Good news if you've been clinging to a Rihanna-approved Hood By Air T-shirt since designer Shayne Oliver announced his label would going on hiatus in 2017.
At the time, Oliver and his co-founder, Leilah Weinrab, decided to put HBA on hold in order to "to focus on their current projects." Oliver, as we would later learn, was designing a collection for Helmut Lang, and Weinrab was working on a film.
However, they maintained the hiatus was not permanent. "HBA will continue to fulfill its creative vision in the near future," a release said at the time.
They kept their promise. On Wednesday, in an interview with cool-kid Canadian e-tailer Ssense, Oliver announced Hood By Air is relaunching . "No one knows how our comeback will be received," Oliver says in the interview. "We are all hoping for the best, but we also understand some time has passed." The brand still has quite a dedicated following despite the long break. "For a while, the brand worked to make new archetypes of humans, of people we never understood or people that I wanted to meet—and many resonated with that. They still do."
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Oliver hints he may skip traditional Fashion Weeks the next go-round, saying: "Fashion schedules are ridiculous! And fashion weeks, at this point, are no longer for the people that need them. You look at younger designers, and they get overshadowed by people that garner the most success from fashion weeks but don't actually need it." Instead, the designer aims to exist outside of the fashion industry vacuum. "I want to remove the brand from the conversation of just fashion in general, and allow it to exist outside of the fashion system, so people can really see I am not trying to prove anything or create a vocabulary for the fashion world."
To do that, Oliver aims to build a brand voice through its shopping experience. "A temporary retail store won't be the first thing we will do, but we will introduce new models inside our system that will offer contemporary retail experiences," he offers.
No word yet on when the new line or retail experiences will debut.