Description

Sandy Liang designs from New York, with a brand built on close attention to detail and layered cultural references. Salomon has been making ski equipment in France since 1947. The two had been circling each other for a while — Liang had been putting Salomon footwear in her runway presentations since SS21 — before the collaboration produced two co-created styles.

The CMF question in a collaboration like this is not which colours are nice. It is where two brand worlds genuinely overlap, and how far one can enter the other before either stops being recognisable. My role was to understand Liang's universe well enough to work inside it, then propose colour applications that still read as Salomon.

That came out of research and a series of conversations with Sandy. The references she brought were specific and unexpected — trail running in a dress, ballet slippers — and the work was translating them into something that held on a technical upper. The XT-6 Expanse arrived in Cradle Pink with Jolly Green, cream and black accents; the RX Moc 3.0 in white and black with a sheer upper.

Neither pair reads as one brand borrowing the other's language, which was the standard the work was held to.