On chases cultural relevance as Nike doubles down on legacy storytelling
Every generation of brands has its breakout stars. Some catch fire, burn bright, and fade with the trend cycle. Others, like Nike, ignite a cultural shift, transforming from mere product purveyors into living symbols of grit, aspiration, and identity. Now, a new name is sprinting hard: ON.
With Swiss precision, explosive growth, and a reputation for design that turns heads without trying, the brand is winning over runners, tastemakers, and investors alike. But here's the bigger question: can ON do what Nike once did? Can it become not just a great brand, but a cultural icon? To find out, we look back at the playbook Nike wrote and decode its genius through the lens of Cultural Strategy by Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron, a theory that explains how brands become myths, movements, and markers of their time.
Nike’s Cultural Revolution: Not Just a Footwear Brand
Nike didn't just ride the wave of American athleticism; it reshaped it. In the early 1980s, the company found itself at a crossroads. The U.S. economy was wobbling, cultural identity was shifting, and traditional ideals of success were giving way to something harder, more individualistic. For many, grit replaced glory. Hustle became hope.
Nike understood this. It pivoted from touting performance specs to championing resilience: raw, imperfect, deeply human effort. The "Just Do It" campaign wasn't just about doing more; it was about being more: more determined, more defiant, more self-made. Ads like the 1988 Walt Stack spot (featuring an 80-year-old marathoner), the powerful "If You Let Me Play" (1995), and the visually stunning "You Can't Stop Us" (2020) didn't just sell shoes: they stirred emotion, provoked thought, and placed Nike at the center of cultural conversation.
This was a cultural strategy in action. As Holt and Cameron write, the most enduring brands become mythmakers, offering symbolic solutions to deep-seated societal tensions. Nike saw the rise of individualism and built a brand that said: You are your own hero. Lace up. In doing so, it transcended sport and became a vessel for ambition, identity, and rebellion.
NikeSKIMS: Rewriting the Myth for a New Generation of Women
Decades on, Nike is writing bold new chapters, and nowhere is this more evident than in NikeSKIMS, its landmark collaboration with Kim Kardashian's SKIMS. The launch introduced a new "system of dress", obsessively crafted for the body with a mission to redefine women's activewear without compromise, spanning multiple collections and dozens of silhouettes, offering thousands of possible outfit combinations.
The debut campaign pulled no punches culturally. Featuring over 50 globally recognised women athletes, including Serena Williams, Sha'Carri Richardson, and Jordan Chiles, alongside Kardashian herself, it cast all of them under the same banner: athletes. "Put my body on a pedestal," Kardashian declares in the opening sequence. Directed by Janicza Bravo, the film was less a product launch than a statement of intent: to expand the very definition of who counts as an athlete.
NikeSKIMS: Rewriting the Myth for a New Generation of Women
The line has continued to evolve at a pace. The Spring 2026 collection marked the debut of a full head-to-toe system of dress, footwear, apparel, and accessories, drawing inspiration from the fluidity and strength of modern ballerinas, with global icon LISA of Blackpink fronting the campaign. Filmed in Paris, the campaign also featured professional ballerinas and dancers, and introduced the NikeSKIMS Rift Satin: a tabi-inspired split-toe silhouette bridging the gap between athletic and everyday elegance. Most recently, Nike expanded the Spring '26 line with a new capsule of gym-essential styles, including the debut of a Matte Shine Mix material collection, with Kim Kardashian fronting the campaign herself, demonstrating that performance wear can flatter as much as it functions.
Viewed through Holt and Cameron's framework, NikeSKIMS is a textbook myth expansion. Where past campaigns like "Dream Crazier" (2019) spotlighted trailblazing female athletes, this collaboration proposes something broader: an athletic identity that merges strength, sensuality, and style, one that speaks to a generation of women for whom sport is as much about self-expression as performance. The real question is whether NikeSKIMS can sustain momentum beyond the launch halo and whether it can genuinely cement Nike once more as a brand that doesn't just follow culture, but moves it.
ON's Bold Emergence: A Modern Playbook
Shape of Dreams: ON Steps Into the Myth-Making Arena
Fast forward to today, and ON is sprinting into the market with the confidence of a brand that knows its footing. Net sales reached around €850 million in Q3 alone, and the company has lifted its full-year outlook to roughly €3.2 billion in sales (2025). With a market cap in the €13.6–15 billion range, ON has achieved what many in retail only dream of: sustained, disciplined growth with grace. Its shoes are instantly recognisable: streamlined, futuristic, and unlike anything else in the running aisle. Even with the logo obscured, the silhouette does the talking. That's no small feat in a market saturated with sameness. But what sets ON apart isn't just design. It's discipline. While many young brands chase virality and burn capital on influencer drops or algorithmic hype, ON has built its house with intention. Product-first. Performance-driven. Quietly bold.
And now, ON has made its most decisive cultural move yet. The brand's first co-created collection with Zendaya comes to life through an imaginative cinematic campaign film by Academy Award-winning director Spike Jonze, bringing the creative process behind the project to the forefront and marking a bold new chapter in the brand's creative storytelling. This is not a standard celebrity endorsement. Zendaya is not positioned simply as the face of the campaign. ON has framed her as a genuine creative collaborator, with her longtime stylist Law Roach central to the collection's visual and design direction. Titled "Shape of Dreams", the campaign film is set inside Zendaya's imagined "Dream Lab," where silhouettes stretch and transform in a boundary-defying journey of creation.
The three-minute film begins with Zendaya standing alone in a stark white room before a group of dancers erupts from behind her, all wearing matching white sets. The rest unfolds as an illusion of proportions: hands reach through the screen to pick up, throw, and drag around palm-sized versions of Zendaya and her crew, with Law Roach appearing to fashion his muse into the new collection.
The resulting collection, available from April 16, features elevated sports and loungewear, including ribbed tank tops, parachute pants, and a new running shoe, the Cloudnova Moon. The pieces balance Zendaya and Roach's fashion instincts with ON's Swiss engineering: versatile, effortless, and designed to move across different moments of a life. Spike Jonze's role is not primarily to make the collection look expensive, though it does. His role is to make the act of imagining and refining a garment feel visually interesting, a more useful storytelling move than simply filming a celebrity in finished clothes. The still-life photography by Sean Thomas completes the structure: the film carries the imagination, the stills carry the proof.
Viewed through Holt and Cameron's lens, Shape of Dreams is ON's first genuine piece of myth-making. It doesn't just sell product, it offers a narrative: that design is a dream, that style is a creative act, that movement is personal. The choice of Jonze, a director whose entire career has been built on making surrealism feel emotionally legible, signals that ON understands something important: cultural resonance isn't manufactured by star power alone. It's built through the quality of the story told around it.
The Missing Link: Building a Myth That Lasts
ON's rise is a case study in how far you can go with excellence, precision, and vision. Shape of Dreams proves the brand is ready to engage with culture, not just design. But if the goal is to leave a legacy, to become more than a product, the deeper question remains: what emotional truth will ON's brand ultimately carry?
Nike didn't wait for culture to notice it. It stepped into the arena and offered a story that made people feel seen. That's what ON must now consider as it builds beyond this first act. Could ON become the voice of a quieter kind of athleticism: introspective, holistic, human-first? Could it champion a new myth around movement: one that speaks to the meditative runner, the weekend walker, the person for whom performance is deeply personal? Shape of Dreams gestures toward an answer, a world where creativity and motion are the same thing, but the myth is still being written.
The brand has the canvas, a brilliant first stroke, and some of the most compelling collaborators in culture right now. What it needs next is the sustained conviction to keep telling that story, even when the campaign cycle moves on.
Learning from the Past, Building for the Future
Nike's story proves that long-term brand power isn't built in labs or boardrooms. It's forged in moments of cultural insight: storytelling, symbolism, and emotional gravity that turn a product into a movement. NikeSKIMS is Nike's latest attempt to do exactly that for a new generation of women, redefining athletic identity at the intersection of strength and style.
ON has checked all the right boxes on the functional side, and Shape of Dreams shows it is beginning to check the cultural ones, too. But if it hopes to be more than a beautifully designed success story, if it wants to become a brand that lasts, it must keep building: deeper, bolder, more resonant with each chapter.
Brands That Lead, Not Follow
Nike's legacy reminds us that the brands that thrive are the ones that don't just respond to culture, they shape it. Through cultural strategy, we understand that becoming iconic means solving cultural tensions with bold, belief-driven storytelling. ON's moment is now. The shoes are exceptional. The business is thriving. And with Shape of Dreams, a Spike Jonze film, a Zendaya co-creation, a Law Roach collaboration, it has done something rare: made a campaign that the culture actually wants to watch.
But to run the long race, to become not just a great brand, but a cultural landmark, ON must keep returning to the Dream Lab. Not just for the next drop, but for the next decade. Because at the end of the day, people don't just buy shoes. They buy meaning. They buy belief. And the brands that offer that, as Nike once did, and as ON is now beginning to, don't just ride trends. They define eras.
Written by mimoza Malići
Mimoza Maliqi is a seasoned marketer with a sharp eye for storytelling and strategy. At TOML Collective, she runs the show on all things marketing and helps shape the TOML Journal, where she crafts stories that are honest, insightful, and occasionally unexpected. Reach her at mimoza@tomlcollective.com.