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Converse Jack Purcell Mo’Wax Ox

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James Lavelle collaborated with Converse shoes on two limited releases based on their Jack Purcell shoe. These were only available to friends and family of James Lavelle, and not available in stores.

Converse Jack Purcell Mo’Wax Ox
Year2014
TypeShoe

James Lavelle and Converse created two shoes, both of which were only available in limited quantities to James Lavelle's friends and family, though they had originally been intended for wider release.[1] These were released in 2014 in two styles, a high and low,[2] and feature the Build and Destroy motif which was also used on James Lavelle's collaboration with Nike, the Nike X Mo’ Wax Build and Destroy Collection.[3]

Lavelle has also hoped to collaborate further with Converse for his Daydreaming with...Stanley Kubrick exhibition, in what would have been a James Lavelle x Converse x Supreme x Stanley Kubrick show, but it didn't eventuate.[4]

James Lavelle Interview 2014

In 2014 Gwarizm posted the following interview with James Lavelle regarding the Converse collaboration.[5]

How did the Converse project begin?

JAMES: Once the book started and was on social media right at the beginning, there were a couple of interviews right at the start of the book and it started this wave of re-interest with Mo’ Wax and I wanted to do a series of collaborations around the Mo’ Wax thing, with people who we’d worked with in the past — we did a few things with Bathing Ape again and there’s other collaborations coming as well from people we worked with in Japan. For some reason it came through that Converse would potentially be interested in doing something and I know Ian [Ginoza] from DJing back in the day and I’d done some work with him back in Asia when he was there. We met up in New York when I was there at the end of last year and we talked about doing a possible collaboration that would be a friends and family type project.

Did you pick the Jack Purcell?

To be honest with you, the sneakers that I wear the most are Jack Purcells now. So I was quite keen to be able to work with Converse as a contemporary thing, representing me as a person right now. I buy Converse — it’s the sort of thing I wear and it’s generally a Jack Purcell. I designed it with them basically and the detail was really, really important. Just new ways and new technologies and things that hadn’t necessarily been down before — the idea was to create something that had the Mo’ Wax feel. I really wanted to create a shoe that would stand out as a shoe in its own right and wasn’t gimmicky or over the top and garish. It would fit in with where I was at now and not necessarily where I was at 15 years ago, do you know what I mean? It was with me and Matt [Sleep]. Ian facilitated it and has been very open, like, “Do what you wanna do!”

To be honest, there wasn’t much compromise with what we did. The idea was to take something that was iconic from Mo’ Wax, so the camouflage — it’s a recurring theme in a lot of elements of what we’ve used recently. It’s on the book, it’s on the Nike sneaker, it’s in the Nike garms, it’s on a lot of other collaborations — all these other things, like the Medicom. It’s not a graphic design thing — it has a pattern quality to it. It has something that, in its own right — away from Mo’ Wax — is an interesting image. I didn’t want to do anything where it felt like we were printing images, like when we did the DUNKLE and it was really garish, with lots going on. How can we get the design aesthetic into something really subtle? And with the mids, it was just self-indulgent for me because I really wanted to do something with stingray or something that had an interesting fabric to it. We talked through lots of ideas and I’d just seen the Margiela shoe and was quite jealous of that, with it being such a great idea. They were very much against repeating anything that might have been done in the past or something that was too similar to something that was going on, because I’d suggested about something that involved painting shoes — then I saw the Margiela and was like, “Oh fuck, that one’s done.” So what was interesting with that was keeping subtle themes going, like having Mo’ Wax on the sole of the feet or on the tips of the laces or on the insole or on the little strip on the back — there’s this sort of Mo’ Wax touch. But the stingray was just to try and apply something that would hopefully look pretty cool.

Stingray always looks good — I’ve seen real stingray used on a New Balance before.

The only compromise was that I couldn’t use the real thing. There’s laws about exotic materials. But actually, how it came out was pretty cool because it has a weird, unique feel to it.

James Lavelle Comments in 2021

In UNKLE's Original Headz newsletter for November 2021, James Lavelle wrote about the Converse shoes as part of a regular series called Urban Archeology, where he looks back at his history.

"This month I want to share a collaboration I designed with Converse to celebrate the 21st anniversary of Mo' Wax.

We made 30 pairs of a special "friends and family" edition of a Converse Jack Purcell sneaker. They were released in conjunction with the Urban Archeology Mo’ Wax Rizzoli book and exhibition at Meltdown held at London’s Southbank. We made 25 low-tops and 5 high-tops.

The soles of the trainers joined up to create a Mo' Wax logo and the inner soles were printed in MWA camo. The onglets on the laces said Mo' Wax and the toe caps were embossed with the words Build and Destroy. The low-tops came in white with MWA camo embossing and the high-tops were in a blue faux stingray scale.

Each pair came in a limited edition gold, black and white MWA camo print box. We really tried to push the details and technology at the time to create a high end product. We looked into releasing these but sadly it wasn't commercially viable at the time as these details were expensive!

It was a great opportunity to collaborate with one of my favourite sneaker brands and styles of shoe. As the 30 year anniversary approaches we hope to share more new and interesting collaborations."

Images

External Links

Information and Photos of shoes

Interview with James Lavelle on shoes

Article on the shoes from Mo Wax Please

References

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