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MSCHF has made a business out of blackboxing. Or has it?
The enigmatic entity entered the art market by way of coffee table fodder with the Phaidon-published “Made by MSCHF” retrospective.
The self-described “irreverent guide to the art collective’s inner workings” was penned by two of MSCHF’s co-founders, chief creative officers Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner, with cultural entrepreneur Karen Wong.
A smattering of essays by the non-sneaker company’s various collaborators, meanwhile, teed up the peeks behind the curtain provided by the book.
“In MSCHF’s practice, destruction is just another tool of creativity, the author role is up for grabs, and the work is just another drop,” Amy Adler, an Emily Kempin Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, wrote in one essay. “As they move seamlessly between art and brand, between shows at the Perrotin gallery and drops of fucked-up sneakers, MSCHF exposes the hopelessly retrograde boundary that moral rights law depends on between art and commerce.”
The 384-page compilation of case studies was received by the public as predicated by most of MSCHF’s projects: passionately.
So it goes for the group dubbed a “digital-native Molotov cocktail.”
“We are constantly outliers or outsiders in basically every industry that we’re working with,” Wiesner said to Sourcing Journal ahead of the March 13 panel at the New School, which happened to fall on the same day as his previous pet project, Angus, celebrates his first—and perhaps last—birthday. (The baby cow, who’s life MSCHF tokenized last August, may meet an ugly fate, with more token-holders in favor of handbags than humanity.)
One of the scribed studies—a project falling under the Absurd System umbrella and titled Global Supply Chain Telephone (GSCT)—attempts to hold a mirror to the fashion industry’s supply chain. The best-selling book on Amazon defined this project’s genesis as “forefronting hidden creative labor by MSCHF’s authorship.”
To summarize: GSCT explored playing telephone with the fashion’s value chains. Working with four factories across three continents, MSCHF didn’t send tech packs or spec sheets, opting to provide open-ended prompts inspired by assignments reminiscent of RISD instead.
In a simplified and non-exhaustive attempt to explain what that means: Factory One was to knock off a Birkin while Factory Two reworked Factory One’s Birkin into the iconic Celine tote before Factory Three cascaded the derivative manufacturing chain.
“Our handbag’s exquisite corpse process continued until a compelling final design emerged,” the book reads.
Made by MSCHF / Phaidon
Once successfully sequentially scrambled, the minds behind Satan Shoes mass-produced the resulting Frankenstinian sample and sold it in four colorways for $650 a pop.
“The final handbag has undergone a curious metamorphosis by virtue of its commercial success,” the case study concluded. “The object, originally auxiliary to the conceptual process, unexpectedly became a financially viable standalone product, a separate existence from the global manufacturing performance it created.”
MSCHF has a penchant for memetic mutations (see: MSCHF X), though GSCT was (arguably) a bit more meta.
“It’s a funny thing; I feel like we stumbled into it, to be honest, by making a lot of other projects,” Bentel said of GSCT, noting the buttons that MSCHF was (perhaps unintentionally) pushing in giving suppliers utter autonomy. “The number of times we’ve sent them something and they’re like, you designed this really incorrectly.”
For Wiesner, these assumptions—while logical—were astonishing, given the sheer volume of additional labor they created. It was quite the departure, he continued, from consumer products in the relatively black-and-white world of hard goods.
“You make a CAD file and it’s going to show exactly what we want and [that’s] going to be exactly what we get,” Wiesner said. “And then when [we] into this world of leather and cloth and foam, it’s like, ‘Here’s an illustration drawing. Doesn’t really have dimensions or angles.’ It’s purely based on vibes and for me, I was like, what is going on?”
Presented by the New Museum—and its New Inc incubator—as well as book publisher Phaidon and Parsons School of Design at the New School, the panel reinforced the notion of “Made by MSCHF” as a deliberate unshrouding of spontaneity.
Karen Wong, co-founder of the allegedly first-ever museum-born incubator, New Inc, kicked off the evening by expressing hopes that the “sophisticated title” would be as “fun, weird and juicy” as she’d come to expect from the Brooklyn-based satirical art collective.
“I met Kevin and Lukas in 2014 on Brown’s campus, where I was invited by a student group to talk about the museum’s initiatives and the cultural incubator we had just started,” she recalled to the New School’s pretty-packed Tishman auditorium. “These two scrawny seniors rolled up and said they wanted to apply. I thought that’s a bit audacious, but I gave them my email.”
Operating as Hello Velocity, the duo joined New Inc’s second-year cohort to maintain their “quasi-ad agency” with just themselves as the studio’s lone client.
“It’s come full circle that, in a decade, we met, we laughed, I mentored—and then they hired me for a book gig that’s pretty plumbing,” Wong said. “Kevin and Lukas, never stop surprising me, confusing me, with your ambitious, crazy and provocative ideas.”
The mischief behind the curtain, however, is still a refraction of reality, according to the collective’s original (and internal) manifesto. The passive suspension of disbelief is arguably active, per the handbook’s 2019 standards.
“The experience of magic used to be a common internet experience. We’ve gotten jaded, and it’s gotten rarer, but the sausage still tastes better when you don’t know how it’s made,” reads page 18. “MSCHF only shows the process when the process is the magic.”
