There’s a particular vibration in DIRT’s SS25 collection that resists reduction, an almost anti-linguistic quality that moves less like a narrative than a texture. The collection’s campaign, shot at the Filmore Hotel in Toronto, is a quiet meditation on utility and estrangement, staging each silhouette within a space that feels neither inhabited nor entirely abandoned, a mise-en-scène suspended in limbo where function takes on the aura of fiction and the practical becomes uncanny.
Late-‘90s athletic silhouettes, hiking soles, mesh panels, utility-coded textiles, these are the familiar motifs of the brand’s offering for the season. But familiarity, here, is only the point of entry. What follows is an intentional erosion, a slow warping of purpose into gesture, where the functional becomes fetish and the practical, suddenly, a provocation. “This was a reset,” the designers tell me, “a return to what made us excited about DIRT in the first place,” a statement that reads less like a clean slate and more like an archaeological impulse, an excavation of formative instincts, early misfires, and what they describe as “a playful, slightly naive energy” that once guided their earliest works, now reentered not to be refined but reanimated, distorted, and hyper-expressed.
The result is a collection that feels like a dream misremembered. Silhouettes from the late 1990s flicker against newer material renditions, proportions are toyed with, inflated, collapsed, and pulled into surreal proximity with themselves. The Range sole, for instance, “borrows from late-’90s hiking outsoles,” but instead of resting in tribute, it is “abstracted into something that feels more sculptural than rugged,” not a direct citation but a hallucinated echo of the original object, one that has passed through layers of aesthetic interference and emerged haunted by its own utility.
There is a productive tension throughout SS25, a push and pull between stability and distortion, nostalgia and estrangement, material weight and chromatic lightness, and rather than resolve that tension, the collection seems to luxuriate in it, pushing further into the friction. “We’re always thinking about wearability,” they say. “Our shoes need to survive real life, whether that’s pulling an all-nighter or strutting around NYC,” a statement that reads almost like a dare, as if the act of survival itself were aesthetic, as if function and performance were always already entwined. What they’re describing is not contradiction but convergence, a design logic that actively refuses the binary between the expressive and the usable, instead folding them into one another until what appears ostentatious is revealed to be strategic, and what looks utilitarian reveals a latent eroticism.
“We started with earthy, hiking-inspired tones,” the designers explain, “then added fluorescent shades that reflect how we both love to layer colour in our own wardrobes.” But these brights—acid pinks, chemical oranges, synthetic greens—are not used to highlight or contrast. They are deployed to destabilize. “There’s something energising about those fluorescent tones when they feel a little off-kilter,” they added. “They bring optimism and a touch of humour.” And it is precisely that humour, slippery and ambivalent, that gives SS25 its edge. These are not colours worn to blend. They are worn to rupture, to puncture space, to be seen and misread.
Materiality carries that same ambivalence. The monochromatic Range Thongs, perhaps the collection’s most distilled gesture, were the result of exacting experimentation. “Getting the colour exactly right across a range of materials: leathers, rubbers, plastics… it was a bit of a challenge,” they say, “but it really paid off.” Elsewhere, waxed leather, rubberized finishes, and sporty mesh collide with tactile intentionality. “There’s a kind of tactility we’re always chasing,” they say, “something that makes you want to reach out and touch it.” But tactility here is not just a sensual impulse. It is a conceptual one. To reach, to touch, to test the surface is also to acknowledge surface as limit. What looks soft is hard. What looks impractical is durable. SS25 functions through these reversals.
At its core, this is a collection about thresholds. If it had a sensation, the designers tell me, it would be “like stepping barefoot onto warm pavement, a little gritty but grounding.” The warmth of the ground, the friction beneath the foot, the low-grade discomfort that coexists with pleasure. “We want people to feel a bit bolder when they wear it,” they say, “like they’re stepping into something slightly outside their usual rhythm, but still completely themselves.” And that is precisely what the collection offers. Not transformation, not transcendence, but friction; a gentle productive dislocation. DIRT SS25 gives us aesthetically and conceptually a collection somewhere in the in-between. It offers an articulation of what it means to dress like you’re both remembering and refusing the future.
Photography: Shaza Tarig
Model: Ashtyn Williams
Production/ Styling: Meg Summers
Art Direction: Dirt
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.