The collective spotlights invisible creativity behind fashion’s icons
MSCHF has released a new iteration of its Global Supply Chain Telephone (GSCT) project. The latest version, titled ‘BLUR,’ includes three prototypes of blurred monogram handbags, named Blurberry, Blucci, and Blendi. The pieces continue the group’s ongoing investigation into the creative labor embedded in global manufacturing and question the boundaries of copyright infringement.
Initially introduced last year, GSCT functioned as both a product and social experiment. It tasked four factories—located in Peru, Portugal, India, and China—with contributing to the final design of a handbag through a sequential manufacturing process. Each factory added its own interpretation without being aware of the others’ exact contributions. The result was a product shaped as much by the production process as by any central design.
The BLUR edition of the project builds on this concept by taking aim at the use of branded patterns and logos. By obscuring luxury monograms into blurred, unrecognizable versions, MSCHF introduces commentary on the gray areas of intellectual property, imitation, and authorship. The new designs are intended to challenge perceptions about who contributes creatively in the fashion production chain.
“Global Supply Chain Telephone uses–protagonizes–hidden creative labor from four factories in sequence (in Peru, Portugal, India, and China) as the design process, mechanisms, or techniques for the handbag, that succeed when they cannot be spotted by the end consumer,” MSCHF stated. “The result –– a bag entirely designed by the global supply chain.”
Priced at $650 USD each, the Blurberry, Blucci, and Blendi bags will be sold one per day from MSCHF’s 48 Ludlow Street pop-up location in New York and online at www.globalsupplychaintelephone.com, with availability limited to the weekend.
According to MSCHF, the goal is not only to produce a product but to foreground a critique of the creative hierarchy that often omits the contributions of laborers and manufacturers. “GSCT understands that the more novel the object in question, the more creative labor the factory performs,” the collective said. “Never-been-done-before, by definition, means the process to create it is being invented on the go. To make things that are new requires a creative factory.”
The release reflects MSCHF’s ongoing focus on interrogating social systems through their work in fashion, art, and commerce, often blurring the line between critique and consumer product.
