How FUTURA Influenced Streetwear, Fashion & Contemporary Design

Cover photo © Jiro Konami / Courtesy of KENZO

From New York Graffiti to Nike, Supreme, Virgil Abloh and FUTURA LABORATORIES

Today, collaborations between artists and fashion brands are everywhere. Painters design trainers, street artists work with fashion houses, collections incorporate contemporary art, and limited-edition products move between galleries, boutiques and collector markets. That relationship now feels completely normal, but FUTURA was navigating these different creative worlds decades earlier.

Beginning as a graffiti writer in New York, he gradually built a career that moved between painting, music, graphic design, fashion, footwear and collectible objects without treating those disciplines as entirely separate. Over the years, his collaborators have included Nike, Supreme, Comme des Garçons and Off-White, while his own FUTURA LABORATORIES became an important platform for extending his visual language beyond paintings and exhibitions. What makes that history particularly interesting is that FUTURA did not simply lend his name to fashion. His symbols, abstraction and graphic language became part of the objects themselves, allowing ideas developed through painting and graffiti to move into clothing, footwear and design.

In this guide, we’ll explore how FUTURA moved from New York graffiti into streetwear and fashion, why collaborations became such an important part of his practice, and how that relationship between art, design and music continues through projects including our Nas x FUTURA Hip Hop 50 collection.

Before Streetwear Became a Global Industry

To understand FUTURA’s influence on fashion, it helps to return to the culture he came from. Graffiti was already built around visual identity. A writer developed a name, transformed that name into an individual style and built recognition as it travelled across neighbourhoods and subway lines.

At the same time, graffiti existed within a much broader cultural environment. Clothing, music, record sleeves, flyers, photography, DJing and breaking circulated through overlapping communities, particularly as hip hop developed in New York during the 1970s and early 1980s. The boundaries that would later separate “fine art”, “streetwear”, “graphic design” and “music culture” were not necessarily the boundaries through which the artists themselves experienced the city.

FUTURA’s career developed within that environment. As his work moved beyond New York’s subway system, it began appearing in other cultural spaces, from galleries and music projects to clothing and commercial design. That ability to move between contexts would eventually become one of the defining characteristics of his career.

👉 Start with our introductory guide: Who Is FUTURA? From New York Graffiti Pioneer to Contemporary Art Icon.

Why Fashion Made Sense for FUTURA

Fashion offered FUTURA another way for his artwork to exist beyond conventional gallery spaces. This is particularly interesting when considering his relationship with Supreme. FUTURA has spoken about the connection between his work and the New York streetwear world, describing collaborations with brands rooted in the culture around him as a natural extension of his practice.

The distinction is important because his work in fashion should not simply be understood as commercial activity happening alongside his “real” artwork. Design provided another surface for the visual language he had already spent decades developing. Clothing and footwear could circulate through cities, reaching people who might never encounter the same artist through a museum or gallery exhibition.

For an artist whose career began by placing images into public space, there is a clear continuity in that idea. The context had changed, but the possibility of allowing an artwork or visual identity to move through the city remained.

FUTURA LABORATORIES: Building His Own Platform

Photo © Timothy McGurr

A crucial part of this story arrived in 1997 with the establishment of FUTURA LABORATORIES. Created as FUTURA’s own design studio and experimental lifestyle brand, FUTURA LABORATORIES provided a platform through which his visual language could move across clothing, products, editions and collectible objects. The brand was born in Brooklyn, while its flagship retail store later operated in Fukuoka, Japan. Over time, FUTURA LABORATORIES developed into a wider collaborative platform connecting FUTURA with artists, institutions and brands across fashion, art, entertainment, sport and design.

The project is significant because it demonstrates that FUTURA was not simply waiting for established fashion companies to provide him with opportunities. He created his own vehicle for translating his artwork into products and editions, giving him another space in which to experiment with the relationship between art and design. FUTURA LABORATORIES continues today, describing itself as both a design studio and experimental lifestyle brand.

When Artwork Becomes Something You Wear

Part of FUTURA’s strength as a collaborator comes from the visual language he developed as a painter. Across decades of work, recurring elements have included gestural marks, atom-like forms, abstract fields, energetic lines and characters including his Pointman figure. Because this language is not dependent on a single image or conventional logo, it can be reinterpreted across different surfaces and materials while remaining recognisably his.

A motif that appears within a painting can therefore be reconsidered across a trainer, jacket, T-shirt or graphic rather than simply reproduced as an image. This makes collaboration a natural extension of his wider practice: the format changes, but the underlying visual language remains connected to the paintings, drawings and graffiti from which it developed.

👉 Explore the artwork itself in: The Art of FUTURA: Understanding His Paintings, Abstract Style & Visual Language.

FUTURA x Nike

Photo © Nicholas Llanton, Courtesy of Hypebeast

Few relationships demonstrate FUTURA’s position within streetwear and sneaker culture better than his longstanding work with Nike. Across multiple projects, FUTURA has contributed to some highly sought-after releases, particularly within Nike SB. One of the best known is the FLOM — “For Love or Money” — Dunk, created in 2004 to commemorate the opening of the FUTURA LABORATORIES flagship store in Fukuoka.

Rather than being produced as a conventional commercial release, the shoes were primarily created as gifts for close friends who travelled to Japan for the opening. Two additional pairs were raffled to customers at the store. The design featured an all-over currency motif exploring ideas around love, money, motivation and creativity. Its unusual origin and extreme scarcity subsequently helped make the FLOM one of the most recognised collector pieces associated with FUTURA’s sneaker work.

His relationship with Nike has continued across different periods of his career. In 2024, Nike partnered with FUTURA on its breaking collection ahead of the sport’s appearance on the global stage in Paris. As a long-time Nike collaborator, FUTURA designed artwork incorporated throughout the collection, including federation kits for the United States, Korea and Japan.

The collaboration also extended to the Nike Jam, Nike’s first shoe designed specifically for breaking. A FUTURA colourway reinterpreted elements of his iconic 1980 Break Train, while his signature visual language—including atoms, characters and paint splatter—was incorporated across the wider apparel collection. The project brought several strands of his history together: graffiti, hip hop, breaking, design, sport and a relationship with Nike that had already developed over decades.

Supreme and the Rise of New York Streetwear

Photo © Supreme New York

FUTURA’s relationship with Supreme represents another important part of this history. Supreme emerged from New York’s downtown culture in the 1990s, with skateboarding at its centre and strong connections to art, music and the visual culture of the city. For an artist whose own career had already moved between graffiti, painting, music and design, this provided a natural cultural overlap.

FUTURA has spoken about his relationship with Supreme and the accessibility he found within fashion and streetwear compared with some of his experiences of the traditional art world. The connection was not simply between an artist and an unrelated commercial brand; both emerged from overlapping areas of New York’s creative culture. By the 1990s and 2000s, graffiti, skateboarding, hip hop and downtown New York culture were becoming increasingly visible within a global streetwear market. FUTURA’s involvement in that world was therefore part of a much longer relationship with the culture from which streetwear itself was drawing.

Comme des Garçons and the Expansion Into Fashion

Photo © Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com

As FUTURA’s profile expanded, his work increasingly entered fashion contexts beyond conventional streetwear. His relationship with Comme des Garçons provides an important example. FUTURA first collaborated with Comme des Garçons in 2008 for the opening of the brand’s Hong Kong store, beginning a creative relationship that brought his visual language into another influential area of international fashion.

The contrast is striking. An artist whose visual identity had developed partly through painting New York subway trains was now collaborating with one of the world’s most influential fashion companies, yet the work remained recognisably FUTURA. That ability to move between very different environments without abandoning his own visual identity has become one of the recurring characteristics of his collaborative career.

FUTURA and Virgil Abloh

Photo © Courtesy of Virgil Abloh

FUTURA’s relationship with Virgil Abloh became one of the most significant creative friendships of his later career. The pair collaborated directly on Off-White’s Spring/Summer 2020 collection, which brought FUTURA’s imagery into Abloh’s fashion world. His artwork appeared across the collection, while his Pointman character was also translated into sculptural form for the presentation.

The relationship made particular sense because Abloh’s own practice consistently moved between fashion, music, architecture, art and design. Like FUTURA, he resisted the idea that creativity needed to remain confined to a single discipline.

FUTURA has spoken warmly about Abloh and the support he showed for his work. Their relationship also reflected a much wider cultural transformation. By this period, creative languages rooted in graffiti, streetwear and hip hop were no longer operating solely on the margins of fashion; they had become increasingly visible within its most influential institutions and luxury houses, including during Abloh’s tenure as men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton.

The significance is not that FUTURA abandoned his graffiti origins in order to enter fashion. His identity and visual history remained central to why these relationships existed in the first place.

Why FUTURA’s Collaborations Matter

It is tempting to measure FUTURA’s influence by creating a long list of famous brands, but the list is not really the point. What matters is the model of artistic practice his career represents. FUTURA has spent decades moving between painting and products without insisting that one must invalidate the other. Gallery exhibitions have existed alongside trainers, clothing, graphics and limited editions, each providing a different context for his visual language.

That approach now feels increasingly familiar. Contemporary audiences may discover an artist through a fashion collaboration before ever entering a gallery, while collectors routinely move between prints, sneakers, vinyl, clothing and original artworks. FUTURA’s career provides an unusually long example of this way of working. Rather than separating art, design and popular culture into distinct territories, his practice has repeatedly moved between them.

From Product to Collectible

FUTURA’s career also provides an interesting way of thinking about the increasingly blurred boundary between products and collectibles. A commercial object can acquire additional meaning through authorship, scarcity, provenance and cultural context. In some cases, its significance comes as much from the story surrounding its creation as from the function it was originally designed to perform.

The FLOM Dunk is an obvious example. What began as an extremely limited object created around the opening of FUTURA LABORATORIES in Fukuoka subsequently became highly desirable within sneaker collecting. Its significance therefore extends beyond its function as footwear, connecting it to a specific artist, location, period and story.

The same principle increasingly appears across contemporary culture, from prints and artist editions to clothing, sneakers and vinyl. The physical format changes, but collectors are often responding to an object’s relationship with a particular artist, creative collaboration or cultural moment. FUTURA’s career sits naturally within this broader shift because his work has long moved between painting, clothing, footwear, graphics and collectible objects.

Connecting Art, Music and Collectible Design:
Nas x FUTURA Hip Hop 50

Photo © Louis Kassam

That intersection between art, music and the collectible object also sits behind our Nas x FUTURA Hip Hop 50 collaboration. Created to celebrate hip hop’s 50th anniversary, the project brought together two figures from different generations of New York culture.

Nas handpicked twelve genre-defining tracks reflecting key influences across hip hop history, while FUTURA created original artwork for the project. Created by 12on12, the resulting limited-edition vinyl brought music and visual art together within a physical format designed to function as both a listening experience and a collectible object.

That connection is particularly fitting within FUTURA’s wider career. From his early relationship with The Clash to record artwork, live painting, fashion and product design, music and visual culture have repeatedly overlapped throughout his practice. The Nas x FUTURA project continues that conversation within the context of hip hop’s history, using the physical record as a meeting point between music, artwork and collectible design.

👉 Explore the Nas x FUTURA Hip Hop 50 collection.

From the Subway to the Object

There is an interesting continuity running through FUTURA’s career, even as the surfaces on which he works have changed dramatically. A subway car, canvas, record sleeve, trainer, jacket and limited-edition vinyl may belong to very different contexts, but each offers another way for an artist’s visual language to enter the world.

FUTURA’s career demonstrates that contemporary art does not have to remain inside the gallery. A visual language can move across public space, clothing, music, products and collectible objects while still remaining recognisably connected to the artist who created it. That movement between contexts has become one of the defining characteristics of his practice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is FUTURA important to streetwear?

FUTURA has a longstanding relationship with the intersection between art, street culture and design. Through FUTURA LABORATORIES and collaborations with companies including Supreme and Nike, his visual language has appeared across clothing, footwear and collectible design alongside his continuing studio practice.

What is FUTURA LABORATORIES?

FUTURA LABORATORIES is the design studio and experimental lifestyle brand established by FUTURA in 1997. Born in Brooklyn, with a flagship retail store later operating in Fukuoka, Japan, it has served as a platform for products, editions and collaborations extending FUTURA’s creative practice beyond conventional gallery contexts.

Has FUTURA collaborated with Nike?

Yes. FUTURA has a longstanding relationship with Nike that includes several notable projects, particularly within Nike SB. These include the extremely rare 2004 FLOM Dunk and, more recently, his work on Nike’s 2024 breaking collection and the FUTURA colourway of the Nike Jam.

Has FUTURA worked with Supreme?

Yes. FUTURA has worked with Supreme as part of his wider relationship with New York streetwear and design culture.

Did FUTURA work with Virgil Abloh?

Yes. FUTURA developed a creative friendship with Virgil Abloh and collaborated directly with Off-White, including on the Spring/Summer 2020 collection. FUTURA has also spoken about Abloh’s support for his work and their shared interest in moving between art, fashion, music and design.

Did FUTURA collaborate with Comme des Garçons?

Yes. FUTURA first collaborated with Comme des Garçons in 2008 in connection with the opening of the company’s Hong Kong store.

Why are FUTURA collaborations collectible?

The reasons vary between individual releases, but many bring together FUTURA’s recognisable visual language with limited production and a specific cultural or creative context. Particularly scarce releases, such as the FLOM Dunk, have consequently become highly sought after within specialist collector markets.