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Technically a repost from here, but now with the full article (in case anyone was interested in reading!):
Francis Phommisai is a jack-of-all-trades in the truest sense of the phrase - from Livejournal communities to the new fairy-type Pokemon,...
Apr 16, 2014 / 79 notes

Technically a repost from here, but now with the full article (in case anyone was interested in reading!):

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Francis Phommisai is a jack-of-all-trades in the truest sense of the phrase - from Livejournal communities to the new fairy-type Pokemon, Phommisai wears his passions on his sleeve, and through his staccato conversation.

It takes skill and a whole lot of Internet culture knowledge to wade through the 24 year-old’s imaginative mind - it’s pop references upon pop references. Having a cup of coffee with him is like having a conference with three different people - there’s just so much information to go around, it’s hard to find a starting point. Despite his creatively chaotic mind, Phommisai is always poker-faced. He might flit through conversation topics like a bird, but he’s always in stone faced neutrality. Maybe it’s desensitization to the pop phenoma the colours him with a “don’t give a damn” attitude. Any North American kid is the same to some degree, really. But as the epitome of an Internet-age artist, Phommisai is breaking the mold of the typical fashion blogger. 

It’s a hot and windy Mississauga day, and Phommisai is spending the afternoon like any other Greater Toronto Area suburban creative - at the local Starbucks. Though originally form Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario and having spent time in Oakville for school, Phommisai now calls Mississauga home. After studying advertising at Sheridan College, he scored a job promotion as a store co-ordinator at the local Zara. Phommisai feeds his daily fashion craving through his daytime job, which in retrospect, can be the sweetest vice for any imaginative fashion blogger. At over 16,500 followers, Phommisai’s Pokexfashion Tumblr space is arguably the biggest local niche fashion site - Pokemon and high-fashion ad campaigns are apparently easy reblog material. Taking fashion photos (advertisements, cookbook shots, editorials and the like) and seamlessly Photoshopping Pokemon into them is an ingenious idea, tailor-made for the Internet age and increasingly spilling over to other outlets - Phommisai has already been featured on a number of networks and shows such as MuchMusic, MTV Fora, Complex magazine and Refinery 29 - the simplicity of the concept obviously appeals to the media bigwigs. Fashion outsiders, left field fashion lovers, and the digital generation also gravitate towards his blog. I mean let’s face it, where else could you see Linsey Wixson, clad in a scarlet polka dot Miu Miu coat, smouldering in front of an angry red Gyarados? It’s postmodernism at its finest.

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Despite walking away from advertising, it was a school project that initially birthed the “poke x fashion” idea: “We had to do a campaign, and it was supposed to appeal to children. So I just put Pokemon. I used an actual [page] of the magazine and cut up these stickers that I had. I didn’t look at it for maybe a year because it was just a school project,” he muses. In life, pivotal moments tend to reveal themselves in mysterious ways, and it was the same with the blog. After coming across his school project a year after the initial scrapbook aesthetic inception, Phommisai recreated his physical work on Photoshop. Multiple cuts, crops and pastes later, a blog was born (June 2011 to be exact) and as they say, the rest is history.

Undeniably Tumblr famous, with the youth of his generation on lock, it’d be easy to assume all the attention would get to his head. Truthfully, any friend alone of a popular fashion blogger is the cool friend; that must make for big personalities and bigger egos. But, Phommisai is indifferent to it all. “I’m literally neutral to everything that happens,” he explains, deadpan. “Not that I’m not grateful, [it’s] just my personality. It’s always just like: ‘oh, cool.’” It was the same reaction he had when he was contacted by London-based womenswear designer Joanna Pybus. A quirky clothier, Pybus celebrates the 1960’s silhouettes and mixes it with a kawaii print-happy post-modernist attitude - for the fashion folk, think more wearable Jeremy Scott or Lauren Conrad with some J-Pop sensibilities. Naturally, Phommisai’s Poke atheistic adds a rollicking sense of humour; his work was featured in Pybus’ whole SS’13 collection.

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It’s a cheeky sense of humour that resonates with the “poke x fashion” follower. Reading between the lines in a must to fully appreciate what Phommisai offers. Imposing a cute Cubone face onto a model’s masked visage in a Givenchy ad levels the fashion playing field. Or a smiling Jigglypuff makes an appearance in a rigid and racy Vogue Italia editorial. Every photo is a message: fashion never has to be reserved for the black-clad and stone-faced. All the Fashion Week hullabaloo, the expensive photo productions, the lavishness of it all; fashion is frivolous, therefore it should be fun, not elitist. Pokexfashion is a visual fashion commentary for the digital, and perhaps only the Internet-bred can understand what Phommisai really means.

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- franny

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