Can Needles Kick It?

Nowadays, the collaboration is streetwear’s overly-beaten horse. That little “x” in between two brands is often the only thing holding product together, where the collab operates as a cultural Hail Mary, if you will.

Now, a collaboration truly in the spirit of collaboration…it shouldn’t be as novel as it is, and the undeniably head-y Needles and A Tribe Called Quest collaboration shows that we can make collabs great again. 

The Japanese streetwear brand teamed up with the Queens hip-hop group to reproduce now-iconic album artwork for a collection available on its web store. This collection is based on the landmark 1991 album The Low End Theory, a musical tome that whose jazzy timbre not only helped shape an entire era of sample-driven hip-hop, but showed just how much swagger can come from doing things differently, especially when that experimentation makes people scratch their heads and groove all at the same time.

Needles sampled the album’s visual language, reinterpreting it through renderings of its own butterfly logo in matching colors for boilerplate Needles moments, like a co-logo’d track suit and varsity-style wool jacket that wears the album art on its rear. 

But it’s not just like ATCQ loaned their name out like a rubber stamp for some pre-existing Needles pieces — there is a level of consideration both for the garments themselves, and how they will resonate in the larger world surrounding ATCQ.

Few collaborations take it there — some immediate thoughts are Supreme’s collaborations with KRS-One and Public Enemy that didn’t only borrow graphics but recontextualized and blew them up. The best bits of Needles x ATCQ similarly appropriate, like the use of a 3D knitting technique (borrowed from heritage British knitwear label Corgi) to create a textured red-black-green roll-neck cardigan. 

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