Compression, distortion and anatomical silhouettes shape the latest chapter of adidas Originals and Avavav, where sportswear mutates into something colder, stranger and unexpectedly intimate.
adidas Originals and Avavav return for Spring/Summer 2026 with a collection that pushes their collaboration into body manipulation, controlled awkwardness and sculptural sportswear. Shot by Lennert Madou, the campaign replaces the chaos of earlier Avavav presentations with something more clinical: elongated limbs, compressed torsos, biomechanical sneakers and poses between dance rehearsal, physiotherapy session and digital rendering.
Creative director Beate Skonare Karlsson has built Avavav’s identity through fashion performances shaped by failure, discomfort and internet virality. SS26 keeps that tension alive, but refines it into a quieter and more controlled visual system.
This season, adidas sportswear appears stretched, moulded and anatomically reconfigured. Track jackets become skintight second skins. Cut-outs trace the body like exposed musculature. Sleeves extend almost to the floor. Waistbands sit deliberately displaced. Familiar adidas staples feel digitally warped or physically compressed. The result lands somewhere between sportswear, performance costume and avatar design.
The footwear continues that dialogue between function and mutation. The Avavav Megaride evolves from the exaggerated Moonrubber silhouette introduced in previous collections into something rawer and more stripped back. Mesh openings create skeletal and anatomical effects, while the Modified Superstar returns with distorted proportions and sculpted shell toes that transform the classic sneaker into a hybrid object somewhere between ballet flat, orthopedic shoe and cartoon prop.
Accessories also play an important role in the collection’s visual language. Oversized leather sports bags appear almost inflatable in scale, while long athletic socks, sweatbands and slashed caps push the collection closer to the aesthetics of training equipment and bodily performance. Even the styling contributes to that atmosphere: retro flipped bobs, icy lighting and empty studio backgrounds make the models look less like athletes and more like synthetic characters suspended inside a simulation.
SS26 feels invested in rebuilding sportswear as a speculative body language: awkward, compressed, hyper-stylised and slightly uncanny. The performance is still there, but now it lives inside the silhouette itself.
–
Follow us on TikTok @veinmagazine
