BEHIND THE STITCH: ALANI
June 21, 2024
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In a groundbreaking fusion of irreverent streetwear and cyberpunk surrealism, Palace Skateboards has teamed up with Jerry Hsu’s LA-based label, Sci-Fi Fantasy, for a hyperreal Summer 2025 collaboration that bends the boundaries of fashion and digital imagination. This debut partnership, dropping May 30, 2025, presents a vibrant, high-concept capsule collection that fuses Palace’s streetwise irreverence with Sci-Fi Fantasy’s cult-favorite love for speculative futurism and oddball tech nostalgia. The result is a collection that successfully dresses the body while projecting an alternate reality.
At the heart of this collaboration lies an obsession with visual storytelling. The clothing showcases a series of meticulously designed graphics, led by the standout “Palace Fantasy” emblem created in 3D by artist Jon Baken. It features intricate Chinese characters alongside an otherworldly crest, rendered in hypnotic shades of pink, yellow, green, and purple. These elements appear throughout the collection, stamped boldly across coach jackets, oversized tees, and vintage-style trucker caps, giving each piece a cinematic flair. Another standout graphic design, titled “Sci-Fi Palace Hyperreality,” blends typeface overlays with the retro rendering of a tricycle, serving up a visual homage to the chaotic aesthetics of early internet design.
Far from being just a visual experiment, the PALACE x SCI-FI FANTASY drop is also a deep dive into tactile creativity. The garments are made with Palace’s signature premium quality, yet carry the experimental spirit of Sci-Fi Fantasy’s design language, elegantly showcasing bold silhouettes, unexpected color clashes, and head-turning material contrasts. Each piece feels like a wearable artifact from a speculative near-future, steeped in glitchy memories and reimagined youth culture.
To accompany the collection, Jerry Hsu directed a short film that adds cinematic weight to the capsule’s concept. Referencing Wong Kar-wai’s noir masterpiece Fallen Angels and the legendary motorcycle slide from Akira, the visual piece reinforces the narrative of movement through digital dreamscapes. This short isn’t just promotional, it’s world-building, enhancing the collection’s mythos and anchoring it firmly in pop culture’s most iconic visions of the future.
Rounding off the release are a trio of six-panel caps–available in black, brown, and bright yellow–each embroidered with the bold “Sci-Fi Palace” branding. These accessories continue the collaborative ethos, marrying form and function with the same conceptual edge as the garments. Palace fans will recognize the drop as a natural continuation of the brand’s fearless innovation, while Sci-Fi Fantasy devotees will appreciate the imaginative world-building and understated satire embedded in every stitch.
The PALACE x SCI-FI FANTASY Summer 2025 collection will officially release on Friday, May 30, both online via Palace’s official site and in-store, as well as through Dover Street Market. With its daring visuals, cultural references, and immersive aesthetic, this collaboration isn’t just a collection, it’s a full-scale transmission from another dimension, blurring the line between fashion and fantasy in one of the season’s most imaginative drops.
