WHAT'S TAKING SHAPE

Ideas, references & culture.

A considered selection of ideas, brands, creative projects and cultural references worth paying attention to.

THE BRANDS REDEFINING HOW WE SEE AND EXPERIENCE THINGS

Aimé Leon Dore: When a brand becomes a world

Some brands sell products.

Others build a world around them.

Aimé Leon Dore belongs firmly in the second category.

At first glance, the formula seems simple: New York, streetwear, sport, nostalgia, good photography.

But the strength of Aimé Leon Dore has never really been one individual product. It is the consistency of everything surrounding the product.

A sneaker becomes part of a uniform.

A café becomes part of the brand.

A playlist becomes part of the atmosphere.

An event becomes part of the culture.

And suddenly, you are no longer buying into a collection. You are buying into a point of view.

That is what makes the brand's collaborations particularly interesting.

New Balance has allowed Aimé Leon Dore to move between lifestyle and actual performance, including a 2026 performance running capsule featuring the FuelCell Rebel v5 and FuelCell SC Elite v5.

Golf has become another territory, with the brand developing its own Golf programme and an ongoing partnership with FootJoy.

Then there is Porsche.

The relationship goes beyond putting two logos on a product. Since 2020, Aimé Leon Dore and Porsche have worked on restored classic cars, while later collections have translated elements of Porsche's archive into clothing.

These collaborations work because they don't feel random.

They all live somewhere inside the same world: sport, movement, cars, New York, nostalgia, craftsmanship, leisure.

Even music plays a role. Through ALD's SOUND platform, music becomes another layer of the environment rather than simply background content.

And this is perhaps the more interesting lesson.

Aimé Leon Dore does not need every product to be revolutionary.

The world around the product does some of that work.

It is a reminder that a niche brand can remain relatively specific while becoming culturally expansive. You do not necessarily need to appeal to everyone when you have built something that the right people want to enter.

That might be one of the most powerful shifts in modern branding.

The product gets you noticed.

The world gives people a reason to stay.

THE CREATIVE DECISIONS BEHIND WORK WORTH REMEMBERING

The home is becoming a set

For a while, the ideal home seemed to have one visual language.

Warm beige. Light wood. Stone. Bouclé. Soft curves. Almost nothing on the shelves. Everything carefully neutral.

It was beautiful.

Then it became familiar.

And once a visual language becomes familiar enough, the eye starts looking for something else.

That is where interiors feel particularly interesting right now.

The return of darker woods, richer colours, lacquered surfaces, sculptural furniture, vintage references and more atmospheric lighting is not simply a return to the 70s. It is a reaction against spaces that feel too resolved, too neutral and, increasingly, too interchangeable.

Architectural Digest has been documenting this shift in 2026, pointing to a resurgence of 70s-inspired interiors across homes, hospitality and creative spaces: dark woods, glossy finishes, sculptural forms, warmer palettes and moodier lighting replacing what it describes as more standardised beige environments.

But perhaps the more interesting shift is not the return of the seventies.

It is the return of the set.

A home is increasingly treated as an environment with a point of view. The chair matters. The lamp matters. The object left on the table matters. The photograph on the wall matters. The texture of the rug matters.

Not because every room needs to look like a film set, but because we are becoming better at noticing the decisions that make a space feel like itself.

That is partly the result of the creative scene around us.

Designers, photographers, architects, stylists, restaurants, hotels, fashion brands and independent studios are constantly producing new visual references. Social media has compressed all of these worlds into one enormous visual feed. A Milanese chair can sit next to a New York restaurant, a 1970s film still, a Parisian apartment and a campaign set within seconds.

The result is that the eye gets trained.

We begin to recognise materials. Proportions. Lighting. Typography. Silhouettes. References. We start noticing when something is genuinely considered and when it is simply following a template.

This is why niche creative references matter.

The more specific the references we encounter, the less satisfied we become with generic ones.

Maybe that is why the current interior conversation feels less like “minimalism versus maximalism” and more like a move towards character.

The beige room did not disappear.

It simply stopped being enough.

And perhaps the next evolution of the home is not about making it more beautiful.

It is about making it more specific.

THE REFERENCES, SPACES AND IDEAS CURRENTLY ON OUR MIND

On: Loud Without Shouting

For a brand built around running, On has become surprisingly difficult to place.

It is still, fundamentally, a performance brand. Swiss engineering, technical innovation, elite athletes, running shoes.

But somewhere along the way, the conversation around On started moving beyond performance.

The shift is not happening through a sudden change of identity.

If anything, it is happening through a very deliberate selection of people, brands and cultural spaces.

Take Zendaya.

When On announced its multi-year partnership with Zendaya in 2024, the choice immediately placed the brand in a different conversation.

Not because Zendaya is simply famous, but because fashion has been such a carefully constructed part of her public identity for years. Her long-standing collaboration with stylist and “image architect” Law Roach has produced some of the most recognisable red-carpet moments of the past decade, turning styling into a form of storytelling rather than simply wardrobe selection.

On explicitly brought that relationship into its own world, describing Zendaya as both a fashion icon and a creative force.

That distinction matters.

On did not simply put Zendaya in a pair of sneakers. It created a bridge between movement, fashion and storytelling.

Then came LOEWE.

The collaboration takes something inherently technical and pushes it into a different visual language: proportion, colour, craft, material and design. The latest LightSpray Cloudmonster, released in 2026, combines On's manufacturing technology with LOEWE's approach to design.

Again, the product remains recognisably On. But the context around it changes.

And then there is Kylian Mbappé.

On's announcement of its entry into football alongside Mbappé in September 2026 is more than a new sport category.

Mbappé brings another layer of cultural relevance: an athlete whose world already extends well beyond the pitch, including his role as a Dior ambassador.

On is therefore entering football through someone who already sits comfortably between elite sport, fashion and contemporary culture.

The partnership also gives Mbappé a role in product development, rather than positioning him solely as a face of the campaign.

That is where On becomes particularly interesting.

The brand is getting louder in presence while becoming quieter in language.

There is no need for an enormous logo or an aggressively “luxury” identity. The signal comes from the people chosen, the collaborations selected, the design language and the environments in which the brand appears.

Even Zendaya's relationship with On reflects this. In Be Every You, she moves between performance-inspired pieces and elevated everyday looks, with Law Roach shaping the visual language and the Cloudzone Moon becoming her first co-created On shoe.

It feels less like a sportswear brand trying to become fashion and more like a sportswear brand understanding that performance has become part of fashion's vocabulary.

The new luxury is not necessarily about being louder.

Sometimes it is about being recognisable without having to explain why.