Etro opens multiple pop-up stores worldwide for Etropìa project

By

Dominique Muret

Translated by
Nicola Mira

Published
Feb 21, 2023

Marco de Vincenzo continues to revamp Etro’s brand image through the Etropìa project. The designer, who took charge of style at the long-established Italian luxury label in June 2022, has released his first advertising campaign, for Spring/Summer 2023. The campaign has been deployed worldwide together with a series of pop-up stores and activations, and is inspired by the apple as a magical, dreamlike element of myth, at once a symbol of wisdom, seduction and immortality.

The forbidden fruit cropped up in de Vincenzo's first women's ready-to-wear collection for Etro, unveiled in Milan last September, as a fun accessory encapsulated and suspended at the end of a golden chain. The apple is now back in larger, multi-coloured versions, as the defining aesthetic element in an array of temporary installations inside Etro stores and department store concessions, showcasing the label's next summer’s collection around the world, until the end of July.

In total, a dozen destinations are planned, starting in Tokyo with the Isetan department store. For Japanese customers only, Etro has also created a virtual pop-up store in the metaverse, inside a digital replica of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, developed in partnership with the Rev Worlds app. Etro’s temporary installations, with their giant apples, will also make their appearance in Milan, Paris, New York, Osaka, Seoul, Busan, Beijing, Chengdu, Yokohama and Singapore.

Several major department store chains are partnering with Etro in this initiative, from Bon Marché in Paris to La Rinascente in Milan and Selfridges in London. Some stores will feature, in addition to the ready-to-wear collection, the Love Trotter bag in a limited-edition version, a different one for each country, made from Etro’s dormant fabric stock.

This initiative, called ‘Wonderland of Etropìa’, is the latest incarnation of the Etropìa programme launched by de Vincenzo in September with his ‘Manifesto’, a first multicultural communication project featuring a series of portraits of models wearing no clothes, dressed only in shades of colour, their faces painted with stylised, colourful apple drawings. Etropìa’s second act was the show entitled ‘Master of Textiles’. Now, it is time for the third and fourth acts, with the pop-up store openings and the ‘Eden of Etropìa’ advertising campaign.

The models, with long, wavy Pre-Raphaelite-style hair, are pictured in a supernatural universe, in the likeness of “acrobats, nymphs, witches and princesses,” dancing around the forbidden fruit. The campaign was shot in London by Malaysian photographer Zhong Lin.