Lewis Hamilton collaborates with S’pore artist on space-themed apparel

SINGAPORE – F1 driver Lewis Hamilton tapped Singaporean pop artist Jahan Loh for a collaboration with his lifestyle brand Plus44 in June.

By July, the 30-piece streetwear capsule bearing Loh’s signature spacemen figures and camouflage print was in production.

Everything came together at “record speed”, says Loh, 49, who is the first Singaporean to join Plus44’s starry roster of art world collaborators, including Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and Briton Ralph Steadman.

Loh’s Plus44 Marina Spaceport collection launched on Oct 5 at the three-year-old London brand’s pop-up at Marina Bay Sands – its first in South-east Asia. The range of apparel, accessories and even a Plus44 spaceman collectible (from $30 to $245) is available at the temporary boutique, running until Oct 11, and the brand’s webstore.

The central graphic reimagines Marina Bay as a launchpad for space shuttles and Hamilton as one of Loh’s smiling spacemen, wearing an astro-suit emblazoned with the driver’s racing No. 44, also the calling code for his native Britain.

Loh says: “There is something almost extraterrestrial about what an F1 driver does. They’re strapped into extraordinarily sophisticated machines and subjected to extreme physical forces while making decisions at incredible speed. That intensity creates a conceptual bridge for me between motorsport and spaceflight.

“And if anyone were going to pilot a spacecraft, it would be Lewis,” he said at gallery ArtCEO, where an Oct 8 exhibition of the paintings, art toys and preparatory sketches he made for this Plus44 project is being set up. A painting of the Hamilton spaceman blasting off from Marina Bay should put to bed online suspicion that the graphic, central to the collection, was AI-generated.

A quartet of camouflage-print paintings was developed into smoky, car exhaust-like patterns on windbreakers ($245), caps ($60), track pants ($205), socks ($30) and T-shirts (from $90). The “smoke, flames, sparks and heat” that are the emissions of blisteringly fast F1 cars look like “nebulae and cosmic matter,” says Loh.

One variant of the print has dragons camouflaged within. The mythical sky beast represents royalty – as king of the sky – and victory, evoking Hamilton’s racetrack dominance with seven world titles and 106 wins, the most in the history of the sport.

The dragon is also an Asian touch and a nod to Singapore, says Loh.

He is drawn to F1’s bleeding-edge quality, with drivers regularly experiencing forces of up to six Gs, more than what many astronauts train for.

Loh declaims “love and fascination” for the motorsport. “Beyond the racing, the technology, engineering, speed and relationship between human instinct and machine, the Singapore night race transforms streets I know intimately into something completely different. At 300kmh, Singapore begins to resemble the science-fiction city I’ve been imagining in my paintings for years,” he says.

He has collaborated with some of the foremost names in streetwear, including American singer-designer Pharrell Williams and Japanese fashion designer and DJ Nigo’s Billionaire Boys Club and the Japanese brand beloved by rappers, BAPE.

Unlike his main medium of painting, he says, cloth moves, creases and travels. “The challenge is translating an artwork across different scales and materials without losing its energy, but that’s also what makes fashion collaborations exciting.”

Loh wears a no-fuss, plain black outfit every day but has been smitten with camouflage since around 2010, using the print in some of the 20 or so apparel projects he has done.

He says: “I like its contradiction. Camouflage was created to make you disappear, while fashion turned it into something you wear to be seen. For Plus44, I reinterpreted it through speed.

“The Plus44 camouflage comes from velocity. Smoke, flames and sparks from racing become abstracted into the pattern – almost a kind of camouflage in motion. I think of it as camouflage for movement.”

His spaceman fixation started even earlier, when as a schoolboy prone to “spacing out”, the figure of the anti-gravity voyager became his alter ego. He started painting spacemen in 2004 as a response to global panic about the hole in the ozone layer.

Decades on, the hole is healing and his smiley astronauts have evolved into something more universal, even optimistic.

“I’ve always been interested in migration and identity, and an astronaut is perhaps the ultimate migrant, leaving one world and adapting to another. Behind the visor, race and nationality also become less immediately defined,” he says.

The spacemen motif fits into his vision of spaceships becoming as commonplace as planes in the next half-century, an idea he also explored in an eye-catching 3m-by-3m AI video at Marina Bay Sands mega fair Art SG in 2025.

He has long said that in the future, everyone will be a spaceman.

He adds: “I don’t necessarily mean we’ll all physically leave Earth. We’re already moving between physical and digital realities and adapting to technologies and environments that didn’t exist a generation ago.

“The spaceman is my way of asking what remains human while everything around us changes.”

Info: Till Oct 11 at 10 Bayfront Ave, The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, B1-148. Open from 10.30am to 10pm.