Former Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci has collaborated with NikeLab on a new capsule collection.

Inspired by the NBA, this new collection is created for a fictional basketball team dubbed the Victorious Minotaurs. Drawing from sportswear troupes, the designer has combined different generations of sportswear icons, to create an ultimate uniform of men’s and women’s pieces: a Nike Destroyer varsity jacket, a new Tisci-fied take on the Nike Air Force 1, an Oxford shirt, track pants and a series of accessories.

Tisci’s love of basketball is well documented – in fact he was even a promising young player before he suffered an accident and stopped – and at Givenchy his affinity for elevated sportswear saw him bring a new athletic edge to the storied fashion house. The current trend of sportspeople wearing shorts over tights? Givenchy menswear SS09. Here the aim was to create a collection that paid homage to the sport while mixing it with a sense of luxury, reflective of the current crop of NBA stars who mix sportswear and luxury goods with relative ease.

“I live for sports,” says Tisci. “There’s always been sportswear in my style, and I believe the mix of sport, street and elegance is really good… In the 90s, basketball players became kind of like rock stars, but now, they are more than rock stars. They’re superhuman — representative of historic mythology.”

Riccardo Tisci x NikeLab - Victorious Minotaurs from HERO magazine on Vimeo.

The NikeLab x RT Victorious Minotaurs collection launches 12th October in North America, 20th October in Paris and 21st October globally at NikeLab stores and nike.com/nikelab.