It might be a couple of months old, but it's worth bringing this Art & Sole interview with British artist Ben Drury to your attention. As one-time art director of Mo'Wax, Drury was on hand during the design of the DUNKLE, and talks about the process, as well as his other collaborations with Nike, in the article.
Read an extract on the inception of one of the most iconic Dunk SBs below and check out the whole thing here.
What was your involvement with the DUNKLE shoe, and how was it working with Futura?
James Lavelle hooked it up through Fraser Cooke and Sandy Bodecker, who were in the process of setting up Nike SB. It was around the time of the second UNKLE album, Never, Never, Land and we really went to town on cross collaboration - rather than doing it all ourselves like we had with the first album (Psyence Fiction). There were a few things with Medicom, Bape did a load of tees, and obviously the Nike collaboration. It was more a case of applying the artwork elements we already had in place for the album. That was the way we had structured the project artwork from the start - we (myself, Will Bankhead and James Lavelle) went to Brooklyn and actively art-directed the cover painting with Futura - with Will documenting the process. The prototype designs were actually a lot more subtle and less character based than the final shoe... so as well as it being my first experience of collaborating with Nike, it was also slightly disappointing. On the back of that we also had a Vans collaboration lined up which would have been amazing, but the person we dealt with in Berlin changed jobs and it never happened - I've still got a couple of samples.
