Profile
As a guest lecturer, Khary Simon enjoys working with students to rewrite the brand narrative within the fashion and luxury goods space.
Khary is a creative director and vice-president working within the design and branding sector. With over 15 years of leadership in branding and storytelling, he works for global fashion brands, publishers, emerging disruptors, and Fortune 500 companies. Khary has a broad understanding of brand architecture and how to express a unique brand vision through storytelling, design, immersive experiences, packaging, digital marketing, advertising, film, and print media.
Aside from his work with brands, Khary co-edits and publishes a bi-annual art publication, CRUSHfanzine, curated group art installations, and has been a guest speaker for design panels.
Career highlights include:
• Delivered cohesive multi-platform brand messaging and marketing strategy for luxury clients including Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Saint Laurent, and Sergio Rossi, while boosting several of the top-performing retail spaces in North America.
• Developed new fragrance programs for kate spade new york, Fila, and Rebecca Minkoff, which included all design, packaging, advertising, and digital media
• Received notable mentions in The New York Times, Interview Magazine, and Women’s Wear Daily.
Learn more at www.kharysimon.com
Degrees Held
BA: (design & entrepreneurial studies) City University of New York
MPS: (design management) Pratt Institute
Professional Affiliation
Publication: CRUSHfanzine
CRUSHfanzine is a French and American quarterly publication that has collaborated with renowned designers, brands, artists, and cultural leaders to create a new visual conversation. This limited-edition publication is sold in key museums around the world.
press links below:
http://thewildmagazine.com/blog/something-beautiful-at-marianne-boesky/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/fashion/01fanzine.html
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/blogs/culture/2009-04-17/crush-fanzine/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/silhouettes/2013/03/22/crush-magazines-women-we-love/
Art Installations: Marianne Boesky Gallery & Art Basel (Miami)
Through examining contemporary culture, Khary has created vital art installation projects that focus the lens on exploring beauty and obsession.
Something Beautiful, Marianne Boesky Gallery
September 2015
This exhibition uses the lens of contemporary photographic portraiture to examine the ideals of youth as a product of memory and the wisdom of hindsight. Like a daydream, the works on view propose the fleeting sensuality of a fantasy, coupled with the sense of loss that comes from a jolt back to reality—a juxtaposition analogous to the journey from childhood to adulthood. Artists Jeff Burton, Sue de Beer, Keith Edmier, Roe Ethridge, Annika Larsson, Deana Lawson, Viviane Sassen, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Xaviera Simmons, Dorothée Smith, Eva Stenram, Eric Stephany, and Wu Tsang come together here, offering varied photographic visions that portray different manifestations of this shifting space—between youth and maturity, between the ideal and the true.
Something Beautiful takes the recent still and portrait photography work of Sue de Beer as its point of departure. De Beer's earlier work is recognized for its empathetic portrayals of youth. Her raw casting and on-camera improvisation process create a sense of the unfolding of real experience located in an artificial world of sets and props. In her latest work, de Beer cuts notions of reality adrift, giving her subjects idealized versions of themselves: an entire film encapsulated in one image. The selected artists follow varied routes in their embodiment of this theme, presenting photographic visions of memory, experience, beauty, and voyeurism.
Nintendo Room, Art Basel Miami
2008
In collaboration with a sneaker brand and video game company, Khary created an immersive installation that addressed the nostalgia and privilege of "boy" culture of the 1990’s.
Lecturer and Panelist
Khary has been a guest lecturer and panelist for Parsons, Pratt, NYU, Select Agency, The SOHO House, Participant Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth Gallery.
Past discussions topics have been:
The importance of being honest with your brand.
No one cares; why should you?
I’m awful & I'm a genius
Being the only COC (creative of color) in the room.
Activism and Art: Where is your role?
Portfolio
website
publication