Damien Hirst X Levi’s®
fall/winter 2008/9


"Life is short - go and waste it!" Damien Hirst
Source: Interview with the artist on
youtube.com/watch?v=-R7QvpABzSo

The limited Levi's collection with British artist Damien Hirst's prominent skull debuted in September 2008.

Working-Class Roots

Both, Damien Hirst and Levi's are symbols of rebellion, each rose from working-class roots to become creative icons. Hirst, the original 'enfant terrible' of the ‘90s art scene, made his name suspending animals in formaldehyde and more recently embellishing a human skull with over 1,000 carats of diamonds. The Levi's 501 jeans are tailored in an ‘anti-fit’ pattern which makes the jeans wrap around the body effortlessly. This makes the Levi's legendary in the fashion world, because she only gets better with time.

In England born Damien Hirst (1965) loves jeans. Levi’s designer Adrian Nyman worked closely with Hirst to showcase his art in a range of jeans and shirts. The collection revolves around three key themes of Damien Hirst’s work: the skull, spots and tropical butterfly. 

"Pablo Picasso is credited with being the first    major artist to wear Levi's® 501® jeans as his creative uniform, but Jackson Pollock made dark, paint-splattered 501® jeans the effigy of uncompromising creativity,” says You Nguyen, Levi's European VP of Design, Merchandising and Licensing.  “World renowned artists from Peter Blake and Max Ernst to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol all adopted Levi's® as their uniform of choice. So, we are naturally thrilled and honored to have a creative genius like Damien Hirst bring his unique perspective to our iconic 501® jeans and the range of unique looks featured in this collection."

Video: Samuel Beckett's "Breath" (written 1969, lasts only 35 seconds and has no characters - only breathing and one cry) directed by Damien Hirst. The work of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett and Damien Hirst have something in common: a minimalistic view on life and its emptiness until death.

About Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst studied at Goldsmith's College in the late 80s. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.

Hirst's best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead animals that are preserved in formaldehyde are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings.

Check out the collection at Levi's www.levi.com


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