Huge and full of heart, Hed Mayner's Reebok collaboration will sadly end in 2025. No tears, that's just when their contract ends. But, until then, the partnership's short-lived future is bright, bright, bright. And nothing this good could possibly last forever.
The designer's debut collab with Reebok's fashion-forward LTD imprint debuted in Hed Mayner Fall/Winter 2023 as a crisp collection of ballooned-out sportswear and Classic runners hand-crumpled into squashed, strapped sneakers.
This was the foundation for beautiful, swift germination, from which some of Reebok's best-ever experimental sportswear blossomed.
For instance, by the duo's third outing a year later, they'd already devised a brand-new shoe to better suit Mayner's still-maxi-sized windbreakers and track pants, an XXXXXL basketball shoe that riffs on the early-'90s Reebok Blacktop. Hed Mayner x Reebok LTD wasn't tired iteration but exhaustively exciting evolution.
This is the Paris-based Israeli designer's wont. He doesn't rip it all up and start again every season.
Instead, his work reflects the gradual growth crucial to shaping Mayner's sculpted proportions.
It takes him time to feel his way through and beyond his own and the garments' comfort zones as each new offering redresses favored silhouettes and reshapes staples.
His perfect pleated jeans? Maybe they're cut from acid-washed denim this season, or loosened beyond Mayner's own extremes. His big ol' blazers? Maybe the back is missing this season, or the sleeves are lengthened to further smother the human form.
I deeply love Mayner's work. He's one of the few working designers consciously designing large clothes not to be merely large clothes but quirked-up weirdo garments that're still somehow supremely wearable.
"I don't make big clothes because of trend," Mayner tells me over Zoom. "It's about looking different, projecting something. You become a personality."
The beauty of bigness, as Mayner sees it, is that his intentionally exaggerated clothes refute conception. "You don't judge yourself like, 'Am I tall? Am I short?' You can't tell how much you're worth, what you earn," he says.
No judgment, only personal style. How you wear your clothes is all. As it should be.
And, FYI, he makes plenty of less-big and, occasionally, slim clothes. It's not about big for bigness' sake but about this being big and that being small because this creates the desired drama.
Because Mayner is so preoccupied with fluidity, with shapes and clothes that flow into each other like tributaries into the ocean, his Reebok LTD collaboration is merely an extension of his design lexicon. There's no other way for him to authentically create.
"There's always the temptation to take the money from the collaboration, inject it into your collection, and just forget everything, just work, work, work," he explains. "But it's always really obvious when that happens." And that's just not how Hed Mayner works.
He does call the Reebok collection "very streetwear" in comparison to his mainline — he's flattered when I compare Hed Mayner clothes to the sublime '80s suiting of Armani and Gianni Versace — but the two are soulfully symbiotic, organically feeding off each other.
As such, it's difficult to tell where Reebok begins and Hed Mayner ends. This is by design.
Like Mayner's mainline clothes, his Reebok garments are made in Italy (this is because his collab is part of Reebok's ultra-premium LTD line) of luxe fabrics interwoven with Reebok's sporty heritage.
For his debut release, for instance — designed in double-time: a mere three weeks (!) — Mayner cut torso-swallowing track jackets and barrel-shaped pants from a hefty, dense nylon and cotton blend, their silhouettes sharpened by thickened piping.
Equal inspiration came from actual retro running gear and superfuturistic '80s designers like Issey Miyake (if you think about it, Miyake's signature Windcoat is basically proto-Mayner).
Spring/Summer 2024 kept the pace but FW24 was Mayner's literal biggest footprint yet, that gargantuan Blacktop riff.
"The new one is big so you dont lose your feet with big pants," he says, simply. "Many times we want the shoe to disappear, be completely hidden. But sometimes we want them very big, massive."
Mission accomplished.
And, like his Reebok Classics, Mayner's massive mid-top comes already lived-in.
"This is how I like my shoes. I cant relate to them when they're new," he says. "I like the shape created by used shoes, too, like they're a found object."
The softness coincides with his clothes, mirroring the tacit drape crucial to creating large clothes that aren't merely large clothes. Mayner's garments are soft, sturdy, shaped to inform a silhouette with something to say. His Reeboks are — or were — too.
