Li-Ning launches 30th anniversary Autumn Winter 2020 collection with celebratory multi-contributor, image and film series
. Featuring a host of leading creative talent from around the world, the project’s second installment
is directed by Traum Inc.
Honoring its 30th year as China’s great icon of sport and style, Li-Ning forges ahead for Autumn / Winter 2020, launching “Future Vintage, Sport Formal”, a collection of men’s and women’s apparel, footwear and accessories contrasting design highlights from the label’s storied past with a modernist vision of the future. Surveying Li-Ning’s robust archives—along with the celebrated career of company founder and
Olympic gold medalist, Mr. Li Ning—the brand’s latest runway assortment creates a unique hybrid aesthetic, one that unites elements of casual sportswear with more formal codes of dress.
As a result of the brand’s time-traveling juxtaposition of casual and bespoke, Li-Ning’s latest collection arrives at a new mode of dressing, one with
little regard for norms of gender, occasion or preconception. Subsequently, seemingly clashing design cues from different eras and style tribes reconcile to create something refreshingly new and utterly modern.

Chapter 2 | Traum Inc.
The 2nd release from Li-Ning’s AW20 image and film series takes an explorative, digital approach as interpreted by Traum Inc. Presenting the collection in a world of shifting dimensions and altered perspectives, the Traum team looks to the season’s many video game references, incorporating digital animation, iridescent colors and a score of intensity-building, whirring cyber sound effects. True to the creative collective’s founding principle —“New Images for a New World”—Traum Inc.’s submission finds Li-Ning-clad avatars presented in a host of new and unseen cyber-landscapes, all still under construction with grids and matrices forming around each figure. Reminiscent of the user experience and level-changing scenery found in video games, Traum Inc.’s other-worldly, digital environments are captured through deliberate, zooming camerawork, with fast-moving rotations weaving around the film’s cast of computer-generated “models”. With its quick-changing, ‘work-in-progress’ range of possibilities, Traum Inc.’s contribution demonstrates technology’s growing power to create bespoke, individual “realities”—custom-made “just for you!”—in a knowing reference to the continued rise of “on-demand” expectations in contemporary life. Founded in 2009 by Thomas Traum, Traum Inc.’s approach is based on the exploration and understanding of modern technology and finding new and novel applications of its use in design, art and visual communication. Their recent exhibitions include Eyebeam in New York City and the Center
for Contemporary Arts, Garage CCC in Moscow
as well as the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris.