NIKELAB X SACAI
Beaverton, Oregon, is a town far removed from Paris and New York, both in location and ethos. Tucked amid the rivers, forests, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the crunchy, techy city is perhaps not the first place you would expect to find a hot bed of fashion innovation. But Beaverton is also the home of Nike, arguably the world’s dominant manufacturer of athletic gear and, with today’s announcement of a new capsule collaboration with sacai’s designer Chitose Abe, a newfound fount of provocative design.
Designer sportswear is nothing new—Stella McCartney and Rick Owens are longtime Adidas partners, and Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3 collections are now sometimes greeted with more interest than those under his own name—but Abe’s pieces, under the aegis of NikeLab, push the envelope further, with their voluminous pleats, blinding flashes of neon, and combinations of fleece, mesh, and glowing lace. If a peplum on a sweatshirt looks incongruous at first, the flexibility of motion it allows in movement makes the standard silhouette feel somehow wrong. Eight designs will be available next week, with more colorways and styles coming in June.
Abe, who is known for her innovative and “disruptive” vision at sacai, went back to the Nike archives for inspiration, mixing technical inventions for running, tennis, and American football with her resolutely contemporary vision. The folds on a skirt alternate between Windrunner fabric and jersey mesh. A sweatshirt dress ends at the bottom with a hint of lace. A t-shirt billows at the back thanks to micropleating.”The idea of functionality is important to me, as is fabric innovation,” says Abe in the press release.
For me, Nike is an original icon with performance and innovation at its core. It has been inspiring to work together.
Also to be found at the junction of performance and innovation is Abe’s updated Air Max, here a slip-on with a trompe-l’œil midsole that looks like a wedge heel, available in the capsule’s key hues of obsidian, wolf gray, and volt (a radioactive green). They are, like all of Abe’s designs, eyecatchingly bold at first glance, and then ultimately revealing in the depth of their details upon closer inspection.
NikeLab x sacai is available March 19 at NikeLab, 21 Mercer Street, New York. For more information, please visit Nike.com/NikeLab.
