Jas Bell was recently named Pacers Sports & Entertainment’s first global design and product director.
This newly created role will allow him to oversee the creation of merchandise for both the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever moving forward. But before he even signed on the dotted line, Bell had already made a name for himself with his Stranger Things collaboration with the Indiana Fever last season.
The project featured an actual jersey, which the players wore last season in home and away games against the Las Vegas Aces, Phoenix Mercury, Dallas Wings, Seattle Storm, Chicago Sky, Los Angeles Sparks, and Minnesota Lynx.
The collaboration was an instant success, selling out, and would go on to secure a Silver Clio Sports Award. Something his mentors, Pharrell Williams and Virgil Abloh, would be proud of.
Bell recently sat down with Pacers on SI to discuss a variety of different topics including what advice the late great, fashion designer and entrepreneur, Virgil Abloh, would tell him to change, if he was sitting courtside at a Fever’s game.
“Man, that’s a good question. Honestly, I don’t know if he would tell me to change anything. I think he would tell me to reinvent things, which is what I’m doing a lot with a lot of the things that I’m working on now,” said Bell.
“Of course, introducing some new things. But I think, from his perspective and the way that he designed, he would tell me to really go in and reinvent some things and see them through a different lens.”
Bell spent a lot of time studying and watching Williams during Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark Tour in 2008, as well as Kanye West and Virgil.
“The reaction that people had immediately let me know that they love and respect the design vein. So now I’m able to lean more into that vein and give the fans those pieces that they see the girls have on.
That’s one of the things I learned from P (Pharrell Williams) as well — just how he would wear a lot of those early BBC colors, a lot of that early Bape stuff from Nigo. They would wear it for three, four, five, six months straight, so people would be like, ‘Man, when is it coming out?’ I think that’s like a cheat code, because as much as people are into the design style, a lot of times they’re into the people behind it.”
In a 2013 interview with Complex, spoke how his music video for ‘Frontin’ was used to launch the clothing brand Billionaire Boys Club into the mainstream.
“Yeah, that was calculated,” Pharrell would later admit to Complex in the publication’s oral history of BBC. That music video laid the groundwork for BBC’s almost immediate popularity, with requests pouring in for the gear that Pharrell was wearing in the video. When the BBC team launched its website, they had already sold some goods through a showroom to other retailers and figured they had a good read on what the demand would be for the product. That wasn’t the case, though because, “as soon as [it was] set live, like a thousand orders [came in].”
With WNBA All Star Weekend in Chicago this weekend, we can only imagine what Bell has instore for the upcoming week. We will just have to wait and see when he decides to drop his next masterpiece.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.si.com ’
