Edison Chen and adidas Originals Return for the Year of the Horse
office chatted with Edison about the world building that went into the campaign, and about the collection itself.
How does this collection with adidas feel different to previous ones for you?
It really feels like a culmination moment. This collection feels like reconnecting ideas with the East x West ethos that defines CLOT and the way I approach my work as a creative director. There’s something refreshing about coming full circle, where both sides are equally involved in the creative process.
The Qi Flow silhouette really embodies that. It’s a culmination of some shoes we’ve created in the past, with a few tweaks that ultimately make it feel almost entirely new.
The same goes for the frog button detail. The recent resurgence of Asian and Chinese jacket elements is something that’s always been part of our heritage, and our very first product was rooted in that idea. To come back to it now and apply it to an adidas silhouette feels very full circle.
You chose to introduce this adidas collaboration through an anime film rather than a traditional campaign. What does anime allow you to express that a photoshoot doesn’t?
Anime allows me to fully step into a storytelling mode, beyond just communicating a concept, a design cue, or a specific color or hue. It gives space to express a broader creative ethos and the culture around it, rather than capturing a single moment through a still image or a one-off campaign.
What we’re trying to do is bring a sense of freshness, coherence, and continuity, building an overarching narrative that runs throughout the year through this anime concept. This has always been a personal dream of mine. I’ve been a fan of anime for a long time, so being able to work in this medium has been incredibly exciting, and I’ve learned a lot through this first phase.
When you eventually see the full culmination of the project, rather than just individual moments or short episodes, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
This collaboration feels less like a product launch and more like world-building. Why was it important for you to create a narrative around the collection rather than just show the clothes?
I think today everyone talks about narrative in marketing, the heart of the story, what the project is about, and the backstory behind it all. That’s something I’ve been doing for years. From the beginning, my work was never about simply playing with colorways or surface-level ideas. Even when there were reissues or iterations, the original designs always came from a deeper place, not just a visual refresh.
Now that storytelling, hues, and backstories have become more common across the industry, it felt more interesting to go beyond just talking about the clothes; and working with adidas has really allowed me to grow as a creative director, and at the same time, to open the door for younger creatives to step in, collaborate, and experiment.
For me, world-building is about creating something that feels lived-in and soulful, something that reflects evolution, community, and a point of view, beyond a collection on a rack.
adidas has a very distinct visual language. Where did you feel most comfortable bending or distorting those codes?
For this collection, what we’re really talking about is Qi Flow – harmony, the subconscious, and the person within you. That idea naturally informed where and how we could bend adidas’ visual codes. The world building is very much geared toward that inner space, and for me personally, this has been a journey of learning how to detach from the self and look more closely at your core, your soul, your spirit.
With this collection and series, we are trying to understand what’s visible and what isn’t: unseen energies, unseen rules, and dimensions that exist beyond what’s immediately in front of us. I wanted to translate that into the work, to add dimensions through the design language, and the way the story is told.
That’s where the distortion comes in: creating a yin-yang flow between future and past, conscious and subconscious, awake and asleep. Those dualities show up in the collection’s tones, the textures, and the overall mood, carried through not just in the product itself, but also in the marketing and how the world around the collection is expressed.
