Last weekend in Tokyo was Polo Fest, a three-day event that celebrated Polo Ralph Lauren’s 50th anniversary of launching in Japan. It gathered vintage stores from around the world, bought their wares, and then sold them for relatively fair prices in an eclectic bazaar in Shibuya. It invited a bunch of these sellers on the floor to take in the action, where all of their products were mixed together and merchandised by the various style world’s that comprise the Polo Ralph Lauren aesthetic—classic tailoring, rugged Polo Country, and the streetwear-adjacent Polo Sport.

While everyone was marveling at the sheer scale of the sales floor, legendary vintage purveyor Brian Procell and his partner Jessica Gonsalves were relaying a story about something that had recently happened at their New York City shop while they were traveling. Ye had stopped in a few weeks before playing in Jakarta, Indonesia. And the very thing he left the shop with? A few pieces from Polo Ralph Lauren.

It was almost too perfect. No matter who you are, if you’re into clothes, for some reason you always find a way back to Ralph Lauren. Not only did a kid from The Bronx create the world’s first true lifestyle brand, nearly 60 years later, so many people are still trying to emulate his formula—but the sauce still remains with him.

In a world where conventions are almost a death knell for culture, Polo Fest subverted the very things that can make things like ComplexCon feel corny and overly commercial. There was a de-emphasis on exclusive product—although there was plenty of that—and even shopping itself. The vintage bazaar was certainly an attraction, but it was preceded by thoughtful exhibits featuring iconic Polo collections and outfits that have become a big part of pop culture (like Diane Keaton’s outfit from Annie Hall).

This was reinforced by the various panels and speaker series that complemented the vintage bazaar and exclusive merch. Curated by author W. David. Marx and former Esquire editor-in-chief Jay Fielden, these paid homage to different aspects of Polo culture: from collecting, its effect on style, and its importance in the zeitgeist.

They brought out some heavy hitters for the panels too, including Lo-Life founder Thirstin Howl III and Tom Gould, stylist and author of Black Ivy: A Revolt In Style Jason Jules, Gauthier Borsarello of L’Etiquette, Drew Heifetz of F As In Frank, supermodel and iconic face of Polo Sport Tyson Beckford, and even Andre 3000 himself.

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The latest drop from HIDDEN.PPF is available now. The second collection of the Fall 2026 season includes a fresh assortment of graphic tees, sweats, shorts, workwear pants, accessories, and several heavier-duty cut-and-sew pieces.

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Designer Willy Chavarria is known for his collections that mix social commentary with boundary-pushing sportswear. In recent years, he’s been a regular collaborator with adidas, using the Three Stripes as a platform to advocate for social justice, immigration reform, and nonprofit organizations like the ACLU.

But he remains in his bag as a designer, alwa…

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Halloween has always been a good excuse to make something a little strange. This year, we put together a small capsule built around the things we associate with it: old video games, cartoons, spiderwebs, and the kind of graphics you might find on a T-shirt you kept from childhood.

The collection includes a Castlevania inspired tee, a red zip hoodie with 100,000 stitches of embroidery, a moonlit graveyard hoodie, and a few other pieces that take familiar HIDDEN graphics somewhere darker.

All orders in the U.S. will arrive before Halloween. The store closes tomorrow, October 5, at midnight.

Happy Halloween.

Shop the collection at HIDDENPPF.com⁠

Today is Virgil Abloh’s birthday, he would have turned 46. Virgil grew up in Rockford, Illinois, the son of Ghanaian immigrants. He studied civil engineering and then architecture, though neither discipline contained everything he wanted to do or restricted him from doing more. In Chicago, his design work reached a screen printing shop called Custom Kings. Through the people there, he met Don C and eventually began working with Kanye West.

West hired Virgil in 2007, years before anyone knew his name. In 2009, the two went to Rome to intern at Fendi. Virgil later became creative director of DONDA, West’s creative company, where the work extended well beyond album covers. A record could require artwork, a stage, a film, merchandise and an entire visual world. Virgil helped move ideas between those forms, working alongside a group of designers whose contributions are easy to lose when the finished project is reduced to a single famous name.

On Watch the Throne, he worked with West and stage designer Es Devlin as the tour’s visual language took shape. He and Riccardo Tisci were nominated for a Grammy for the album’s packaging. He was credited as creative director on G.O.O.D. Music’s Cruel Summer and worked on the art direction of Yeezus. DONDA’s output also reached records by artists including 2 Chainz, Pusha T and Lil Wayne. The role gave Virgil a way to work across music and design at a scale few young designers could have imagined. It also put him among people who were learning to treat an album as more than something you listened to.

I first knowingly encountered Virgil’s career through Pyrex Vision. The clothes combined things that weren’t supposed to sit so easily together: Champion sportswear, Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ, Michael Jordan’s 23 and the visual language of rap. Some of the pieces were made by printing over existing garments. That fact generated plenty of criticism, but it was also part of what made Pyrex so interesting to me. Virgil had taken materials I recognized and changed their meaning.

At the time, I was studying BTEC art in England. At 16, I’d been able to leave my other subjects behind and spend my school days making things, which felt like an extraordinary privilege. My classmate Ding Yun Zhang, who has since become a designer himself, and I were obsessed with A$AP Rocky. We wore Air Force 1 Mids and even made alligator leather vests inspired by something we’d seen him wear. Pyrex felt like the most exciting thing in that world.

I couldn’t work out how to buy it, and even if I had, I couldn’t afford it. What I could buy was a Champion hoodie. I printed Caravaggio on the front and PYREX 23 on the back. Then I made another. I saw what the real hoodies were selling for on eBay and made a few more.

I was faking Virgil’s work and selling it. It would be dishonest to dress that up as something else. But the experience taught me a lot about making a product and selling it. Those hoodies gave me money I had never had before, and I began using it to go places. I took a trip to Amsterdam that I barely remember. After school, I moved to London. I made T-shirts and sold them, met people, studied fashion at university and eventually moved to New York. I can’t claim that any of this was Virgil’s intention. I can say that Pyrex was where the chain began for me.

By then, Virgil had moved on from Pyrex. He launched Off-White in 2013 and built a brand whose quotation marks, diagonal stripes and industrial details became recognizable far beyond fashion. In 2017, he worked with Nike on “The Ten,” taking familiar shoes apart and letting people see their construction. The following year, he became the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. His first show took place on a rainbow runway in Paris.

There was an openness to the way he moved between these projects. Music, clothing, furniture, architecture and art all seemed to belong to the same conversation. His career made the path between them visible to people who had been told, or had simply assumed, that they needed to choose one thing and stay there.

When I moved to New York, I was broke again. A friend working at the Off White store helped me buy pairs of the Off White Nike collaboration without waiting in line. I sold them at Round Two and spent the money getting to know the city: seeing things, eating well when I could, meeting people. It wasn’t a noble use of a valuable pair of shoes. It was what I needed at that point in my life.

In late 2018 when I started Hidden, I was posting about Virgil often. Then one day, very early in the pages history, he followed me back. I couldn’t sleep. Over time his co sign changed the way people saw my page. Sometimes he sent me kind messages. We talked about Trilly & Truly, the project he had made with Lupe Fiasco, which I had loved long before we spoke. He sent me a Louis Vuitton box with shoelaces inside. I still don’t know why he chose to send it, but I remember how happy I was to receive it.

Then suddenly, he died, at 41. It’s one of 2 days I’ve taken off from posting ever, I had lost a hero. Fashion has felt a little duller to me since. I miss the possibility of seeing what he might do next, seeing his stories, listening to his talks and the generosity he showed me in the brief moments we spoke.

Looking back, I can see how much of his influence reached me before I ever even knew it. It came through a garment I couldn’t buy, an image I printed badly, money earned and spent, the most valuable co sign of my career and the confidence to leave home and keep making things. I suspect many people have their own version of that sequence. Today, on his birthday, I wanted to tell mine.

In 2004, Pharrell Williams, Nigo and Reebok introduced the first Ice Cream sneakers. The original boutique shoe was simple in shape, almost like a Stan Smith, but its surfaces belonged to another universe. Diamonds and dollar signs covered one version. Others carried beepers, money rolls and for the ladies; teddy bears.

The Colette pairs remain, to me, the best Ice Cream sneakers ever made. There were samples and customs that lived mostly in forum photographs, including a pair decorated with beer cans. At the time, even seeing one felt like finding a piece of a brighter world that had escaped into the real one.

That was the appeal of Ice Cream. The shoes were only one part of an environment Pharrell and Nigo had built out of skate videos, music, Japanese streetwear, expensive materials and comical artwork rendered with absolute conviction. A beeper could be a luxury print. A cartoon ice cream cone could become a skull and crossbones. The humor did not make the project any less serious as design.

The Board Flip came later, followed by the Board Flip 2. These were wider skate shoes made for a wider audience than the boutique originals. Jimmy Gorecki, who rode for the Ice Cream team, has recalled preferring the first slim shoe for skating and finding the Board Flip difficult to skate in. The reception was uneven in stores, too. I remember pairs sitting on clearance racks. Yet the people who loved them really loved them.

For years, the Board Flip seemed to belong to that specific moment in the mid 2000s. Then Ice Cream and Reebok brought it back at ComplexCon in Las Vegas in 2025, with Don Toliver helping to champion the return. A limited Watermelon release led to his Banana Split version, and the shoe subsequently returned in a wider release. Don’s contribution was less a radical redesign than an argument that the original was worth seeing again. I agreed. Among all the new sneakers at ComplexCon, it was the one that stayed with me.

Now there are two Beer Board Flips: one silver, the other gold. Their metallic uppers evoke Japanese beer cans, with a red stripe cutting across the side. At the heel, the old cones and bones emblem has been remade as a pint of beer fusion that reminds me of Ditto. The silver pair is reported to be limited to 500 numbered pairs for ComplexCon Los Angeles on October 3 and 4. The gold pair is said to number just 25, with 19 allocated to a raffle there. The numbering inside the tongue is important here, a callback to the original boutique which were numbered out of varying amounts.

The beer motif feels like a strange callback to that custom pair I used to see on forums. Whether it was an intentional reference or a coincidence, it belongs to the same habit of taking an ordinary object and pushing it into Ice Cream’s cartoon logic. A shoe this shiny, with a beer at the heel, and Ice Cream on the tongue, will confuse anyone who has no history with the brand. That is a good sign.

Ice Cream sneakers was what first drew me into fashion (drop it like it’s hot video). I do not want them to be discreet or universally wearable. I like it as an object. The silver and gold are excessive, the beer cone is ridiculous, and the entire thing makes perfect sense. I also think it’s great that these were debuted by Dennis (@sneakerdenn) he is the most authentic sneaker curator out there currently.

Some of the most familiar images in streetwear have an unfamiliar author. The Ape Head became inseparable from BAPE; the astronaut gave Billionaire Boys Club a symbol of its own. Both were drawn by an artist whose work travelled far beyond his name.

His name is Sk8thing, also known as Shinichiro Nakamura. He designed BAPE’s Ape Head, worked on the visual…

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The easiest way to look at them is as evidence of success. They are rare, desirable and, collectively, worth an extraordinary amount of money. They represent fifteen years of Kith, a company that grew from two small spaces in New York into an international retail and lifestyle business. They show what it looks like when a person reaches the top of his field.

But that is not what Ronnie Fieg sees.

For Fieg, the shoes are a calendar. One pair returns him to the birth of his daughter. Another recalls his engagement. Others contain periods when the company was growing, when his personal life was changing, when things were working and when they were not. The archive is not simply a catalogue of product. It is a record of time measured in materials, colors and soles.

This is what makes the exhibition more interesting than a room filled with valuable sneakers. It reveals the part of success that is easiest to overlook once the result appears inevitable: the repetition required to produce it.

Fieg began working at David Z, the New York footwear chain owned by his uncle David Zaken, when he was 13. He started in the stockroom and spent roughly fifteen years learning the business from the floor upward. He learned how customers moved through a store, what they picked up, what they left behind and which small changes could make an overlooked shoe suddenly feel necessary. Long before Kith existed, he was developing a retailer’s eye: less concerned with fashion as an abstract system than with what made a person want to put something on.

His first major breakthrough arrived through ASICS. In 2007, while still at David Z, Fieg worked on a limited release of the Gel Lyte III, a model with little of the cultural force then possessed by Nike, Jordan or Adidas. That disadvantage became an opportunity. The project helped show that a collaborator could create demand not merely by attaching his name to an established object, but by finding value in a silhouette the market had neglected. Color, material, scarcity and context could change the way a shoe was seen.

It was an early lesson in what would become the Kith method: identify an object with dormant emotional value, refine it with obsessive specificity and return it to the public with a story strong enough to alter its position in culture.

Sam Ben Avraham saw the potential in Fieg. Ben Avraham, the founder of Atrium and later the influential trade shows Project and Liberty Fairs, had built his career by understanding how brands, buyers and stores moved together. In 2011, he partnered with Fieg to launch Kith. The first locations were modest and physically connected to Atrium’s stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Kith did not arrive looking like an empire. It occupied a small amount of space and depended on the credibility Fieg had accumulated one release and one relationship at a time.

Founders are often described as visionaries after their vision has become visible to everybody else. The more consequential act belongs to the person who sees it earlier. If you had met Fieg before Kith, you might have encountered a relentless footwear buyer with unusual taste and a growing following. Ben Avraham saw the seed of a much larger business.

Kith opened as a footwear destination, but one of its first important proprietary products was not a shoe. It was the Mercer pant, a pair of cotton twill pants cut with a ribbed cuff above the ankle. The idea now appears almost self evident. At the time, it answered an immediate problem for sneaker collectors: ordinary pants covered the product they cared about most. The Mercer allowed the entire shoe to remain visible.

That small adjustment contains much of Fieg’s business philosophy. The pant did not ask the customer to adopt a new identity. It paid close attention to the identity he already had. Kith understood that sneaker culture was not only about acquiring shoes. It was about arranging the rest of one’s life around them: how they were worn, photographed, stored, discussed and displayed.

The Mercer pant became a first domino. Apparel gave Kith a language beyond footwear. Stores became environments rather than points of sale. Collaborations expanded from sneaker companies to brands as varied as Coca Cola, BMW, Versace and Giorgio Armani. Kith Treats transformed the cereal rituals of Fieg’s childhood into another part of the company’s world. Daniel Arsham and Snarkitecture helped give its stores a consistent architectural vocabulary. Each extension risked becoming a novelty, but together they established Kith as something broader than a streetwear label or sneaker boutique.

This evolution belonged to a particular moment in New York. The city’s sneaker shops had once functioned as local institutions, places where knowledge moved by conversation and access depended on being present. The internet widened the audience. Social media accelerated it. The drop turned shopping into an event, and collaborations allowed brands to borrow one another’s histories. A generation of New York founders understood that the store itself could become media.

Virgil Abloh grasped this from another direction. Through Off White and later Louis Vuitton, he treated the distance between streetwear, art, music, architecture and luxury as a space to work inside rather than a boundary to respect. His rise felt expansive and almost philosophical. He made possibility part of the product. Teddy Santis, the founder of Aimé Leon Dore, built a quieter but equally complete world from Queens memories, Greek heritage, basketball, hip hop and an exact image of New York adulthood. Kith collaborated with Aimé Leon Dore in 2017, before Santis’s New Balance work helped turn that brand into one of the defining forces in contemporary menswear.

All three men understood that a successful modern brand must offer more than merchandise. It must create an atmosphere in which the merchandise makes sense. Yet their mythologies are different. Abloh’s was built around access and the permission to cross disciplines. Santis’s is rooted in restraint, memory and a private visual language. Fieg’s is perhaps the most plainly commercial of the three, and that word should not be mistaken for an insult. His great subject is the product itself and the endless labor of making, presenting and selling it better.

Kith’s rise can appear frictionless in retrospect. A coveted release sells out. A larger store opens. A famous partner calls. Another city follows. Then comes a restaurant, a car, a runway show, a private club and a collaboration with a luxury house that once would have seemed impossibly distant from a sneaker shop. But businesses do not experience their own growth as a retrospective. They are built in real time, when the outcome of each decision is unknown and the founder must proceed without the reassurance supplied by the finished story.

This is where the 1,849 pairs become useful. Spread across fifteen years, they amount to more than 120 archived shoes annually, well over two for every week Kith has existed. The collection includes samples, prototypes and unreleased pairs, so this is not a count of commercial launches. It is something more revealing: a rough physical measure of the decisions that had to be made. Every pair contains rounds of color, material, shape, negotiation, revision, manufacturing, photography, allocation and release. Every finished object sits on top of work that disappeared.

The archive also complicates the popular image of creativity as a sequence of inspired moments. Inspiration matters, but volume matters too. Taste becomes more precise through use. Judgment strengthens through consequence. A founder learns which instinct to trust because he has watched hundreds of earlier instincts succeed or fail.

We tend to romanticize the beginning of a company and glorify its arrival. The middle is less cinematic. It consists of repetition, payroll, delayed shipments, damaged relationships, weak seasons, personal crises and the requirement to make another decision the following morning. Persistence is not simply working hard while things are going well. It is continuing through the periods when the work has stopped confirming your belief in yourself.

Fieg’s story does not carry the whimsical openness many people found in Abloh, nor the cultivated mythology that surrounds Nigo. Its power is more legible. You can see the mechanism.

Post every day and, slowly, an audience may form. Work out every day and the body changes. Paint a picture every day and a style begins to emerge. Make shoes, study their reception, learn from the result and make the next pair. None of these equations guarantees success. The world is not that fair. Talent, timing, capital, relationships and luck all intervene. But without the work, luck has very little to discover.

Looking across Fieg’s archive, there are surely shoes tied to moments when the business appeared vulnerable, when his personal life felt unsteady or when the scale of what he had built became difficult to carry. Those memories are invisible to the visitor. The shoes remain aligned, each one completed, each one followed by another.

That is what I saw in Brooklyn. Not simply a beautiful palette, an enviable collection or the revenue of a global company made physical. I saw proof of an unwavering drive. I saw a man mastering his craft through repetition and then continuing after mastery had already been recognized.

There is a time for every sole: a pair for the beginning, a pair for the breakthrough, a pair for grief, a pair for love, a pair for the day it nearly failed and a pair for the morning work began again. Ronnie Fieg made enough of them to fill a room. Taken together, they demand respect. They wholeheartedly have mine.

I grew up on Sark, an island three miles long and one and a half miles wide, with a population of only a few hundred people and no cars. It is a beautiful place, but it is also the kind of place where the limits of geography are impossible to ignore. If you were interested in something no one around you cared about, there was no obvious place to take that interest. But, there was the internet.

From its beginning, the internet offered a simple but radical proposition: the people near you did not have to be the people most like you. Whether or not anyone in your town, city, island or mountain understood what you were drawn to, somebody online probably did. You only had to find them.

In the early 2000s, that search often ended on a forum. NikeTalk, founded in 1999, began with sneakers but expanded into music, sports, video games and everything orbiting them. Superfuture and Styleforum turned clothing into a field of close study. On Hypebeast’s forums and BapeTalk, users traded release information, authentication advice, fit pictures and photographs from shops most of them would never visit. These were not polished publications. They were messy, obsessive and alive.

Their great advantage was that almost nobody arrived as a fully formed public person. You entered under a username. Your avatar, post count and knowledge established who you were. A teenager far from New York, London or Tokyo could know more about a particular Japanese label than someone working in fashion. If the information was useful, it traveled. Geography and conventional credentials briefly mattered less than curiosity.

The forums did more than tell people what to buy. They taught people how to see. A thread about a BAPE shark hoodie could become a lesson in Japanese retail, counterfeit production, colorways and scarcity. A discussion about raw denim could run for hundreds of pages as strangers documented how fabric changed through daily wear. The level of attention could be excessive, but excess was part of the education. Taste was formed collectively, one argument and image upload at a time.

Blogs gave that collective knowledge an editorial shape. Hypebeast began in 2005 as Kevin Ma’s sneaker blog, created because the information he wanted was scattered and difficult to find. Highsnobiety started the same year. In music, NahRight, 2DopeBoyz, The Fader, OnSmash, MissInfo and later Hypetrak created a distribution network that existed outside radio and print. They posted songs, mixtapes, videos and fragments of news at internet speed, allowing artists to build an audience before older institutions decided whether they mattered.

For a generation of listeners, the blog roll was a map of culture. One link led to another. Download folders became personal archives. A producer credit, a photograph or an obscure sample could send someone down a path that lasted for years. These sites did not simply report on a scene after it had formed. They helped form it.

They also changed the role of the fan. On a forum, a fan could become a trusted source. With a blog, that person could become an editor. With enough consistency, the editor could become an institution. The distance between audience and authority narrowed.

The social platforms that followed made publishing easier and discovery faster, but they reorganized this culture. Tumblr turned the blog into an endless visual stream. Instagram compressed it further: one account, one grid, one sensibility. The long forum thread and the crowded blog roll gave way to the archive page.

The phrase “archive page” can be misleading. It suggests passive storage, as if these accounts simply retrieve old images and place them back into circulation. The better pages do something more deliberate. They connect fashion, music, film, art, design, sport, nature and internet ephemera until the relationship between those subjects becomes its own point of view. The sequence is the argument.

When I began HIDDEN.NY, I was drawing from a personal archive of tens of thousands of images I had collected over many years. I placed rare sneakers beside animation stills, old photographs of musicians, industrial design, animals, architecture and jokes. Each post existed on its own, but together they created a world that reflected the way I saw culture. Without showing my face, the page became a complete expression of my interests.

I never thought of HIDDEN as a traditional archive. The intention was not simply to recover old images and place them back into circulation. It was about connecting things that might initially appear unrelated and allowing those connections to form a distinct point of view. The sequence became the argument. Over time, people could recognize a HIDDEN post before seeing the username.

The model spread and developed in different directions. Aplasticplant built an optimistic community from contemporary culture, nostalgia and personal inspiration, eventually extending the page into clothing, collaborations and physical gatherings. Its founder has spoken about HIDDEN.NY and LilJupiter as early influences, and about anonymity as a way of keeping the project from becoming centered on him. Ihategum developed another distinct language from fashion, film, Japanese culture, old rap footage, games and the overlooked images that make up a generation’s visual memory.

These pages naturally overlap, just as the old forums and blogs did, but the best of them remain recognizable before you see the username. That recognition is important. An anonymous page is not without identity. It simply relocates identity from the face to the work.

This runs against the dominant logic of contemporary social media, which asks creators to make themselves the product. Show your face. Tell your story. Turn daily life into content. Build trust through constant access. Under that system, even a private moment can begin to feel like unused material.

Anonymity offers another path. A person can make a complete portfolio of their interests without making a performance of their life. They can be judged first by the connections they make, the things they notice and the consistency of their choices. For someone who does not live in a cultural capital, does not know the right people or does not naturally want attention, that freedom can be life-changing.

Behind a username, you can begin before you feel qualified. You can experiment without asking your hometown to understand. You can be serious about something before there is evidence that taking it seriously will lead anywhere. The page becomes a provisional room in which a sensibility can develop.

This does not mean anonymity removes the self. In many cases it reveals it more clearly. A face tells an audience who is speaking; an archive shows what the speaker has spent years noticing. Every selection leaves a trace. Over time, the repetitions become biography: a particular era of rap, a recurring shade of green, an affection for a film still or an engineered object, a belief that a cartoon and a runway collection can belong in the same conversation.

The anonymous curator may appear absent, but is present everywhere.

There is also a useful equality to the format. When a page is not organized around a visible individual, followers can more easily project themselves into it. The account becomes a meeting place instead of a stage. People arrive for an image, stay for a sensibility and eventually recognize one another in the comments. A community forms around shared attention.

The opportunity carries responsibilities. Anonymity can protect honesty, but it can also shield carelessness. Archive pages work with other people’s photographs, research and ideas; credit cannot be optional. A hidden identity should not mean hidden standards. As these pages become businesses, publishers and brands, their obligations become greater, not smaller. The freedom to speak without showing your face still requires accuracy, attribution and accountability.

Nor is the older internet worth romanticizing completely. Forums could be hostile and exclusionary. Knowledge was often guarded as a test of belonging. The same usernames that allowed shy or isolated people to speak freely also allowed others to behave without consequence. Anonymity is a tool, not a moral quality. It can remove status and ego, or it can remove restraint.

What matters is what the freedom is used to build.

The lineage from forums to blogs to archive pages is not perfectly clean, but the central impulse has survived each technological shift. People gather around an interest. A few of them begin organizing what the group knows. Their usernames acquire meaning. Their selections shape taste. Eventually, institutions follow the audience they have assembled. Hypebeast and Highsnobiety grew from blogs into global media and retail businesses. Today’s archive pages have become clothing labels, creative studios, publishers and collaborators in their own right.

This is sometimes described as the democratization of media, a phrase so familiar that it has lost some of its force. What it means in practice is that a person can start with no office, no masthead, no press credentials and no public identity, only a point of view maintained with enough care that other people begin to trust it.

That trust is the real asset. Followers do not return only for information. They return because somebody has filtered the abundance of the internet into a world that feels coherent. In an era when almost everything is available and almost nothing is manageable, selection has become a creative act.

The internet once promised that anyone could be anyone. The more meaningful opportunity may be that you can become something before anyone knows who you are.

Anonymity gives an idea time to grow larger than the person behind it. It lets people separated by geography recognize one another through taste. It permits the quiet accumulation of work until a username becomes a body of knowledge, then a community, then a door.

You do not have to show your face to show who you are.

The first drop from the HIDDEN fall collection is available now. See the lookbook featuring skater Antwuan Dixon here.

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A$AP Rocky started this year with a bang, shortly after releasing Don’t Be Dumb, his fourth studio album, he proceeded to dominate the zeitgeist and the runways in more ways than one. In addition to high-profile ambassador gigs for capital “F” fashion houses like Bottega Veneta and Chanel (where former Bottega designer Matthieu Blazy has since taken the reins and reinvigorated the French couturier), Rocky also debuted the third collection for his burgeoning AWGE fashion line.

Showing the collection at New York Fashion Week in February 2026, the looks featured plenty of collaborative gear from Puma, with whom Rocky has had a creative partnership with since October 2023. Originally starting as the creative director of its long-running Formula 1 program—where he reinvented silhouettes like the Speedcat and Mostro—the legendary mind-meld has since revved up into something much bigger.

And while there were plenty of automotive-inspired looks and freakboulish footwear on display, one of the best looks of the collection channeled multiple eras of uncanny aura. Part 2000s-era Pharrell, with hints of the bright skater style pioneered by Rocky’s close friend Tyler, The Creator, a look pairing a Superman-blue zip hoodie with exaggerated cargos was finished with a low-key pair of sneakers: the humble Puma Suede.

But it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Suede release, rather, one that had gone through the nuances of a AWGE vibe transplant. While Rocky himself has never skated, there’s always been a mutual appreciation between the self-policing culture of very opinionated skaters and the very tasteful Harlem artist. His earlier songs, many of which created surreal, haunting soundscapes with producer Clams Casino, ended up in the soundtrack of multiple skate videos.

Turns out that many of his tracks are the perfect background for so many legendary parts. Can you imagine a better synergy than seeing Chewy Cannon body some absolutely clean lines in the Palace Skateboards “Tres Trill” video while A$AP Rocky’s aptly-named, atmospheric “Palace” is on full blast? Truly, how real is this?

Likewise, seeing the entirety of the DGK team get introduced on “Blood Money” to the tune of “1 Train” really evokes the spirit of some real New York shit, channeling the gritty street skating the city is known for developing while treating viewers to an insane edit. Woogie’s part starting right during Kendrick Lamar’s verse is a thing of beauty.

Despite his status as a non-skater, there have been plenty of times that Rocky has let his admiration for skate culture shine through. In the past he’s done projects with iconic skaters, and taken inspiration from different aesthetic eras of skate style for his own outfits and his burgeoning AWGE fashion line. But the latest iteration comes in the form of the Puma Suede ‘94, a year synonymous with the peak of Mad Dog-swilling, Marlboro Red-smoking, schwag joint-rolling dirtbag skaters.

Over on Lafayette Street, a little brand called Supreme was just opening its doors before SoHo was a shopping mall, and filmmaker Larry Clark was shooting teenagers like Chloe Sevigny and Leo Fitzpatrick to make seminal coming-of-age flick Kids.

The Puma Suede ‘94 reflects that attitude and then some. The tongue features a raw edge and padding for extra reinforcement, while the OG slimmer tooling shape, longer toe vamp, and era-accurate logos keep it as true to the original as ever. But of course, it wouldn’t be an AWGE shoe without the nuanced nods like the gold dubrae (a nod to Harlem hip-hop’s tendency for bling), and the slightly thicker laces that also nod to ‘80s style.

All of these references aren’t lost on A$AP Rocky, in fact, they’re intentional. It’s a way for him to put wha he sees as one of New York City’s signature sneaker back in the forefront.

Taking something as iconic as a Suede is big, it’s a shoe with big connotations in places like Harlem. Was it a sneaker you were familiar with growing up?

A$AP Rocky: I got my first pair of Puma Suedes in 2009, but of course was always aware of Puma. I think they were biggest in the ‘80s—I was born late ‘80s—but it’s always been an iconic shoe.

You grew up in uptown New York, where Harlem and The Bronx shaped modern sneaker culture. What’s Puma’s place been in that conversation?

Puma has always been heavy in NYC culture. There’s the Puma Suede and its affiliation with Walt Fraizer, who’s a Knicks legend.

In some ways skating and sneakers are places where culture has melted together and united seemingly different communities, how have you seen the barriers between different worlds continue to break down?

Skateboarding has always been something that lived in counterculture. And all of these different cultures connect there through sneakers. From record store folks, skateboard folks, street folks, basketball folks, musicians, and rappers—we all connect through sneaker culture.

What’s it like working with Puma as a partner? What would be the dream shoe to make?

They’re great. They always entertain my wild ideas. We do everything from skateboarding, to racing, and everything in between.

To take things a bit further, on Sunday July 12 HIDDEN will be giving out a limited number of pairs of the Puma x A$AP Rocky Suede ‘94.

Channeling the vibe of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and its “Secret Tape” scavenger hunt, stay tuned to IG stories to see where a few pairs will be dropped, and get the chance to be on the early flow team ahead of the sneaker’s release on July 16.

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In January 1986, Michael Green published the book Zen & The Art of the Macintosh: Discoveries on the Path to Computer Enlightenment. It has since become a cult classic, and copies of the rare tome can still fetch a hefty price.

The book itself was entirely created on the MacPaint program, an early precursor and very rudimentary digital art tool that predates its PC counterpart, Microsoft Paint, by a year. Even more impressive, the increasingly complex graphics and layout, which has the aesthetic of evolved ASCII art, was turned into a book via printing through a Macintosh LaserWriter .

The book was further honored with the “Desktop Publisher of the Year” award in the January 1987 issue of MacUser magazine. Who called it an “unusual book” but also a “tour de force of MacPaint technique.” The award was presented to Green by none other than Steve Jobs himself.

Its pages juxtapose forward-thinking graphic design with inspiring notions about creativity and layouts that toe the line between an edgy, independent zine and the kind of avant-garde design aesthetics favored by tasteful types today.

Green’s seminal tome turns 40 this year, and it has inspired the story behind the Tokyo pop-up between HIDDEN and ASICS. Titled “Zen and the Art of Movement,” the shop takes place this weekend, May 23-24, from 12 noon until 7 p.m. each day.

The shop is located in the SO1 venue in Shibuya, and not only features ultra-exclusive items, but an interactive exhibit featuring various Macintosh items, including a 1986 copy of Zen & The Art of the Macintosh, as well as the MacUser magazine award the book won.

What’s more, HIDDEN is republishing a small run of the rare book, allowing attendees to bring home the cult classic and appreciate it themselves. The release coincides with the equally limited HIDDEN x ASICS GEL-KINETIC™ 2.0, inspired by the original Macintosh computer used by Michael Green while creating Zen & The Art of the Macintosh.

Limited to 200 pairs, the predominantly neutral color palette pulls from the soft grays, aged ivories, and subtle brown tones synonymous with early Macintosh hardware, informing the upper’s mesh, overlays, sole, and custom packaging.

Other key details on the shoe like the graphic insoles and knowing visual nods to both ASICS and Michael Green’s revolutionary computer art inform the uniform and aesthetic of the pop-up, with plenty more easter eggs to discover in-person, should you be in Tokyo.

HIDDEN x ASICS “Zen and the Art of Movement” Tokyo Pop-Up
May 23–24
12:00–19:00
SO1 Gallery
6-14-15 Jingumae, Shibuya
Tokyo 150-0001, Japan

The collaborative capsule collection between A Bathing Ape and HIDDEN is available now. Mixing up the pioneering Japanese-born streetwear label’s greatest hits with some deep cuts for the real heads, it’s a celebration of the brand’s history and HIDDEN’s longtime appreciation for the label’s rich lore.

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When NIGO first started teasing his Nike collaboration a few years ago on the runways of his KENZO shows, heads immediately assumed that he’d basically be making what BAPE should have been all along—legit Nike Air Force 1s done up in candy-colored patent leather.

And while we did get the latter in the form of NIGO’s first Air Force 3, a silhouette he revisited time and again in a multi-chapter sneaker story, the reactions to the shoe were mixed. It wasn’t what fans wanted, but rather what NIGO wanted to put out there. Turns out some things are truly worth the wait.

This weekend marks the release of the LO 2 Air Force 1, a patent leather blue and white sneaker that coincides with the opening of NIGO’s latest exhibit in London. True to his “real heads know” collector’s mindset, it’s not just any Air Force 1. He specifically uses the narrower 2001 silhouette, going as far as changing up the shoebox to one indicative of the era.

The narrower toebox and sleeker shape reflects a connoisseur’s eye for sneakers—if the Air Force 3 was NIGO putting people onto a silhouette he felt was underrated, his resurrection of the OG-approved “ideal” AF1 model reinforces his status as your favorite collector’s favorite collector. And it almost makes the anticipation of the long-awaited release worth it.

Coincidentally, it also marks another historic collaboration—one between HIDDEN and BAPE, the brand NIGO famously founded and then sold to IT Group in 2013. It’s no secret that the label and NIGO have been hugely influential to the entire HIDDEN ethos, both from an aesthetic perspective to the HIDDEN.NY avatar quite literally being NOWHERE, the pioneering Ura-Harajuku shop co-founded by NIGO and Jun Takahashi.

Known as the birthplace of both UNDERCOVER and BAPE, its legacy continues to be felt in the eminently shoppable backstreets of Harajuku and Shibuya, where NOWHERE’s successors range from Supreme to multi-brand shop Studious, and of course NIGO’s latest label, HUMAN MADE.

The meeting of the minds between BAPE and HIDDEN symbolizes a passing of the torch of sorts. Taking the label’s signature camo and graphics and infusing HIDDEN’s signature green motif, even the iconic BAPEsta sneaker is reimagined with minimal colored uppers accented with 3M details, and a more retro shape akin to NIGO’s own beloved 2001 Air Force 1s.

The fact that both sneakers are releasing within days of each other is a coincidence that could only be written by fate.

The legacy of Jun Takahashi and NIGO’s “Last Orgy 2” lives on in the platform that HIDDEN has become. The Asayan magazine article was a way for the two tastemakers to put curious Japanese youth onto emerging movements, new trends, up-and-coming brands, and the latest and greatest in the burgeoning worlds of sneakers and streetwear.

Now with over a million followers, it’s safe to say HIDDEN has become a modern version of that, making curation and bringing subculture to the forefront of pop culture a modern discipline. The dedication to consistent posting and desire to dominate the algorithm in a very honed way is a testament to just how locked in the account is. It has built a following and developed a unique aesthetic, growing its community without sacricificing its identity.

And really, that’s what is monumental about these dovetailing sneakers. It’s an unintentional pairing that makes too much sense. There is definitely a certain crossover of heads raised by the internet that will feel extremely salty if they happen to miss out on both releases.

At least for the HIDDEN x BAPE release, paid members can get a better chance at early access and the exclusive sneakers that will surely sell out. But if you wanted more proof at how cyclical trends are… just ask yourself when was the last time you got this excited for an Air Force 1?

There’s a certain class of sneaker collector who insists on keeping the boxes. As the culture around collecting them has evolved, some parts of the mythology still ring true. The image of a Nike shoebox full of money remains embedded in the collective digital consciousness of people who grew up reading blogs and forums like NikeTalk.

The notion of keeping your money secure in an orange-tinged box rather than the confines of an unseen bank account remains a hood staple. Meanwhile, the proliferation of Container Store drop-front shoeboxes signifies the rise of a new kind of sneakerhead.

It’s a more casual consumer that doesn’t have that NIGO-like obsession and rapid recall of what box holds which shoe, or the in-house archivist mindset to think to put a picture as a means of organizing a massive collection , realizing that the box is in fact as important as the product in it. Why else would people pay so much attention to tissue paper or document the ways in which Nike shoebox color schemes have evolved?

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Towards the mid-1980s and early-1990s, Japanese manga and anime adopted a cleaner, more minimal look. Countless illustrations portrayed women in a more fashion-forward way, coquettish but somewhere between kawaii and demure.

Looking back now, it’s ripe for reinterpretation by a big fashion house for a campaign, or at least a modern homage by an artist. Like many things reinterpreted and given an elevated twist by the Japanese, when it comes to one artist who seems to be source code, it points to a person who was inspired by the American pop art movement of the 1960s.

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There’s a beauty in executing something relatively simple in a novel way. It’s been a guiding ethos from influential designers like Dieter Rams, and reflected in modern icons of design like Apple, Braun, and Eames. It’s no secret that it’s also been a big inspiration for the HIDDEN design language.

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Perfecting the existing isn’t about reinventing the whee…

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It’s known that Yohji Yamamoto has a bit of a thing for cars. In the past he’s dabbled in supercar collabs, and in a well-loved short film he’s waxed nostalgic about his daily driver, comparing his own car to a girlfriend where the relationship is equal parts about appreciating what you have and developing a real bond that matures over time.

Now, Yamamoto’s Y-3 is taking that enthusiasm to the grid with a partnership with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team. The accompanying campaign features drivers George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, but also includes a surprise appearance from F1 legend Toto Wolff, the team’s CEO. The visuals convey the dynamic partnership in way that reflects what make F1 beautiful—the striking moments of calm during the constant chaos of a Grand Prix.

The collection brings back a striking Wolf motif, inspired by Japanese mythology and originally from adidas’ F50 Tunit cleats from 2006. Representing a mythical guardian in the animal kingdom who symbolizes speed, instinct, and bravery, here it also doubles as a sly nod to the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS drivers and the man leading them.

Sticking to Yamamoto’s signature black-and-white color palette, the capsule collection also features a print inspired by smoke billowing from the team’s race cars and other graphic iterations of the wolf, toeing the line between racing gear, football kits, and the unique relationship between Yamamoto and adidas. Further, the collection will be on full display on the grid when it gets worn at the legendary Suzuka circuit during the Japanese Grand Prix later this month.

Wolff recently discussed the partnership in an interview with GQ, speaking to the ways in which the German sportswear giant has at least more than a few things in common with the well-oiled machine that a successful F1 team has to be.

“I think the collection captures both sides of who we are. It feels modern but also refined—there is a simplicity and sharpness that mirrors the way we operate as a team,” says Wolff to GQ. “There’s an energy that comes from being connected to a brand with such a strong identity, and it has translated into a renewed confidence around the paddock and, most importantly, onto the racetrack.”

Funnily enough, Wolff even downplays the coincidence between the prominent Wolf graphic in the collection and his own last name. Pointing out the reference to the 2006 F50 Tunit while nothing that “the jacket is very stylish though and embodies exactly who we are as a team.”

He does add that Mercedes-AMG Petronas is in good company, noting that Y-3 has only collaborated with two other global sports teams in the past: the Japanese national football team and Real Madrid. Being the only F1 team to work with the brand and the iconic designer behind it certainly puts them in great company.

Rounding out the capsule collection is a series of driving sneakers, completing the look from head-to-toe. The Y-3 x Mercedes-AMG Petronas collection arrives on March 19.

In January 2013, Raf Simons’ eponymous menswear line was still going strong. He was only beginning to hit his stride as the creative director of Christian Dior (a time very well-covered in the documentary Dior and I, which you can check out after the paywall).

After making a big splash in the world of fashion with a capital “F,” he then made one of his biggest contributions to the gray area where sportswear, sneakers, streetwear, and high fashion all converge.

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