“I Enjoy Disruption”: Inside Salehe Bembury’s Expansion Into Uber-Colorful Football Kits
When PUMA announced its partnership with Salehe Bembury two years ago, the brief was clear: The prolific sneaker designer and German sportswear giant were to “usher [in] a new era for basketball.”
But the collaboration ended up becoming something far bigger.
Sure, Bembury has been actively rethinking PUMA’s basketball offering, personally selecting Tyrese Haliburton to become a PUMA athlete and then creating his signature shoe, the Hali 1. (Bembury says he “recently finished designing” the Hali 2.) However, Bembury also took it upon himself to bring borderline psychedelic mesh to PUMA running shoes before moving to football, designing goalkeeper kits to be worn by PUMA’s 11 national federations during the 2026 World Cup alongside TRVL WEAR, a range of bespoke off-field gear.
“This has been one of my favorite partnerships because it’s allowed me to exist in multiple spaces,” Bembury says. “I believe industrial designers have a unique ability to apply their design perspective across an extremely diverse range of projects because versatility is such an important part of the discipline. Once you establish a design language and a point of view, you can begin applying those tools to entirely new categories and problems.”
In the past decade, Bembury’s design perspective — a whimsical blend of squiggly lines and bright colors — has led him to carve complex swirling patterns into Crocs clogs, re-imagine basic New Balance shoes into flaming hot statement sneakers, and launch his own line of engineered footwear with proprietary cushioning inspired by squishy kids’ toys. His newest PUMA range is different not only because it’s themed around football, but also because footwear isn’t the main focus.
“True heritage and DNA are the most valuable things that any brand can possess, and both the World Cup and PUMA have an incredible amount of that,” Bembury says. “The first step in the process was honestly the most fun for me because it gave me the opportunity to research deeply. I got to study the history of the World Cup, the culture surrounding football, and PUMA’s own design archive.”
Bembury was tasked with imagining what goalkeepers — the only players with a different, typically more colorful, kit than the rest of the team — would wear during football’s biggest competition. For Portugal, that meant a bright-pink kit covered in Bembury’s signature swirling lines, while Switzerland’s keepers will wear all-black accented with a grey illustration of a mountain. Austria’s shotstoppers have large blue flowers covering their sky blue kit.
“I enjoy disruption. Within my footwear practice, I’ve always tried to maintain a balance between disruption and digestibility,” Bembury says. “When it came to the World Cup project, a lot of the questions I was asking centered around what rules could be broken and how we could offer something that felt different from what the audience was traditionally used to.”
“At the same time,” he adds, “I think balance is what makes design successful. If disruption is the only objective, you can easily create something that feels inaccessible or difficult to connect with. For me, the tension between familiarity and newness is where the most successful design tends to exist.”
That approach extends to TRVL WEAR, where Bembury aimed to “honor the heritage and identity of the countries,” while also “presenting something that felt new.” The colors and patterns from the goalkeeper kits are largely translated onto casualwear that consists of tracksuits and tees informed by archival PUMA KING designs. Plus, of course, a sneaker: Bembury and PUMA’s Velum 1, a runner with 5D-printed mesh sitting atop PUMA’s pinnacle NITROFOAM performance cushioning, arrives in a UV-reactive finish that changes color in the sunlight.
It all releases on June 4 via PUMA (prices ranging from $60 to $240), exactly a week before the first World Cup game kicks off. Bembury is most excited about watching French defender Jules Koundé, a player he says “represents a more modern version of the athlete where sport, fashion, and culture all naturally intersect,” while also being “really disciplined and composed” on the pitch. And once the World Cup winner is crowned, Bembury has big plans to reach more sports.
“I’d love to design within the fishing space at some point,” he says. “I did a lot of fishing with my dad growing up so there’s a real sense of nostalgia and personal connection there. I also think fishing presents a really interesting set of design problems because you’re dealing with water, weather, durability, and utility all at once. As a designer, I’m always interested in creating tools that improve experiences.”
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