With adidas winter club, the streetwear brand launches a project that brings together sport, design, and storytelling, celebrating the arrival of winter through a creative vision: a limited-edition capsule collection created by Roman artist and tattooist Gabriele Anakin.

The starting point for this collection was a blank sheet of paper. When adidas contacted Anakin to bring the capsule to life, they gave him what he himself defines as “the most difficult input an artist could receive”: total freedom.

“The input adidas gave me is the one no artist would ever want, basically: do whatever you want. For me it’s very difficult not to have a starting point, even when I’m tattooing and someone asks me to do whatever I like,” he explains. That absolute freedom, however, soon became an opportunity to explore a new visual universe and translate it into his own illustrative language.

To interpret the world of winter sports, Anakin looked back in time. By digging through images, posters, and visual archives, he arrived at a very specific aesthetic: that of 1930s cartoons, from which he drew shapes, dynamics, and attitudes for the “puppets,” the small characters that animate the capsule.
“In my imagination, when I illustrate or tattoo, I often start from animation. That’s how these puppets were born, inspired by that historical period, the 1930s, which with their irony make you smile—like the snowball chasing the little skier. Let’s say there’s a lot of positive energy, the kind you expect in any sport.”

The result is a pop reinterpretation of winter culture, achieved through a series of far-from-easy choices. As Anakin himself explains, “The most interesting challenge was selecting the final puppets. You only see a few of them here, but I made an endless proposal to adidas. It was hard to discard some of them, because I had grown almost emotionally attached.”

In short, adidas winter club has been described by the tattoo artist himself as fun, fresh, and irreverent. The capsule includes t-shirts, hoodies, and pants, and will be available in limited edition at selected adidas stores across Italy, while stocks last.