Saucony's new project inspired by "Endless" by Frank Ocean

Traditionally, a fashion campaign is a narrative (albeit through images) with a finished product at its center - it is, in short, a point of arrival. A format fossilized in tradition that, with the teaser for the next campaign dedicated to the historic Shadow 5000 Premium silhouette, Saucony wanted to overturn: the campaign to tell about the shoe instead tells the making of the campaign itself. Paradoxically, just eliminating the role of direct protagonist of the final product from the narrative, hiding it from the gaze, as if waiting for a further completion, enhances its value by emphasizing the craftsmanship and composition and underlining the double value of the sneaker as a craft object worthy of being placed in a frame or on a pedestal and as an object behind which there is a whole world of meanings. 

Inspired by the video-album Endless by Frank Ocean, in which all the storytelling revolved around the construction of a set whose completion coincided with the end of the album. Similarly, nss factory and Saucony, in collaboration with director Michele Foti, have created Masterpiece in Progress - a campaign born from the same idea of celebrating the creative effort behind the birth of a product, in this case the Shadow 5000 Premium born in the '90s and now proposed in a new construction with premium materials. The link between Endless and the campaign puts the latter in dialogue with the video-album itself, underlining the influence that Frank Ocean's work has had in the contemporary cultural sphere, intervening in music, fashion but also in the way we understand the figure of the creative. Endless is in fact a collaborative work - an element emphasized in the video, which is literally the work of a group of people, but also in the creation of the album itself in which the featuring of artists such as Arca or James Blake serve to increase the breath of the work, to open it up to new worlds. Similarly, both the campaign and the design of the sneaker is the result of a group effort - and for this reason its value is increased.

The subject of the campaign, therefore, is the campaign itself, produced as an art exhibition, which sees the Saucony Shadow 5000 Premium progressively revealed, shot after shot, and placed next to a statue, on a pedestal, and then inside a frame. Almost as if to celebrate, by mimicking it, the artistic value underlying the creation of the sneaker - whose intangible value is precisely that creativity, that crafting ability of the historic brand born in Pennsylvania 124 years ago and remained over the years at the top of the charts of the manufacturers of running gear most loved by athletes and practitioners of the discipline.

The parallelism implemented by the brand, then, also concerns the relationship between the sneaker and the classicism of columns, sculptures and frames: a tribute not only to the historicity and rich heritage of the Shadow 5000 Premium model but also to the reinterpretation of the silhouette reconstructed with premium materials, elevated to a new product of luxury performance.