SALOMON COUTURE
Concept • Creative Direction • AI Image Direction
(Self-initiated concept)
A couture line for a brand that never made one. I built it to find out what a technical sports brand looks like when you take the effort out of it.
Sportswear is sold on effort. Sweat on the temple, the moment of exertion, the slow-motion replay of a body doing something difficult. I wanted to take all of that out and see whether the shoe still reads.
(all images are AI generated by me)
COURT RULES
The Whites
The all-white rule at Wimbledon was not a design decision. In the 1870s visible perspiration was considered improper, particularly on women, and white hid the marks better than colour. A dress code invented so nobody had to see the body working.
A century and a half later the rule survives and now reads as elegance. I kept the whites and pushed the pretence further. Nobody in these frames is working at all.
The Collision
Salomon spent decades making ski bindings and trail shoes in the Alps. Then the XT-6, built in 2013 for ultra-distance racing, was adopted by people who live nowhere near a mountain. Salomon never asked for it. The shoe crossed over on its own.
So the collision was already half made. I took it the rest of the way: faux fur on a hard court, organza where the kit should be, volume that makes a rally impossible.
No score, no rally, no sweat. She arrives, she stands, she leaves.
ON THE MAKING
I generated and directed every image myself. No photographer, no crew, no set.
Casting came first and took the longest. Most AI faces land somewhere between symmetrical and lifeless, so I kept going until the skin behaved like skin: moles, flush, visible pores, a face that isn't even left to right. The last frame is her with no styling and no set, so you can see what everything else is built on.
Colour was the other rule. The shoe is the only saturated thing in the campaign. Everything else stays cream, white and court green, which means the neon has nowhere to hide and the eye goes to it in every frame.
