Salomon’s Shanghai design competition pairs an established fashion name with eight emerging designers to reinterpret core footwear, then puts the results to public vote. The format turns product development into a community engagement tool and a trend pipeline from China’s emerging creatives.
Salomon ran the 2026 edition of its Road to the Future design competition at its Anfu Road concept store in Shanghai in June, with a public exhibition, a consumer voting phase and a panel discussion. Nine designers reimagined two of the brand’s core footwear silhouettes, and the public helped shape the outcome.
Uma Wang, a Chinese fashion designer whose label is known for the tension between textile memory and contemporary form, served as the 2026 guest designer. Wang drew on materials developed in ballet flat projects and recurring aged polka dot treatments to reinterpret Salomon’s XT RIDGE and ACS PRO silhouettes.
Eight emerging designers worked with Shanghai based multibrand fashion platform Labelhood. Their concepts drew on nature, digital culture, traditional craft and speculative futures: Chao Li, GG, Jaden Li, Joyce Bao, Karmuel Young, Kinyan Lam, Sifan Chen and Zita Tan.
The five day exhibition, held June 5 to 10 at the Anfu Road location, was themed around ”Archived for the Future.” The store was redesigned as a process focused exhibition, pairing finished prototypes with documentation that traced each participant’s creative decisions. Visitors could vote through Salomon’s official mini program or in store.
Why Salomon runs this every year
Road to the Future is not a one off project. Salomon has run the program across multiple cycles, and the 2026 edition followed a repeatable format: one established guest designer, a cohort of emerging talents sourced through a local partner (Labelhood), two core product silhouettes and a combined jury that balances brand judgment, industry expertise and public preference.
The winning designer will have the opportunity to collaborate with Salomon on a future project, making the competition a product development mechanism.
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The program supports Salomon’s push beyond outdoor by tapping emerging designers working at the intersection of outdoor and fashion, an area where the brand is expanding its positioning in China.
An investment in future creativity.
It builds a recurring relationship with the local creative community around the brand’s hub, one of Shanghai’s most concentrated clusters of fashion forward retail and design culture.
What reads like a participatory “crowd design” exhibition is, in practice, a planned pipeline.
China’s outdoor fashion category has grown significantly since the pandemic, with trail running and technical aesthetic hybrid product helping recruit urban consumers ages 18 to 35. Salomon sits at the intersection of that demand: a technical brand from the French Alps with strong trail and winter credentials, now cultivating a creative footprint in Shanghai that speaks to consumers who want mountain heritage legible in a streetwear context.
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