With Friends Like These...

Opening Ceremony’s Humberto Leon and Carol Lim have no shortage of fabulous friends––Chloe Sevigny has been designing clothes for them since 2008, while this year Jason Schwartzman and Kirsten Dunst teamed up to showcase the company's spring collection in a Gia Coppola-directed short. Their latest collaboration is with New York artist of the moment Aurel Schmidt, who first started making waves in the city's downtown art scene in 2005. The 27-year-old Canadian's intricate, seedily fantastical drawings of scrambled faces, typically featuring components such as insects and half-eaten donuts, made the art world sit up and take notice when mega-collector Dakis Joannou snapped up two of her works at a group show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in 2006. This was followed by solo exhibitions at Peres Projects in LA and Deitch Projects in New York. Schmidt’s work is often overtly sexual—she guest-edited a racy photographic insert in the latest issue of Purple  that further explored her outré style. For the new line she has created for Opening Ceremony, Schmidt has been more well-behaved, focusing on the mundane objects of city life, using lipsticks, lighters, banana skins and toothpaste to spell out the name of the store on a range of 15 tees, each with a single letter emblazoned on the front and suitably on-trend frayed collars and hemlines.