The 1969 wedding of John Lennon and Yoko Ono inspired lots of great art, some not-so-great art and some rather unusual creative proceedings, from the Beatles’ No. 1 hit "The Ballad of John and Yoko" to the perhaps less-appreciated sound collage of the Wedding Album to a series of sketches Ono gave Lennon as a wedding gift. This week, Yoko Ono and Opening Ceremony announced the launch of "Fashions For Men: 1969-2012," a menswear collection inspired by those wedding-gift sketches, which featured positive affirmations, cartoony and somewhat whimsical depictions of genitalia and early versions of some of the items found in the collection.
Ono’s collection plays with color, shape and celebrations of the human body — on nearly every set of pants in the collection, a handprint appears over the crotch. Household items and clothing are often entwined, as with the lightbulb bandeau bra, a board worn around the neck with a leather strap, featuring two bells over the nipples and a sign that reads "RING FOR YOUR MOMMY PIECE" and open-toe thigh-highs with a side pocket (an earlier sketch featured an incense holder at the toe). And, of course, there’s the "Butt Hoodie," which is the actual name of the product and is exactly what it sounds like—which we could actually see John Lennon wearing, seeing as he seemed pretty comfortable with depictions of the human body in art (album covers or otherwise).
To introduce the collection, Opening Ceremony, with the help of Lisa Paclet and Irina Dakeva, created a video in which Ono’s sketches get the animated treatment, with cutoff shirts, butts and declarations of "YES" flooding the screen, featuring Ono’s funky track "Mind Train." Watch.