Author Archives: Ida Torres

Veo’s Rover Trike Actually Solves Shared Mobility’s Biggest Gap

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Standing scooters have a way of quietly sorting the world into two groups: people who can hop on and zip off, and everyone else. If you’ve got balance issues, a bad hip, low vision, or you’re just pushing a stroller and can’t manage handlebars with one arm, shared micromobility has never really been built with you in mind. Veo’s new Rover trike is the first real attempt I’ve seen to close that gap.

Launched this summer in Denver, Rover is a three-wheeled, seated electric vehicle that looks less like a scooter and more like a cross between a golf cart and a rickshaw, minus the driver. It’s low to the ground, has a cushioned seat, a throttle instead of pedals, and baskets front and back that can haul up to 100 pounds of groceries, bags, or a folded walker. Fifty of them are currently rolling through downtown Denver as part of the city’s shared fleet, alongside the usual scooters and e-bikes.

Designer: Veo

What makes this launch worth paying attention to is not the hardware so much as who Veo built it for. The company spent nearly two years working with disability advocates, older adults, and more than 20 organizations, including the Parkinson’s Foundation and Capitol Hill Village, before finalizing the design. That’s not a marketing footnote. It’s the difference between a company slapping “accessible” on a spec sheet and one that actually sat with riders who’d been shut out of shared transit for years.

Anna Zivarts, who directs the Nondrivers Alliance and wrote the book on what it means to navigate American cities without a license, put it plainly: shared micromobility has excluded a lot of disabled people and anyone uncomfortable balancing on two wheels. That’s a quiet admission for an industry that’s spent the last decade selling itself as the future of urban freedom. Freedom, it turns out, only counted if you could already stand up and steady yourself at ten miles an hour.

Rover tops out at 10 mph, which sounds unglamorous until you consider what that speed is doing. It’s not chasing the thrill of a scooter; it’s chasing confidence. A three-wheeled base means no tipping over at a stoplight. Throttle assist means no straining up a hill or nursing a bad knee through a pedal stroke. The vehicle is 2.5 feet wide, narrow enough to navigate a normal bike lane without becoming a hazard to itself or anyone else on the path.

I like that Veo didn’t try to disguise who this is for. A lot of adaptive design gets watered down into something “universal” so it doesn’t look like a medical device, and in the process it loses the features that actually made it useful. Rover doesn’t do that. It looks like what it is: a stable, cargo-friendly, seated ride that happens to also work fine for a tourist who doesn’t want to fall off a scooter on cobblestones. Good accessible design tends to work that way. It never needed to be secretly for everyone. It just needed to actually work for the people it was built for first.

Denver makes sense as a proving ground. The city already runs one of the largest and most varied shared micromobility programs in North America, with about 9,000 vehicles in rotation, so a new form factor doesn’t have to fight for infrastructure that isn’t there yet. Veo says it’s watching rider feedback closely before deciding whether Rover expands citywide or beyond Denver altogether, which feels like the right amount of caution for a vehicle type nobody has really tested at scale before.

Whether Rover becomes a fixture in other American cities depends on things design alone can’t solve: pricing, docking logistics, whether cities are willing to give trikes the same curb space as scooters. But as a statement of intent, it’s hard to argue with. Shared mobility spent a decade optimizing for speed and cool factor. Rover is the first one I’ve seen optimize for who actually gets to ride at all.

The post Veo’s Rover Trike Actually Solves Shared Mobility’s Biggest Gap first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Fire Pit That Quietly Solved the Smoke Problem

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Every fall, the same ritual plays out in backyards across the country. Someone drags out the fire pit, gets the flames going, and within twenty minutes the whole group has rearranged their chairs at least three times, all chasing the same goal: getting away from the smoke. It’s such a normal part of fire pit ownership that most people just accept it as the cost of doing business. You want warmth and ambiance, you pay for it with watery eyes and a jacket that smells like a campfire for the next two days.

That’s the actual problem the AirFlow 8-Panel Fire Pit is built to solve. Smoke isn’t some unavoidable side effect of burning wood outdoors. It’s mostly a sign that the wood isn’t burning completely, and Sanyo Works, the Japanese company behind this design, spent decades in metal processing before deciding to fix that at the source instead of asking people to just deal with it.

Click Here to Buy Now: $325

The engineering here is simple once you understand it, even if the payoff feels like magic in practice. Eight removable panels lock together into an octagonal cylinder, and each panel has holes at the base that feed fresh air straight to the wood for primary combustion. That’s step one, and it’s not particularly novel on its own. What makes this pit different is what happens next. The heated air doesn’t just disappear. It rises through a double walled cavity and exits through vents near the top, where it reignites gases that would normally just float away as smoke. That second burn is called secondary combustion, and it’s the reason a Yanko Design review of this exact pit called the smoke reduction “physics, not a marketing claim.” I appreciate that framing, because it’s easy for outdoor gear to lean on vague promises. This one has a mechanical reason for working the way it does.

I’ll admit the modular panel system is what actually sold me on this thing as a design object, separate from the smoke science. You can pull one or two panels off mid-evening and change how the fire breathes entirely. Want a roaring blaze while you’re cooking dinner? Leave it fully assembled. Want something calmer for the part of the night where everyone’s just talking and the temperature has dropped? Pull a panel and let it settle. Most fire pits give you one setting, and you either build a bigger fire or a smaller one and hope for the best. This one lets you adjust the actual airflow, which feels less like a workaround and more like the product was designed by people who understood fire before they started welding steel.

The materials back that up too. The interior uses corrosion resistant stainless steel that’s meant to age into a natural patina rather than just rust out and get replaced, while the exterior panels are built to take the abuse a real campsite delivers. There’s a grill grate attachment included as well, which turns the whole setup into a cooking platform without messing with the airflow logic that makes the pit work in the first place. Ash falls and collects at the bottom, so cleanup is mostly a matter of dumping it out rather than scraping char off a grate.

None of this matters much in July, but fall is exactly when a fire pit stops being a novelty and starts being the actual center of gravity for a backyard. Evenings get dark earlier, the air turns crisp enough that people actually want to stand near a flame, and suddenly the fire pit you own either makes those nights better or gives everyone a reason to go back inside. At $325, this one isn’t an impulse buy, but it’s priced like something meant to be a long term fixture rather than a seasonal throwaway.

What I keep landing on is that good outdoor design usually solves a problem people stopped noticing because they’d just gotten used to it. Nobody wakes up thinking their fire pit smokes too much, they just accept it as part of the deal. The AirFlow 8-Panel Fire Pit quietly argues that they shouldn’t have to.

The post The Fire Pit That Quietly Solved the Smoke Problem first appeared on Yanko Design.

The $20 Monkey That Secretly Carries 13 Tools on Your Keyring

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One of the simple toys I really enjoyed as a kid was Barrel of Monkeys, where you had to pick up one monkey using another monkey until you’d linked all the mischievous-looking little guys together. It was both fun and frustrating, back when there weren’t so many screens competing for our attention.

Taking inspiration from that nostalgic childhood toy, the Cheeky Monkey Carabiner Multi-Tool is a monkey-shaped gadget that packs in all the functional tools you might need, whether you’re heading out camping, hitting a trail, or just running your everyday commute. In one tiny tool, you get 13 functions, plus a built-in conversation starter, since this little guy is guaranteed to grab people’s attention.

Designer: Lucky Jack Gear

There are, of course, plenty of keychain multi-tools on the market, but most of them are generic, Swiss Army knife style metal slabs. The Cheeky Monkey stands out because of its unique shape, turning a plain utility object into something with real personality. But the Double-S design isn’t just about looking cute. Having two integrated hooks built into the monkey’s silhouette means you get a more stable attachment point and a free hang point, compared to the single hook you’d find on a standard carabiner.

Again, this isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s a genuinely multi-functional tool that includes wrenches, hex keys, screwdrivers, a ruler, and a line cutter, all packed into one monkey-shaped piece of steel. Each curve and cutout does double duty, working as both structure and tool edge at the same time. It also requires zero extra effort to carry, since it’s designed to live wherever your keys already live: your keyring, your belt loop, your backpack strap, you name it. It may not fit neatly in your pocket (unless you’ve got an especially roomy one) because of its shape, but it’s still easy enough to clip on and forget about until you need it.

That “forget about it until you need it” part is really the whole point. Lucky Jack Gear built the Cheeky Monkey around a simple truth: the tool you actually have on you beats the toolbox sitting in your garage every single time. Most of us already own a screwdriver, a wrench, or a bottle opener somewhere in a drawer. The problem isn’t that we don’t have tools. It’s that we never have them on hand when we actually need them. A wobbly hinge, a knot that won’t budge, a package that needs opening, a screw that’s worked itself loose: these little annoyances always seem to show up exactly when we’re nowhere near our toolbox. The Cheeky Monkey solves that mismatch by living on your keys instead of in a drawer, so it’s already there the moment you need it.

Made from solid steel, it’s built to handle real use, not just sit around looking cute. It’s meant to be clipped onto a backpack for a weekend camping trip, hooked onto a belt loop for yard work, or tossed onto a keyring for daily errands, and it should hold up to all of it. Reviewers so far have backed that up, with the product carrying a perfect five-star rating, and Lucky Jack Gear’s broader catalog boasting more than 2,000 five-star reviews.

At $20, it’s an easy impulse buy, but it’s also an easy gift. It hits that sweet spot of being useful enough for the outdoorsy person on your list and playful enough for someone who just likes fun, quirky gadgets. Stocking stuffers, White Elephant swaps, birthday add-ons, or a “just because” present for the person who’s impossible to shop for, the Cheeky Monkey checks a lot of boxes without costing much.

At the end of the day, the appeal of the Cheeky Monkey Carabiner Multi-Tool comes down to something pretty simple: it turns a piece of childhood nostalgia into a genuinely useful, always-on-hand tool. It doesn’t ask you to change your habits or remember to pack anything extra. It just clips onto whatever you’re already carrying and quietly waits for its moment to shine, whether that’s tightening a loose screw, snipping a stray thread, or cracking open a well-earned drink at the end of a long hike. For $20, that’s a pretty good trade for something that might just become the most-used item on your keyring.

The post The $20 Monkey That Secretly Carries 13 Tools on Your Keyring first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pat McGrath’s New Pandora Charms Never Need Reapplying

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I sometimes have to reapply the same lipstick four times in one afternoon and still walked out looking like I hadn’t worn any at all. That’s the quiet tax of makeup: the color is gorgeous for exactly as long as you remember to maintain it, and the second you forget, the whole effect disappears with your coffee cup. Pandora and Pat McGrath just designed around that problem entirely, and the fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Turn the lipstick into metal. Turn the gloss into a stone. Stop asking anyone to touch it up.

The collaboration launching October 8 is a 17-piece capsule of charms, rings, earrings, and pendants, and it reads less like a jewelry line and more like McGrath’s makeup kit got cast in gold. There’s a lips motif rendered as a signet ring, a beating heart charm, tiny lipstick tubes dangling with crystal detail, medallions stamped with what basically amount to beauty mantras. Prices land between $58 and $200, which keeps it in Pandora’s usual lane of reachable luxury rather than pushing into fine jewelry territory. Sølve Sundsbø shot the campaign, and the imagery has that glossy, high-pigment feel you’d expect from anything with McGrath’s name on it.

Designer: Pat McGrath for Pandora

What actually makes this interesting to me isn’t the charm shapes themselves, it’s the design logic underneath them. McGrath told ELLE the process started with color, the same way her makeup work always does, and that she wanted “the visual language of beauty: pure pigment, gloss, crystal, texture and light” to become something wearable rather than something you reapply every three hours. That’s a genuinely different starting point than most jewelry design, which usually begins with a metal or a stone and works backward. Here, the inspiration was a lipstick bullet, a mascara wand, a swipe of gloss, and the challenge was translating something inherently temporary into something that survives a dishwasher, a shower, a decade.

I’ve always thought the actual genius of Pandora’s charm bracelet model was never the charms, it was the permission structure. You build the thing yourself, one piece at a time, and it becomes a low-stakes way to commit to an aesthetic without fully committing to it. Beauty products work on the opposite logic entirely. You buy the palette, you experiment for a week, and then it sits in a drawer because reapplying a full look every morning is, frankly, a lot of effort for most people. This collection quietly splits the difference. You get McGrath’s color instincts and her theatrical, maximalist sensibility, but instead of a fifteen-step routine, you clip on a charm and you’re done until you decide to take it off.

There’s also something honest happening in how McGrath talks about the crossover. She’s described makeup and jewelry as coming from the exact same instinct, the desire to adorn yourself and shift how you feel without changing who you actually are. I don’t think that’s marketing language, I think it’s just true. Nobody puts on a bold lip or a statement ring because they need to. People do it because it changes the story they’re telling that day, and both objects disappear the second you stop wanting to tell that story. The difference is one requires a mirror and five minutes you don’t always have, and the other survives an entire flight, a gym session, a full workday, without a single touch-up.

The gifting angle here is obvious and Pandora clearly knows it, timing this for the run into holiday shopping season. But I think the sharper read is what it says about where beauty and jewelry are heading as categories. Cosmetics brands have spent years chasing permanence, tattoo-style brows, semi-permanent lip stains, anything that survives past a single wear. Pandora and McGrath just skipped the science project entirely and went straight to metal. It’s a strange kind of solution, solving a beauty problem with a jewelry answer, and it works precisely because nobody tried it quite like this before.

The post Pat McGrath’s New Pandora Charms Never Need Reapplying first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nobody Will Guess This Stool Actually Has Wheels

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Walk into any modern office, studio, or collaborative classroom and you’ll spot the same compromise everywhere. Furniture either sits still and looks good, or it moves and looks like it rolled out of a hospital waiting room. Task chairs with exposed casters get the job done, but they broadcast “corporate cubicle” the second you glance at them. Anyone trying to build a space that feels warm, creative, or design-forward has had to choose between mobility and mood.

That tension is exactly what Hirotaka Tako set out to dissolve with Allround, a stool for the Japanese furniture brand NII, where he serves as creative director. The wheels are there, tucked completely beneath the base, so the stool reads as a clean, sculptural object first and a mobile one second. Nobody glances at it and thinks “conference room reject.” It just looks like a good stool that happens to glide when you nudge it.

Designer: Hirotaka Tako

I’ve always had a soft spot for furniture that solves a problem without announcing that it’s solving anything. Allround does that well. The whole piece is built around a single design idea, the full-round fillet, which is engineering language for a curved edge treatment, but it also doubles as wordplay for “all-rounder,” a piece meant to adapt to whatever room it lands in. That kind of double meaning in a name usually feels like a stretch. Here it actually tracks, because the stool genuinely looks built for anywhere: a design studio, a retail floor, a kitchen island, a hallway that needs the occasional extra seat.

The construction is aluminum and steel, standing 750mm tall with a 415mm by 415mm footprint, small enough to tuck away without feeling flimsy. There’s a taller barstool version too, with a swiveling top and a third disc built in as a footrest, which is a smart touch for anyone who’s ever perched on a bar stool with nowhere to rest their feet. Both versions ship flat-pack, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Furniture that disassembles for shipping and storage tends to age better in real use, since offices and studios rearrange constantly and nobody wants to haul a fully welded stool across a building.

Color is where Tako lets the design breathe a little. Alongside a brushed hairline aluminum finish, Allround comes in six finishes with names like Gloss Ultramarine, Gloss Vermilion, and Satin Pale Olive. That range signals something about who this stool is for. It’s not trying to disappear into beige office neutrality, and it’s not cosplaying as a designer showpiece either. It sits in a middle lane, confident enough in color to hold its own in a photographed interior, restrained enough not to fight with the rest of a room.

What strikes me most is how the hidden casters change the emotional register of the object. A visible wheel base tells your body “this is temporary, this is a workstation, don’t get comfortable.” A hidden one lets a stool feel permanent and considered, even while it’s doing something mechanically clever underneath. Tako himself put it simply, saying the stool’s rounded form and finishes create a “delicate, melting impression” despite the robust metal frame. That contrast between softness and sturdiness is doing a lot of the emotional work here.

None of this reinvents seating. It’s a stool with wheels, dressed up smart. But there’s real value in a piece of furniture that quietly expands what a shared space can do without making anyone stop and think about ergonomics or floor plans. Design like this tends to get labeled minimalist, and sure, the silhouette earns that word. What it actually offers is flexibility that refuses to look like flexibility, which is a much harder trick to pull off than it sounds.

Whether Allround shows up in American offices and studios the way it clearly will in Japanese ones remains to be seen, but the appetite for furniture that moves without looking like it’s built to move isn’t going anywhere. NII has a stool ready for the moment more people start asking their furniture to do two jobs at once.

The post Nobody Will Guess This Stool Actually Has Wheels first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s Hidden Concert Hall Fits Only 600 Fans in London

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Watching live concerts is one of the greatest joys of my life. There’s something really special about seeing artists you love perform their hearts out and hearing the whole crowd sing along with them. But as I’ve grown older, and as tickets have gotten more expensive, I sometimes wish I could enjoy live music in smaller, more intimate venues instead.

Apple Music seems to have felt that same tension, and it’s one of the reasons behind its newest venture: Apple Music Hall. It’s the brand’s first dedicated live-music venue, and it’s tucked inside the iconic Battersea Power Station in London, right underneath its UK headquarters.

Design: Apple

If you’re picturing something meant to rival the biggest arenas and stadiums in the world, you’d be wrong. This space was intentionally designed to be small and exclusive, built for artists to put on one-off, special shows for a limited number of fans. The music hall holds only 600 people, which gives both the artist and the audience a real chance to connect in a more intimate setting than your typical concert experience. It’s also fully reconfigurable, so a show can be set up as all-seated, all-standing, or a hybrid of the two, depending on what the artist wants that night.

What really makes the space feel special, though, is how carefully it was designed around the building it lives in. Battersea Power Station is one of London’s most beloved landmarks, a decommissioned coal-fired plant from the 1930s known for its dramatic Art Deco architecture, and Apple leaned into that history rather than covering it up. The venue’s interior features heritage brickwork and exposed structural steel joists that pay homage to the building’s industrial roots, while four illuminated, streamline-style arches sweep across the space as a nod to its original Art Deco detailing. Bronze balconies sit between those arches like box seats, echoing the look of the power station’s historic oriel windows.

Even the foyer carries that same balance of old and new, with a cozy seating area, a large screen, glass walls overlooking the Thames, and a staircase that ties the whole space together. The project was led in-house by Kristina Raspe, Apple’s vice president of Apple Places, which says a lot about how much thought Apple put into treating this building like a product in its own right, rather than handing it off to an outside design firm.

But this venue isn’t just about what happens inside its four walls. It’s also built so artists can broadcast their performances to a much bigger audience, even if that audience is only watching online. Apple Music Hall comes equipped with a 48-speaker spatial audio sound system and 16 hardwired cameras, which Apple says is more than any other venue of its size anywhere in the world. There’s also a full production facility attached to the venue, including two professional-grade recording and mix studios. That means an artist can perform a live show, record it in Spatial Audio, have it mixed to broadcast quality, and release it to the entire world, all without ever leaving the building or bringing in outside equipment.

Apple Music Hall officially opens its doors to the public on September 28, and honestly, it feels like exactly the kind of concept that’s been missing from the music world for a while. We’ve all gotten used to streaming everything from our couches, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it can start to feel a little disconnected after a while. Apple Music Hall seems built to close that gap, giving a lucky 600 people an unforgettable night in the room while still letting the rest of us tune in and feel like we’re part of something happening in real time.

For someone like me, who still dreams about the days of catching a favorite artist in a room small enough to actually see their face, this feels like a genuinely exciting step forward. It won’t replace the thrill of a packed arena show, and it’s not trying to. But it might just be the closest thing we get to bottling that up-close, once-in-a-lifetime concert feeling and sharing it with the whole world.

The post Apple’s Hidden Concert Hall Fits Only 600 Fans in London first appeared on Yanko Design.

This 27-Inch Japanese Shoehorn Quietly Disappears Into a Clear Acrylic Stand

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As you get older, some bones and muscles refuse to cooperate, creaking even when you’re doing something as ordinary as putting on your shoes. Using a shoehorn can be a challenge in itself, since most designs force you to bend over and strain your back just to slide your foot into a sneaker or a dress shoe. On top of that, shoehorns aren’t exactly the most attractive tools to leave lying around by your front door. You don’t need a shoehorn that’s pretty, but it sure helps to have one that either blends into your entryway or stands out as a piece of decor you’re actually proud to display.

The Invisible Shoehorn is exactly the kind of tool you’ll want to display rather than hide. It’s a long-handled, stainless steel shoehorn that “disappears” into a clear acrylic stand when it’s not in use. This clever design solves both problems at once: the bending-over issue and the aesthetic issue. The optical trick makes the metal shoehorn look like it’s floating in midair, or vanishing completely, turning a purely functional tool into a minimalist decorative object you won’t want to shove into a drawer once it’s done its job.

Click Here to Buy Now: $299

Designed by Kairi Eguchi for Takeda Design Project, the Invisible Shoehorn stands about 700 millimeters tall, or roughly 27 inches for those of us who don’t think in metric. That height is the whole point: it’s tall enough that you can slip it between your heel and the back of your shoe while standing up straight, no crouching, no wobbling, no throwing out your lower back on a random Tuesday morning. The shoehorn itself is crafted from polished stainless steel that tapers from a rounded handle down to a thin, curved tip, smooth enough that it won’t snag or run your socks the way cheaper, rougher shoehorns sometimes do.

What really sets this piece apart is the acrylic stand. It’s shaped to mirror the metal shoehorn exactly, so when you dock the two pieces together, the stainless steel appears to hover in midair against the clear background. Seen from a few feet away, or in the dim lighting of a typical entryway, the whole object reads as a sleek, abstract sculpture rather than a household tool. It’s a small bit of visual sleight of hand, but it’s the kind of detail that turns something you’d normally hide in a closet into an object you’d happily leave out on a console table or shoe bench.

Compare that to the shoehorns most of us grew up with: cheap plastic ones from the drugstore, or the metal long-handled versions from mobility brands like Vive Health, which are functional but were never going to win any design awards. Even OXO, a brand practically synonymous with smart, ergonomic housewares, makes shoehorns and shoe-helper tools built around that same “no more bending” philosophy, and its versions still lean strictly utilitarian, designed to work well but never really designed to be seen. Most of these options run somewhere between $10 and $30, and they absolutely get the job done, but they’re not something you’d want sitting out in plain view. The Invisible Shoehorn, at its higher price point, is clearly aiming at a different shelf entirely. It’s less a mobility aid tucked away in a bathroom drawer and more a piece of everyday design you’d be proud to own, closer to something you’d spot in a design showcase than in a pharmacy aisle.

That’s really the appeal here. The Invisible Shoehorn benefits anyone dealing with a stiff back, tight hips, or knees that don’t love bending anymore, but it’s just as appealing to design lovers who want their entryway to look intentional instead of cluttered. It solves the everyday annoyance of a tool that’s either buried in a drawer or, worse, an eyesore parked awkwardly by the door. Instead, you get something that works exactly when you need it and quietly disappears, both literally and stylistically, when you don’t. For anyone who has ever grumbled about bending over to wrestle a shoe on, or wondered why every shoehorn on the market looks like it belongs in a hospital supply closet, this one is worth a second look.

The post This 27-Inch Japanese Shoehorn Quietly Disappears Into a Clear Acrylic Stand first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nobody Wants This Life Jacket Hidden in a Tote Bag

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Picture the most unremarkable object you own. A canvas tote, maybe, the kind you grab off a hook without thinking, sling over one shoulder, and forget about until it’s holding your groceries or your gym clothes. Now picture unzipping that same bag, pulling it over your head, and yanking a cord that inflates it into a life jacket, because the subway platform under your feet just turned into a swimming pool. That’s Lifeline, a conceptual piece by New York artists Phil Le Brun and Gabriela Mestriner, and it exists because a very real, very unfunny problem has been building under this city for years.

New York’s subway was engineered to handle a major flood about once every five years. That math stopped working a while ago. Nearly 200 stations have flooded during major storms over the past several years, Hurricane Ida alone dumped more than three inches of rain in a single hour back in 2021, and this past summer the city logged roughly two severe weather warnings a week from June through August. Riders have waded through knee-deep water and clung to walls just to get out of a station. That’s the problem Lifeline is responding to, not with a fix, but with a mirror.

Designers: Phil Le Brun and Gabriela Mestriner

The bag itself is genuinely well made, which is part of what makes it unsettling. Mestriner dismantled a standard nylon life jacket and heat-welded the pieces back together into the shape of a tote, using about three yards of nylon, two polyester zippers, four yards of black cord, and four adjustable metal locks. A zipper runs through the center of the flap and body, wide enough to fit over someone’s head, and there’s a detachable rain hood tucked inside for good measure. Pull the straps and the whole thing inflates in about fifteen seconds. None of this was drafted on a computer first. The team built, tested, took it apart, and rebuilt it by hand until it worked.

The color is doing a lot of the talking too. Lifeline is a loud, unmissable orange, the same visual language as a highway cone or a hazard sign. Le Brun has called it exactly that, the language of emergency, and it’s a smart choice because it refuses to let the object blend in the way most safety gear quietly does. Life jackets on a plane are tucked under your seat where you never see them until it’s too late to think clearly. This one is worn like an accessory, which is either darkly funny or the most honest design decision in the whole project, depending on your mood that day.

What actually gets me about Lifeline isn’t the engineering, it’s the framing. Le Brun described the whole project as an “essential that shouldn’t exist,” and that phrase does more work than any statistic could. We’ve gotten so used to climate disruption showing up as background noise, a delayed train, a canceled flight, a flooded platform you just have to walk around, that we rarely stop to ask why any of it has become normal enough to accessorize. Mestriner put it well when she talked about the project sitting at the intersection of convenience and emergency, privilege and vulnerability, and how that weight never falls evenly across people or neighborhoods.

Lifeline isn’t for sale, and it was never meant to be. It launched at the start of Climate Week as what Le Brun calls a narrative object, something built to spark a conversation rather than solve a logistics problem. That’s a fair goal for a five person art collective working with heat-welded nylon in a studio, and I don’t think anyone involved believes commuters should actually be shopping for inflatable totes. But the object does something a chart or a headline can’t quite manage. It takes an abstract, slow moving crisis and makes it wearable, immediate, almost absurdly personal.

I keep coming back to the photos of the bag being converted into a life jacket inside an actual subway station, styled like a fashion editorial one second and a survival scenario the next. That whiplash is the whole point. New York keeps moving through disruption because that’s what the city does, but Lifeline is a pretty sharp reminder that resilience and denial can look identical from the outside, right up until the water starts rising.

The post Nobody Wants This Life Jacket Hidden in a Tote Bag first appeared on Yanko Design.

adidas Actually Built a Sub-$300 Shoe With Record-Breaking DNA

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Most runners will never own the shoe that broke the two-hour marathon barrier. The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 that Sabastian Sawe and a handful of other elite athletes wore into the history books this year was never really built for the rest of us. It’s fragile by design, priced somewhere north of $500, and made for maybe one perfect race before it’s done. That’s the actual problem adidas set out to fix with the Adizero Adios Pro 5: how do you take genuinely record-breaking technology and put it on the feet of someone training for their local Sunday marathon without asking them to spend half a paycheck or babysit a shoe that might not survive the training block that gets them there.

The answer, released globally on September 22 at $275, is a shoe that borrows its most important ideas from the Evo 3 and builds them into something you can actually train in, race in, and buy again next season. That distinction matters more than it might sound like it does. Super shoes have spent the last several years chasing marginal gains that only elite athletes could feel, at price points that only enthusiasts could justify. The Pro 5 is adidas’ attempt to close that gap, and from what’s been tested so far, it mostly succeeds.

Designer: adidas

The headline feature is something called ENERGYRIM, a carbon-fiber-infused ring that runs around the perimeter of the midsole instead of the carbon rods threading through the center, which is how most super shoes have handled propulsion since the category exploded. Freeing up that center space means more room for pure Lightstrike Pro foam directly under the foot, which adidas says translates to a 9 percent bump in energy return over the previous version. I’m generally skeptical of percentage claims in shoe marketing, but the logic here actually checks out from an engineering standpoint. More foam where your foot actually lands should matter more than a rod you never directly feel.

What’s harder to fake is the weight. The Pro 5 averages 177 grams, about 23 grams lighter than the Pro 4, which doesn’t sound dramatic until you’re 20 miles into a marathon and every gram left on the shoe is a gram you’re not fighting anymore. adidas has leaned into this a little too cheerfully in its own marketing, but the number holds up across early reviews, and it’s the kind of change runners actually feel rather than just read about.

The geometry shift is the quieter story here, and probably the more interesting one. Stack height moved to 39mm in the heel and 35mm in the forefoot, with the drop dropping from 6mm to 4mm. That’s a flatter ride than the outgoing model, and it’s a deliberate move toward something closer to how the Evo 3 actually rides. adidas isn’t hiding that this is a trickle-down shoe. It’s stating it outright, which I appreciate more than the usual vague marketing about “innovation.”

The upper got real attention too. Lightlock 2.0 adds anti-slip foam pods around the heel, addressing the one complaint that’s followed nearly every carbon racer since the category started: your heel slipping around mile 20 when your form starts to fall apart and you need the shoe to hold its end of the deal. Underneath, a Continental rubber patch at the toe-off zone means grip doesn’t disappear the moment the road gets wet, which matters more than any spec sheet number if you’ve ever raced through a rainy start line.

None of this makes the Pro 5 a shoe for everyone. It’s still a race-day tool built for people chasing a number on a clock, not a daily trainer for easy miles. But adidas tested it with more than 25 athletes across Kenya, Ethiopia, and the US before bringing it to market, and that groundwork shows in a shoe that feels less like a marketing exercise and more like an honest attempt to hand serious runners a genuine piece of the tech that just rewrote what a marathon can look like.

The post adidas Actually Built a Sub-$300 Shoe With Record-Breaking DNA first appeared on Yanko Design.

Jennie’s adidas Superstar Actually Looks Like a Ballet Flat

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One of the biggest trends in sneakers and footwear in general over the past few years has been big brands rolling out their own take on “balletcore.” Personally, it’s a trend I hope sticks around, since the designs we’ve seen so far give me serious sneaker envy. They tend to strike the perfect blend between fashion and comfort, and for anyone who’s on their feet all day but still wants to look stylish, this aesthetic is one of the better options out there.

If you’re a fan of adidas and K-pop, specifically Blackpink, this latest collaboration with Jennie (who’s also a successful soloist in her own right) will be right up your soles. The adidas Superstar SQ Ballet marks the first pair of shoes Jennie has ever co-designed for any brand, which makes it a genuine collector’s item. But even if you’re not a K-pop fan, this is still worth a look if you’re after ballet-inspired shoes built for comfortable, everyday wear rather than actual dancing.

Designer: Jennie x adidas Originals

The Superstar has long been one of adidas’ most recognizable sneakers, but this version trades in the brand’s signature rounded shell toe for a square, ballet-flat-like toe box. Standard laces are gone too, replaced by an elastic closure that lets you slip into the shoes effortlessly. To complete the ballet look, a leather ribbon with a delicate bow accent runs across the vamp, giving the sneaker a softer, more feminine touch.

Don’t let the delicate detailing fool you, though. The upper is crafted from premium leather, built for durability and everyday comfort as much as style. An ultra-light EVA foam sole keeps it wearable from morning to night, and both colorways, off-white/black and black/off-white, lean into the “quiet luxury meets streetwear” mood dominating fashion now.

The Superstar SQ Ballet drops in two colorways, listed under style codes LB3786 (Off White/Core Black/Core White) and LB3787 (Core Black/Core Black/Off White), priced at $130 on adidas.com. It anchors a bigger capsule called adidas Originals by JENNIE, built around a concept she’s dubbed “Functional Grace,” which also includes reworked trackwear, wrap skirts, sheer layers, and knitwear.

On her vision for the line, Jennie said she wanted to bring together the elegance of ballet and the freedom of space as concepts for “softness and strength.” She added that reworking the Superstar was about bringing “the softness and restraint found in ballet, as well as the strength behind it,” to a shoe that still feels unmistakably adidas. Reportedly, the design took a full year to complete, which explains why every detail feels intentional rather than rushed.

This isn’t the first time balletcore has found its way onto a sneaker, and we’ve covered plenty of these hybrid designs before. Converse Japan gave the All Star its own ballet-flat makeover with delicate straps and a softer silhouette, while Nike added satin ribbons to its Air Rift “Black Swan” that you could wrap around your ankle for a more theatrical finish. Birkenstock even teamed up with Repetto, the French ballet shoe maker, blurring the line between sandal and slipper entirely. What sets Jennie’s Superstar SQ Ballet apart is that it isn’t just a licensed nod to ballet dreamed up by a design team. It comes from someone with a genuine point of view on softness and strength, backed by a full year of development instead of a quick seasonal push.

At the end of the day, balletcore sneakers like this one prove that comfort and elegance don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Whether you’re drawn to it because you’re a die-hard Blackpink fan, an adidas collector, or simply someone who appreciates a sneaker that can go from errands to dinner without missing a beat, the Superstar SQ Ballet earns its spot in the rotation. And if this trend keeps producing shoes this thoughtful, I, for one, hope brands never let balletcore leave the building.

The post Jennie’s adidas Superstar Actually Looks Like a Ballet Flat first appeared on Yanko Design.