LOEWE x Nike Football [concept collection]
Intro
Sportswear brands and luxury brands collaborate often, but it's usually just lifestyle product. Almost never performance. A shoe you wear to dinner, not to the pitch. This was a gap I wanted to adress.
At the same time, Nike walked away from kangaroo leather boots years ago, leaving a genuine hole in their performance lineup. I wanted to make a luxury Nike leather football boot.
Loewe was founded in 1846 as a leather craft collective, and natural materials have remained central to their identity ever since. The question wrote itself: what happens when Nike's performance obsession meets Loewe's craft philosophy?
This project is the answer. A full kangaroo leather football boot and accompanying collection, designed just in time for the World Cup 2026.
Skills:
Creative Direction
AI Workflow integration
Product Design
Ideation
Sketching
Year
/
2026
Personal Project
Sportswear
The Challenge
Create a conceptual Nike x Loewe collection that:
Translates Loewe's craft design language into functional football product without compromising either brand's identity
Builds a coherent collection narrative that extends beyond the boot into apparel and accessories
Demonstrates a full design workflow from sketch to photorealistic visualization
The Concept
Nike's departure from leather was practical. Synthetic materials are lighter, more consistent, and easier to manufacture at scale. But something was lost. The touch, the break-in, the relationship between material and player that leather develops over time.
Because Loewe is a luxury brand, they has never had to accept that trade-off. Their entire design philosophy is built on the premise that natural materials carry meaning synthetics cannot replicate. Gathered leather, wrapped constructions, materials that bear the mark of craft. That language translated directly into the boot design.
The result is a genuine collision of two philosophies that happen to agree on one thing: the most advanced thing you can put on your foot in 2026 might be made the oldest way.
The collection extends that argument across apparel, exploring natural materials, layered construction, and a vintage outlook on the game.
Design Process
Research & Discovery
The research phase had two distinct directions running in parallel. For the boot, I studied Nike's leather boot archive, particularly the Tiempo lineage, looking at silhouette, stud configuration, and how performance details evolved across generations. For the Loewe influence, I focused on their material language: the gathered and wrapped constructions, the leather patch as structural punctuation, the earth-toned palette drawn from natural pigments. The goal was to find where these two visual worlds could genuinely intersect rather than simply coexist.
Sketching
With the references established, I moved into sketching to work out the boot silhouette and collection direction. The key design decision was treating the Loewe influence as structural rather than decorative. The stacked and wrapped material language informed the boot's construction details, while the Loewe anagram pattern was debossed directly into the kangaroo leather on the toebox. Minimal branding, maximum material integrity. The apparel sketches extended this logic, bringing the vintage football aesthetic of the boot into the garment silhouettes.
3D Modeling
The boot was modeled entirely from scratch. The foundation was built in Gravity Sketch, allowing me to work directly in 3D space and develop the silhouette intuitively. From there I moved into Blender for cleanup and refinement, tightening the geometry and preparing the model for texturing. Texturing was done in Substance Painter, where I developed the kangaroo leather material with the debossed Loewe pattern detail. Final rendering was completed back in Blender.
AI Visualization
For the apparel and campaign imagery, I used AI visualization tools to generate photorealistic renders from the sketches. This allowed rapid iteration across colorways, material treatments, and styling directions. The process is not automatic. Achieving output that matches a specific design intent requires precise prompting, parameter adjustment, and significant curation across many generations. The efficiency gain is in iteration speed, not in reducing the judgment required at each step.
Final Campaign
The final step was combining the Vizcom-rendered garments with the Midjourney-generated campaign environments using Nanobanana as an AI-powered composition tool. This allowed me to place my designed pieces onto models in authentic settings, seeing how the collection would actually look when worn.
Before AI, this would require either: (a) extensive Photoshop expertise and hours of manual compositing work, or (b) actual photoshoots with real garments and styling. AI democratizes this process, removing the technical skill barrier and focusing on vision and communication instead.
Outcome & Reflection
The project succeeded in making a creative argument that holds up strategically, not just aesthetically. The Loewe partnership rationale is specific and defensible: craft heritage, material philosophy, and a founding story that makes them the only credible luxury partner for a leather boot concept.
The 3D modeling workflow proved the most valuable part of the process. Building the boot from scratch in Gravity Sketch and Blender produced a level of material and structural fidelity that AI visualization alone could not have achieved, and it gave the campaign imagery a foundation of genuine craft to build from.
If I were to extend this project, I'd push further into the performance details of the boot. The current design prioritizes the visual argument. A next iteration would develop the stud configuration, last shape, and construction methods with the same rigor applied to the aesthetic decisions.
