays with Dratini, Dragonair, and Dragonite to transform the Maison’s signatures and icons into mini pop monuments.” So, what’s actually on sale as part of this epic three-way collaboration? Well, a lot.
Garments are split into gendered categories (but let’s remember that anyone can wear anything and gender is a social construct designed to compartmentalize us). For “her,” there’s a $3,980 brown fabric bag with Dragonite on the front, a pair of gold-colored metal earrings with Dratini and a Poké Ball for $520, a $1,250 100 percent cotton hoodie with Dragonite emblazoned on it, and more. For “him,” you get some of the same pieces with a few tweaks to design, but there’s also a $2,550 brown fabric bag with Fujiwara’s “FRGMT” text on the front, a $340 red ribbon bracelet with Dragonite stamped onto a gold coin, and a brown fabric card holder featuring Dragonite that runs $450, among other accessories and clothing items.
You might be wondering why Hiroshi Fujiwara, Fendi, and The Pokémon Company opted for the Dratini bloodline instead of a monster from a more recent generation and region. I asked Kotaku staff writer and resident Pokémon expert Kenneth Shepard and, for him, the reason is simple. In a Slack DM, Shepard said Kanto has always been the fandom’s favorite due to nostalgia. As a result, TPC has recently leaned heavily into propping the region up, featuring it in the FireRed and LeafGreen remakes, making it the basis of games like Pokémon Go, and dedicating a ton of merch to those OG 151 Pokémon.
Not everyone can recall Scarlet and Violet’s Paldea off the top of their heads or the monsters that roam the rather lush region, but most folks born in the ‘90s and ‘00s either remember or have heard of the ‘mons of Kanto. It’s where the newly minted Pokémon master and world champion Ash Ketchum is from, and the latest anime, Pokémon Horizons, is largely set there, too. Kanto is the most recognizable region in the TPC brand, so the Fendi line’s focus makes sense.
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This collaboration between anime and expensive fashion houses is a long-standing tradition. Some immediate examples that come to mind are 2016’s crossover between Louis Vuitton and Final Fantasy XIII, as well as 2021’s mash-up with Gucci and the Japanese anime and manga character Doraemon for Chinese New Year. On the games side, developer FromSoftware collaborated with the luxury brand ARK/8 for some Elden Ring-inspired drip in 2023, while the late fashion designer and style icon Vivienne Westwood has inspired many anime and gamese in her decades of garment making. I’ve no doubt we’re going to see even more collabs as the months and years go on.
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