Nike’s Releasing New Collections with Virgil Abloh and Kim Jones
Today we’re getting two more good reasons to call it the beautiful game. Nike has partnered with Kim Jones and Virgil Abloh on a pair of collaborations to celebrate the World Cup. Combined, the collections represent the world of soccer on and off the pitch. Abloh, seemingly suspending (or maybe emphasizing) his air-quoted irony, has designed a range of honest-to-God soccer gear—uniforms, gloves, warm-up jackets, a pair of traffic-cone-orange sneakers—which, if you can stand to get them dirty, will make you the coolest guy at your pick-up game. Jones, meanwhile, went the traditional designer-interprets-thing route, reimagining soccer staples as inspired by London’s punk scene.
If these two designers just did fun World Cup collaborations, that would be neat. But the World Cup isn’t the only historic only-every-couple-years event this pair of collaborations coincides with. Because Abloh and Jones, you might recall, are both starting new high-profile gigs at Louis Vuitton and Dior Homme, respectively. And before you can even see, let alone buy, their highly anticipated high-fashion collections, Nike’s managed to get new gear from both—presumably the best distillation of where their brains have been at as they’ve been prepping their debut runway shows. Think of these Nike capsule collections as amuse-bouches before then—menswear’s future bent like Beckham.
Their Nike drops give a good feel for the wavelength each designer is on. Abloh pulls from his own interpretation and memories of soccer, casting the sport through the streetwear-tinted glasses he never takes off. According to a press release, the collection is inspired not just by Abloh’s time playing soccer in high school, but “playing hip-hop tracks on the way to soccer matches.” The graphics are suitably bold: a cursive orange Off-White logo swoops across the chest of several pieces and the black-and-white checkered pattern nods at a uniform worn by the Czech Republic (for reasons that aren’t entirely explained—though we’d guess one of them is “it looked dope”). Abloh’s Mercurial Vapor sneaker is a soccer how-to wrapped onto a sneaker, with teal and white circles placed on an otherwise blindingly bright shoe to highlight “optimal strike zones.”
Jones, meanwhile, has made a career out of reworking classic street and sportswear items and elevating them to designer standards, first at Dunhill and then at Louis Vuitton. (You might also know him as the guy who created that white-hot LV-Supreme collaboration.) Jones’ Nike collab is similarly high-minded when it comes to design. “I was inspired by the idea of DIY [during the punk era of the ‘70s and ‘80s]—cutting up and putting things back together—to create something new,” Jones said via a press release. That means athletic shirts with panels striping down the sleeves and across the waist, and track jackets that appear similarly stitched together. There’s also a recurring smiley face formed by a Swoosh below two stripes, which is nice. Jones’ shoe, the Air Max 360, follows the same thread of deconstruction that inspired the collection. The shoe takes component parts from the Dior designer’s favorite shoes—the Footscape, the Vandal and the Air Max 97—and turns them into an attractive high-top Frankenstein.
NIKE LAB KIM JONES
Photo by Brett LloydThe pair of collaborations, and the extraordinary timing, shows off Nike’s ability to flex the muscle of its partnerships and archive. In the new world where the line between street and sportswear and fashion is nonexistent, it makes a surprising amount of sense that designers at Louis Vuitton and Dior are more in Nike’s orbit than any time before. In 2018, these collaborations coming from Nike look just as avant-fashion as what will come down the runway later this month.
Nike’s collection with Jones releases June 7th and Abloh’s drops the next week on June 14th.
