Launching at Fashion Weeks around the world, The Cool Hunter brings you McFancy, “an upmarket temporary McDonalds store.” London, Paris, New York, Sidney, Milan and Hong Kong will see the art installation/restaurant this year, if the designers at TheCoolHunter.net have their way.
The Cool Huner is an online magazine with 950,000 readers per month across the globe. And now the makers of the website are launching a branding agency, Access, which hopes to revolutionise household brands by spinning them in an unexpected way.
“The surprise element,” according to the brains behind McFancy, “changes the thinking patterns, and makes the experience memorable.” The first brand to be put through the process is McDonalds, with this Access created profile of exactly how customers’ perceptions would be turned upside down.
Turning cheap food of rather suspect quality into a luxury commodity, with beautiful packaging and designer influences is the core of this particular rebrand. Whilst the food itself is accessible to the masses, the presentation nods to the high end, luxurious lifestyle of those who frequent the Front Rows.
Among The Cool Hunter’s ideas are silver service waiters dressed in tuxedos and private, exclusive dining areas. The real spectacle, however, if the food. Without changing the product itself, the redesign allows for real comfort food amidst the cocktails and canapes of the fashion world (though we doubt many of the models will be tucking into a fillet’o’fish).
Our favourite piece in the office in the Paul Smith McFlurry, complete with ice cream parlour stripes and artistically drizzled chocolate sauce. This truly is a world away from out usual two a.m. dashes for a burger, and surely with this level of sophistication the calories must not count?
Although not a fan of the old Golden Arches myself, I could definitely see thosse fried looking more tempting complete with Chanel quilting, and you might even catch me eating a burger if I felt I was sharing in a little bit of that Burberry love.
So all this fancy food got us thinking here in the office, and we reckon we could give this Cool Hunter fellow a run for his money. Remember those candy necklaces that featured heavily in Party Bags (Oh for the days when you left a party with more than an impending hangover) and tasted inescapably of string? We would like to rebrand these little beads of crunchy nostalgia to have them packaged in individual turqoise boxes, Tiffany style, with enticingly expensive looking gilt labelling and clasps.
Polos, of course, practically rebrand themselves with their potential to feature a tiny man, astride a tiny horse, playing polo with a tiny mint instead of a ball. And while those good folks are busy being sued by Ralph Lauren, they should bring back the Polo Citrus too.
Whether or not designer fast food will take off is yet to be seen, but it would certainly make us see our post-lash grub in a different light if Efes was a bit more Erva, and Viking Kitchen a bit more Vivienne Westwood.
Hermes fries with that?