By Natalie White | Cover image by Nick Knight
Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing is known for tailoring formfitting silhouettes, but it’s his love of football — dating back to childhood — that sits at the heart of the NikeLab x Olivier Rousteing: Football Nouveau collection.
The second collaboration in NikeLab's Summer of Sport series, with the first collection by Riccardo Tisci, blends Nike innovation with Rousteing’s creative vision.
"Fashion is usually about the catwalk and the glamour, but with Nike it was about performance and the athletes," explains Rousteing.
What I love about this collection is that we are integrating the iconic style of football into sport style."Taking the lifestyles of professional football players competing in the upcoming UEFA European Championship this summer as inspiration, the men's and women's offerings are designed to meet off-pitch performance needs while pushing the sport's aesthetic forward.
Iconic football designs are reimagined through modern silhouettes and paired with luxury finishes, including touches of gold, the color of champions.
The fixation with authenticity further extends to the collection's footwear, which includes sport-style models inspired by Nike Football's four offerings in its footwear collection: Mercurial, Magista, Hypervenom and Tiempo.
"Olivier is meticulous about the details, with a passion for finding clever ways to embellish existing structures," says NikeLab Senior Footwear Innovation Design Director Nate Jobe.
This obsession with finishing manifests itself especially well in the Magista and the Mercurial. In each model, we’ve embroidered patterns into the Flyknit for the first time, which creates a completely new expression of the technology."
