May 16, 2024

Into the WP Archive: Celebrating a Story Always in Progress

Anniversaries are an occasion to celebrate and look ahead, and because no party is complete without friends, together with WP we engaged a group of creators, designers, and style consultants to narrate a 40-year story.
Some say life begins at 40, and we couldn’t agree more when it comes to WP Lavori in Corso, the Bologna-based company that has shaped the aesthetics of menswear for the past four decades, scouting and distributing brands like Vans, Barbour, Woolrich, Baracuta, and Blundstone to a European audience seeing them for the first time.

HOW TO NARRATE 40 YEARS OF RESEARCH AND STYLE, OF DISCOVERIES AND PASSIONS?

Not a single story, but many stories, intertwining and shaping the History – with a capital ‘H’ – of European streetwear. The WP Stories project is not just a series of video interviews: it’s a cultural tale at the intersection of style, counterculture, music, and art.
It all began in the WP archive in Bologna, a playground for fashion enthusiasts, where 80,000 pieces including iconic garments and accessories, as well as books, catalogs and historical ads are preserved and exhibited. There, we invited a group of friends from around the world to discuss the influence of the group on men’s fashion and its legacy on contemporary and future aesthetics.
Trend consultant Sam Trotman, better known as Samutaro; Vans historian and collector Henry Davies; Dame Margaret Barbour, Chairman of the eponymous fashion house symbol of Britishness in the world, Daiki Suzuki, legendary Japanese designer and creative director of Baracuta: these are only some of the amazing people we met on this journey. A journey into the past, but also into the present and the future, remaining faithful to the values that have always characterized WP.
The result was a web series of eight videos, hosted on a dedicated website and amplified through media collabs with magazines such as nss, Hypebeast, Vogue Italia and Dazed. The video content was part of a broader strategy that led to the reissue of some iconic lines and the opening of Bologna’s archive to the public. Because when a story is so important, it deserves to be shared with as many people as possible.