Jordan Brand and Free The Youth have released the campaign images for their debut collection, scheduled for August 2026. The visuals connect the collaboration with the Ghanaian collective’s resourceful approach to art, fashion and community.
Image maker Ilya Chemetoff created the campaign around the idea of Free The Youth as cultural stuntmen. The concept reflects the collective’s practice of taking risks, testing creative boundaries and building ambitious projects with the resources available. Free The Youth turns imagination into action, and the campaign translates that approach into a series of physical studio images.
The production used hand drawn, hand painted and hand sculpted environments. The team shaped clay elements for the sets and created each scene through practical methods. Members of Free The Youth performed every flight sequence live in the studio. The production used no stunt doubles, digital compositing or AI generated imagery.
Chemetoff and the team then spent several days completing the images by hand during post production. This process gave the campaign a physical quality and kept human labor visible in every frame. The final photographs place experimentation, resourcefulness and direct action within the same visual language.
Ghanaian architecture, traditional prints and cultural symbolism informed the campaign. The team also drew from Free The Youth’s roots in Tema. One reference comes from the Sun Man, a stilt performer who appears during Ghanaian festivities. The imagery also takes cues from late 1990s hip hop visuals and their lo fi surrealism.
That period often used practical effects, altered physics and saturated color to create emotionally charged images. Free The Youth and Jordan Brand drew from those ideas while developing original scenes for the collaboration. The campaign uses suspension, handmade sets and theatrical color to express the collective’s approach on its own terms.
Free The Youth has relied on resourcefulness, courage, improvisation and community since its founding in 2016. The new images connect those values with flight as a creative mindset. That idea frames possibility as an active practice, linking ambition with the willingness to use what already exists and create opportunity from it.
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Imruh Asha styled the campaign and directed the apparel presentation within each scene. His work gives the clothing a distinct presence inside Chemetoff’s constructed environments and supports the expressive character of the collaboration.
The campaign arrives after A Night of Flight in Paris, the first Arena of Flight experience from the Jordan Brand and Free The Youth partnership. The event introduced the latest phase of a relationship that has developed over a decade through shared belief, creativity and community.
The inaugural Free The Youth x Jordan Brand collection will launch exclusively on August 1 through freetheyouthxjordan.net. Jordan Brand and Free The Youth will release the collection globally on August 15, 2026.
wow! love the art direction here, finally something new and cool with jordan brand.
Imruh Asha nailed this 😍😍😍