What We Borrowed to Build HELD.
Notes on the look of the season, from EMBODI's Creative Director.
Every season, before anyone posts anything, I have to answer a smaller question first: what should this place look like right now. Not what should we say — what should the room feel like, what should the light do, what should the camera be looking at when nobody's posing for it. HELD. started as a word. It became a look because of two things I kept coming back to, from opposite ends of the world of images, and I want to explain both, because I think the reasoning matters as much as the result.
The first: brutalist architecture.
If you don't know the term, you've still seen the buildings — the Barbican in London, Boston City Hall, Marcel Breuer's concrete institutions, Le Corbusier's housing blocks. Raw concrete. No ornament. Every beam doing exactly the job it was built for and nothing else. Brutalism gets a bad reputation because, at a glance, it looks cold. What it actually is, is honest. Nothing on a brutalist building is there to be liked. It's there because the structure needed it. And because of that, a lot of these buildings are still standing, still working, fifty and sixty years after buildings that tried harder to charm people were torn down.
I kept thinking about that while we were figuring out what fall should look like, because it's the same argument we'd make about coaching. We don't dress up a correction to make it feel nicer. We don't add flourish to a program because flourish photographs well. The work here is structural — it's the same principle Bandit Running used to build their own fall collection this year, borrowing from Mies van der Rohe's idea that less really can be more, and I wanted our version of that same discipline, but built from a reference that felt like ours: a building that works quietly instead of a runway that performs.
That's where the visual language for this season comes from. Studio shots framed like architecture instead of like a gym — strong lines, a person small against the structure, flat overcast light instead of a warm golden hour. Racks and plates and the floor itself treated with the same respect you'd give a load-bearing wall, because functionally, that's what they are to the person training on them.