Cole Alexander
for #GucciGig

Old King Cole Younger is the side project of Cole Alexander, guitarist of the garage-rock band Black Lips as well as Crush.

Lo-fi and abstract in comparison to his work with Black Lips, the sound is like an LP that has been lost and recovered from somewhere far away—otherworldly but still punk. That sound is what inspired Alexander’s collaboration with the artist Ariana Papademetropoulos for #GucciGig to highlight Gucci eyewear, which takes the form of a fictional album cover and gig posters. Black Lips are known for their intense stage shows. The band members have at times, for example, stripped or set guitars on fire, though the most extreme onstage antics have cooled off more recently. There’s a restless creativity to the music as well as their style; their albums are conceptual projects, including the most recent, Satan's graffiti or God's art?. They role-play, inhabiting as well as subverting different genres and archetypes. New music from Black Lips is expected later in 2019.

Papademetropoulos has shown at galleries including Los Angeles’s Wilding Cran and London’s Soft Opening. There’s a Baroque aesthetic to her work, with lush colors and plush textures in her paintings and sculptural installations. The artist is something of a magpie, too, grabbing visual material from French flea markets or Renaissance paintings as much as Instagram.

In her designs, Cole Alexander is an adventurer cast onto another planet. He strums a pink electric guitar on a golden bed that seems to have crash-landed and stares out over the surface of the alien landscape in crystal-studded Gucci sunglasses.

— Kyle Chayka

Listen to ‘Lunar Egg,’ Cole Alexander’s playlist for #GucciGig on.gucci.com/ColeAlexanderGucciGigPlaylist