In partnership with Gentle Monster
Life imitates art – but sometimes art also begins in the produce aisle. The fashion world has always looked towards the ordinary rituals in our everyday lifestyle and turned them into objects of desire. For its latest Veggie Collection, Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster looks to nature’s own objects of desire, transforming vegetables into a surrealist design language.
The collection draws from the natural architecture of vegetables. All from the minute details in the way stems curl, vines twist, skins bruise into gradients of colour, and leaves unfurl sculpturally. Organic forms are meeting architectural structure in this collection, in a way the frames feel both alien and familiar. Acid greens mirror the flesh of broccoli stalks, while temple embellishments mimic the small shape of a tomato pedicel. The collection feels like Gentle Monster at its most eccentric, futuristic, and impossibly refined.
Fronting the campaign are Aespa’s Karina and multi-hyphenate Yosh Yu. Across two separate campaign films, Karina and Yosh step into a dreamlike world suspended somewhere between hazy pastoral fantasy and sci-fi hallucination. Set against a farm-like landscape where sheep gather in circles and sport mushroom-shaped haircuts, the film centres on the vegetable as the prize fixation. Appearing across their eyes like talismans, the fresh produce motifs guide their gaze through the cinematic landscape until they finally lock onto the ultimate prize – the tomato.
That same surrealism runs through the eyewear collection itself. Translating vegetable-inspired forms into ten foldable frame designs, engineered to move as effortlessly as organic matter adapts in nature. The frames collapse neatly into bags and pockets, designed for lives constantly in motion. Eggplant-toned rims are paired with softly pink-tinted lenses, while silver temples branch outward like tomato vines on the verge of bloom. Naturally, the collection also includes tinted frames made for long afternoons in the sun – whether spent gardening or simply wandering outdoors. Some could say it encourages us to see the everyday objects through a fresh lens.
To bring the collection into the physical world, Gentle Monster will launch immersive pop-up installations across six cities around the world: Los Angeles, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Bangkok. Each space recreates a surreal agricultural landscape, similar to the ones seen in the campaign, that is anchored by a large tomato sculpture and surrounded by surreal vegetable creatures known as the ‘Veggiemon.’ Twisted, oversized, and slightly uncanny, the installations encapsulate Gentle Monster’s signature dimensions through immersive fantasy world-building. Guests can also step inside photo booths that transform them into their own ‘Veggiemon’ avatars – a chance to step beyond the screen and into the campaign’s surreal world itself.
The Gentle Monster Veggie Collection will be available on 5 June 2026 from 12pm AEDT. The collection will be available to purchase from the Gentle Monster’s website, and the Gentle Monster store at Sydney’s David Jones, the Sydney Airport T1, and Melbourne’s Chadstone.
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