Salomon Got a Creative Director. He Has One Rule.
In 2014, a Parisian concept store called The Broken Arm called Salomon with a specific observation: kids in Paris were coming in wearing their dads' old XT-6 trail shoes. Trail shoes. The ones designed for 100-mile mountain runs. Being worn on the street.
The store asked about stocking them as fashion items. That call started the arc that led to Rihanna wearing Salomon at the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, the MM6 Maison Margiela (MM6 is Margiela's sportswear and streetwear-adjacent sub-label) collaboration, and a brand that took 75 years to reach $1 billion in revenue now on track to double it.
Salomon didn't go to fashion. Fashion came to Salomon. The XT-6 didn't change.
What the New Creative Director Said
In June, Highsnobiety published an interview with Heikki Salonen, who joined Salomon in early 2026 as the brand's first-ever creative director. Salonen spent years at Maison Margiela, where he was instrumental in evolving MM6 from a quiet women's sub-label into one of the more interesting brands in fashion. He was also a key figure in the MM6 x Salomon collaboration, which now reads as obvious preparation for exactly this role.
The quote that got traction: "Salomon should never become a fashion brand."
From someone whose entire career happened inside fashion, this is worth sitting with. He is not an outdoor industry person warning fashion to keep its distance. He is a fashion person saying: the thing you want to borrow is only worth borrowing because it hasn't tried to become you yet.
The distinction he draws is specific and useful. He wants Salomon to make products that can be adopted by the fashion world, not products whose core reason for existing is to look good in a fashion context. The shoe should still be designed for a 100-mile run. What happens to it afterward, who wears it, what context they put it in, is not Salomon's call to make.
Most Salomon streetwear fans came in through three or four silhouettes from the last several years. Salonen's point is that an 80-year catalogue exists underneath those three shoes, and the brand's job is to keep making things from inside that catalogue rather than reverse-engineering the three entry points the fashion world happened to find.
What Actually Gets Preserved
There is a pattern here that plays out on roughly five-year cycles, and it always goes the same way.
Brand A makes something for a specific purpose. The thing is well-designed, slightly weird, and immediately readable as something built for people who actually need it. Fashion discovers it. People start wearing it outside its intended context. The brand gets approached for collaborations. If those collaborations take the function seriously, the crossover holds. If the brand starts designing for the fashion audience instead of the original one, the fashion audience moves on within two seasons. Because what they were responding to was authenticity of function. Not the aesthetic. And once that's gone, there's nothing left to respond to.
Salonen uses the UGG boot as his illustration. Created for Australian surfers to warm their feet and stabilize their ankles before entering cold water. Now worn at airports and shopping malls globally by people who have never thought about a tide. The boot didn't change. The context did. Nobody in the airport knows the origin story. It doesn't matter. The thing works in both contexts because it was designed to work in the first one.
The XT-6 is the same argument made in a different material. It was built for trails. Fashion found it in a Paris vintage bin. The shoe was not changed to appeal to the person at Paris Fashion Week. The person at Paris Fashion Week changed their context to accommodate the shoe.
That direction of travel -- culture finding a product rather than a product trying to find culture -- is the only version that holds.
The Ugliness Principle
The most useful observation in the interview is not the "never become a fashion brand" line. It is the one about ugliness.
Salonen wants Salomon to stay weird. Technical, specific, slightly strange. He describes classic Salomon shoes as "absolutely mental" -- gradient colorways, stacked technologies, a visual complexity that the people who designed them have stopped seeing because they've been looking at it for twenty years. He loves this. The internal view is that it's a normal shoe. The outside view is that it is a weird object with unexplained details that might mean something.
The products that cross over from function into fashion culture are rarely the beautiful ones. The XT-6 is not beautiful. The UGG boot is not beautiful. The Carhartt WIP Double Knee pant is not beautiful. These things work in a way that produces an aesthetic as a byproduct, rather than starting with an aesthetic and engineering backward toward some vestigial function. The weirdness is evidence that something real was being optimized for first.
This is the line between crossovers that last and ones that don't. When Loewe made the Puzzle Bag with its strange geometry, the proportions came from the bag's functional opening mechanism, not from wanting to look interesting. Remove the function and you have expensive clothes with a logo. The ugliness disappears. So does the reason anyone cared.
The Harder Position
Salonen ends the interview with something that sounds like a contradiction: "We need to change in order to preserve."
It is not a contradiction. A brand preserves its identity by staying true to what generated it, not by freezing it. Salomon's core is performance and specificity. If the XT-6 gets smoothed into something beautiful, if the GORE-TEX (Gore-Tex is a waterproof, breathable fabric membrane used in high-performance outdoor gear) gets replaced by fashion fabric, if the weird gradients get replaced by this season's palette, the fashion world will notice. Not because fashion is paying close attention. Because the thing it was responding to will no longer be there.
His position is: make the weirdest, most performance-obsessed products possible. Let the fashion world find them. Don't help too much.
The clothing isn't designed to be on-trend. It is designed to say something specific, from a specific place, with a specific point of view. That's either findable by the right people or it isn't. The brand can't manufacture the finding.
Somewhere there is a sheep farmer wearing the same Salomon shoe as someone who walked a runway at Paris Fashion Week this season. Salonen says he loves this. The shoe works for both of them, and neither needs to know about the other.
That's the position. It is much harder to hold than it sounds, and most brands discover this only after they've already let go of it.