When he’s not making absolutely sublime music or throwing high-profile dance parties, Frank Ocean has a few other ways of staying busy. He photographed the 2019 Met Gala for Vogue, for one thing; he also opened pop-up shops for his 2016 album Blonde, which included a sizable zine featuring full-color photography and writing from a number of big names. Where does one go from there? Evidently, the answer is to launch a luxury brand. And now Ocean has done precisely that.
Pitchfork’s Matthew Strauss reports that the new brand, Homer, includes both scarves and jewelry — the latter made “using 18-karat gold, recycled sterling silver, hand-painted enamel, and American lab–grown diamonds.”
Ocean offered more details to Mark C O’Flaherty of the Financial Times in an exclusive interview. O’Flaherty offers a concise description of the work found in the collection, writing that “the pieces are pop but luxury, channelling the personality of Takashi Murakami and the graphic energy of ’90s club flyers.”
Part of Homer’s launch involves a pop-up shop at 70-74 Bowery in New York City, with visits by appointment. The prices in its debut collection range from $395 to $1.9 million. “I didn’t want our work to be any less expensive than Cartier,” Ocean told the Financial Times.
From what Ocean said in the interview, this project has been in the works for several years, beginning with a kind of design summit in 2019 which yielded some of the objects photographed in Homer’s catalog. And he shared some of the artists and designers whose work he’s admired — including Herzog & de Meuron, Donald Judd and Pierre Paulin. As with his music, Ocean seems to have sought inspiration from a wide range of sources — which offers plenty of reasons to be excited about this new venture.
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