It all starts with a van. A 1995 Honda Acty Street, red, nicknamed the Habibi Express, parked at 1720 Llewelyn Avenue in Baltimore: the address of the Carpet Company warehouse, where brothers Ayman and Osama Abdeldayem built one of the most respected brands in skateboarding, starting from hand-screened t-shirts and skateboards made for their local community. A self-taught project, never intended to become a brand, that over time developed an unmistakable aesthetic: ironic, dense with references, capable of speaking to a community without ever compromising.
It is from that world that the collaboration with Salomon on the XT-Whisper Void was born. The silhouette is reinterpreted through Carpet Company’s lens with an almost philological precision: the glossy red echoes the van’s bodywork, the iridescent TPU inserts mirror the reflection of its windows, and the brand’s iconic “devil horns” complete the design alongside custom graphics that bring the full visual energy of Baltimore into the shoe. This is not a collaboration that simply places a logo on an existing silhouette — it is a reinterpretation with a precise narrative starting point, followed all the way through.
For Salomon, whose heritage is rooted in outdoor performance, this partnership continues a path of dialogue with cultural contexts where design and community meet. The XT-Whisper Void base preserves the technical functionality of the series, but the character is unmistakably Carpet Company. The result holds together two apparently distant worlds — Salomon’s technical precision and the instinctive DIY spirit of skate culture — without either one overpowering the other.
The edition is limited to 1,720 individually numbered pairs, a number that is no coincidence: it is the address of the warehouse where the Habibi Express is kept, and in many ways the place where everything began. Each pair is both a shoe to wear and a collectible object, and the distinction between the two is deliberately irrelevant. In Italy, the sneaker is available from today, May 21, at the Salomon Store Brera, at Corso Garibaldi 12 in Milan.
