Fashion Garments

EVEN before the actual launch date of the Juice KL store, there were rumours about Bangsar residence signing a petition against its opening in one of Kuala Lumpur’s most upmarket neighbourhood, expressing their dislike towards one of its founders. However, judging from the crowd which flooded the street area of Jalan Telawi 5 one Saturday morning recently, Juice KL clearly made its presence known and was well supported by hundreds of fans, some who had waited for almost three hours in the presence of RELA (Volunteers of Malaysian People) officials, to witness the owners of Juice KL, namely Hongkong “superstar” Edison Chen, his sidekick Kevin Poon and local partner Edwin Choong, officially open the store.

 
Edison Chen
 
The two-storey high fashion store, which has Malaysia as its second chapter, has injected something different into the existing local fashion directions which are mainly skewered towards women’s fashion. Once you step into the store, you will notice the interior which infuses technology with timeless materials, lighting effects with LED lights, wooden panels, steel and glass, all creating a futuristic ambience which brings influences over fashion trend and lifestyle.

“We chose Bangsar and not major shopping malls simply because we believe that we could represent our identities better in street fashion here. When you walk into a mall, you tend to get lost in the shuffle of brands available. Most brands can’t really represent who they really are … they work really hard to focus on personality so people would take notice. We are instead proud to be able to build areas, for example the Clot outlet in Shanghai. It used to be an unknown area, a very ghetto area. Now if you go there, you will notice a lot of developments, roads paved and bright lights everywhere,” explained Chen at a group interview.

Established in 2003, Juice is a select shop located in an urban shopping centre in Causeway Bay, Hongkong, that carries the “flyest” gear from around the world. The concept of Juice was to provide Hongkong urbanheads with a legitimate way to buy clothing from official stockists at market price. Carrying brands like Clot Apparel, Colette, Demeter, Devilovk, Fragment X Kangol, adidas, Nike, OriginalFake and many others, Juice also sells crossover projects between Clot and several other brands regularly.

“There are two meanings to why we took the name Juice. Besides the literal meaning of it, Juice represents the many flavours, like how there are so many flavours in fruit juices, putting them in one place (Juice store). We’ve also adapted another double meaning of it from a movie which featured our favourite rapper (Kevin and me), and in that movie, ‘juice’ meant money, power and respect,” said Chen.