Other plans include a trial of a new website and catalogue, Label, selling well-known brands such as Converse and Calvin Klein.
A barely known band on an independent label, selling a few thousand copies of an album, could have a No. 1 record on a CMJ chart, which is one way of impressing a recording company.
Certainly not for democratic reasons (that seems unlikely for a man at the helm of a billion-euro label selling bags with four-figure price tags) – it's more likely for the insider fun of it.
Van Noten has built a successful label selling proper clothes to men and to women, while sticking to an old-fashioned business model – just two menswear and two womenswear collections a year, half of the number produced by most labels, and with a distinctly low-key brand of celebrity ambassador.
First, because they appeared to be doing very well with their own Manchester-based Cow label, selling records and T-shirts by the cartload, and second, because Clint Boon's organ frenzy – the Inspirals' musical trademark – is as perversely electronic as it's possible to get.
He set about trying to make money as a California label selling mostly bluegrass music.
