As a fitness aficionado, this fashion film for Nike Women with ‘technical couture’ fashion designer Pedro Lourenço presented by NOWNESS, really hit home hard!  Featuring Pedro’s first women’s performance collaboration for Nike, which includes an eight-piece collection celebrating the sensuality of having a second skin made of finely knit mesh, woven satin + at times, an embossed crocodile motif, in couture-inspired silhouettes, just makes you not only want to dress like you mean business at the gym but might encourage many women intimidated by fitness, to give it a shot, just to look this good wearing Nike by Lourenço.  But it’s really no surprise that activewear design should take a backseat to form over function anymore, with the impressive new colorways available, including metallics + pieces created to come off as quickly as they go on, to make it from the gym to your next meeting, on time.

I’m sure when the first designers of athletic gear, were given the task to design, their creations only needed to perform well.  But as time went on + technology advanced, with the creations of different materials like spandex + lycra compounded with the audacity of some fashion designers to come, bringing fitness gear out of the gyms + into a woman’s daily wardrobe, design + performance had to come in equal measure.  In fact, Lourenço told NOWNESS what sparked his inspiration for this collection by saying, ‘I started sketching in the same way I do my collections: I had a crocodile Haute Couture coat from the 1960s as a reference, + I was thinking about how I could bring that into performance. There are lots of references to the way I create vertical lines on the construction of the garments.’  

Now in keeping with the Brazilian designer’s clean + simple approach to modern design + the presence of the late iconic Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in his work, with the mixture between organic + graphic, NOWNESS took to Morocco’s Atlas Mountains with filmmaker Abteen Bagheri to channel Lourenço’s spirit.  Add Jessy Lanza’s ‘As If’ as the soundtrack + you can almost see the sweat dripping down the model’s body in slow motion, which is mimicked through the electronic pulsing sound, coursing through the song.

Enjoy!

(via NOWNESS)