LA HAINE Mens T Shirt Vincent Cassel Cotton Black French Movie Kassovit

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The partnership rekindles the relationship between the movie and the sportswear company, which provided sneakers during the production in 1994. Virginie Montel, the costume designer responsible for the characters' looks, recalls working with Reebok's press office to get the shoes then. People were happy to give us some stuff, but small stuff," she says. "Not like, 'You want 100 pair? OK, we will have 100 pair.'" Any possible trepidation didn't stop the product placement, but the movie does not fetishize its sneakers or see them as more than items built for wear. La Haine doesn't veer into the advertorial-adjacent territory of classic movie sneaker scenes like those in All of our t-shirts are manufactured using the latest Direct To Garment printing (DTG) printing methods. Unlike traditional screen printing DTG does not require detailed layer seperation, screen preparation etc which makes it the ideal print solution for detailed, multi-coloured designs. As the name suggests, all our t-shirts have their designs printed directly onto the garment using specially formulated garment inks. We were looking for sneakers that we could adapt for our lifestyle," he says, "but it was not meant for us."

According to Michael Jovanovic, a product manager Reebok Classics in France who worked on the La Haine retro project, the link between the movie and the brand isn't a particularly well-known one. This came after the team working on the La Haine retros reached out to Reebok's headquarters to see if the archivists there had any concrete information on the mysterious shoe. All they could offer were small pictures in catalogs, which showed enough of the upper but didn't give much clarification on the sole. In recreating the silhouette, the product team decided to use the tooling from the bottom of the Reebok Phase 1, a 1984 design that's enjoyed a long retro life. Here in turbulent Paris, right around the corner from the riots, beyond charred car skeletons and the reach of police batons, there is a cow. It exists in a groggy memory possibly influenced by hash smoke, and then only for a few seconds, but it exists. It is not at home, but not out of place. The cow, the suffocating threat of police brutality, and the scream of the streets are among the enduring elements of La Haine, the 1995 masterpiece of French cinema from writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz. This shoe doesn't exist," Jovanovic says of the flat-soled trainer that wears a jumbo Vector logo on its upper. "We redesigned it based on screens and on watching the movie again and again. We redesigned it because we didn't find any archive piece."No fashion incubation, no stuff like rarity or things like that," Jovanovic says, were among the guidelines he and Reebok used when working on the collaboration.

The goal behind La Haine x Reebok, a relatively plain set of shoes elevated by their place in history, is the same. For the director, their austerity is the ultimate signifier of their worth. To date, the proposal of La Haine Inside Us is a fusion between street wear and avant-garde and thanks to its rapid rise we can find the brand present in the best fashion weeks and international fashion events between Paris, Milan and Berlin as well as in the his beautiful headquarters in Bologna. Kassovitz, himself nearly an old man, is still wearing them. In one breath he claims he's been done with sneakers for 20 years, but in the next he says he'll still find himself at Courir, or in a fancier spot, in pursuit of the next pair. His chase is not obsessive, and he doesn't care who designed what or what it means for the fashion business. He wants to get what the regular guys want and make it his own.It was not meant for us, it was not meant for this," the director says of the shoes he and his friends chased during their youth in France. "That's why it was interesting and fun and creative." When it comes to our team here," he says, "there are some people that didn't know that the three actors were all wearing Reeboks." I'm from an era where streetwear didn't exist," he says. In his acidic tone, he insists that the whole streetwear culture is bullshit. Specialized shoes like this, not to mention all the matching apparel included in the La Haine x Reebok collection, feel dangerously close to a violation of Kassovitz's fierce convictions about fashion and the forces of marketing. He reasons that this is not a cash-in moment, though, because the product remains mostly true to what appears in the movie. Before this year's anniversary, he avoided channeling La Haine, and by proxy the real-life chaos it drew from, into items to be sold.