Elvine is a Swedish clothing brand, represented in over 700 stores across Europe. Hailing from a city hardened by the most rainfall in Sweden, Elvine are best known for their jackets, combining smart functionality with good design.
During spring 2013, the quickly expanding clothing brand realised that they had outgrown their costume. The need for a redesign of the current visual identity, in order to manifest the brand's development from a personal affair to hugely popular maker of jackets, was clear. With a pronounced goal of catering to the functional needs of the urban citizen, we turned to the city for inspiration. The emblem, commonly employed by fashion brands to create a sense of heritage and usually depicting bourgeois buildings or other traditional motifs became our starting point. In order to make a statement and to clearly differentiate Elvine from the high-brow side of the fashion world - we chose to look to the industrial landscapes, common property of the city's inhabitants. The idea was to glorify the ordinary.
The Elvine emblem depicts an illustration of the iconic Gothenburg gas holder; 'Gasklockan'. The building holds a lot of history, and has been a symbol for Gothenburg’s refusal of bending to commercial forces ever since Coca-Cola was forced by public demand to withdraw a request to repaint the whole building as a giant soda can. Gas holders, in one shape or another, can be found in most larger metropolitan areas in Europe, symbolizing urbanity and progression. In a way, they have become an icon for the industrialised urban landscape, as manifested in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
With the Gothenburg gas holder now deemed for demolition, the Elvine emblem might indeed turn into more of a symbol of heritage than what was initially intended.
With Elvine’s new website, we wanted to create a simple way for Elvine to quickly share new garments as well as updates from their showroom, travels and editorial pieces. The landing page features a mix of objects found on travels, garments and other updates and is designed to be in a state of constant flux.
The website was designed to be fully responsive and the WordPress build includes a number of additional features, such as a custom-built solution for creating layouts for the front-page and the story pages. Using these tools, the editor can customise the start page using a number of modules available, as well as build custom story pages, with rows of images, columns of text or both. Each story can be separated in to multiple pages for a better overview.
A fully responsive online shop, using the full width of the screen to display the products, was also designed and is currently being implemented in to the existing shop system.
