MAPS FORM, a fashion design and creative direction studioMAPS FORM, studio de design de mode et de direction créative

We map what doesn’t exist yet and give it form.Nous cartographions ce qui n’existe pas encore et lui donnons forme.

Garment design and creative direction for independent brands. New York, working worldwide.Design de vêtements et direction créative pour les marques indépendantes. New York, partout dans le monde.

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MapsForm

Fearless

Nº02 · Creative direction · Commissioned · 2026

The jersey is armour.

In the arena the jersey is not kit. It is worn over belief, and the belief is the real garment.

Client: DAREFEARLESS
Role: Concept, Creative Direction, Art Direction
Disciplines: Sportswear · Campaign · Cultural research
Production: Hybrid image production
Year: 2026

The challenge

Read laamb as a fashion system rather than as a sport.

DAREFEARLESS sent me a jersey. Laamb — Senegalese wrestling — is the largest sport in the country and its visual language is almost entirely absent from fashion. I grew up around it. The brief I set myself was to build the world the garment came from, and to treat it with the seriousness usually reserved for European football kits.

The idea

The amulets are worn over the jersey, not under it.

Wrestlers enter the arena wearing gris-gris — leather amulets on braided cord, prepared by a marabout. They go on top of the kit. Nothing about the jersey is allowed to obstruct them. Which means the jersey is not the outermost layer and was never designed to be. It is a ground for something else.

Sportswear that carries belief. A kit designed to be worn beneath protection rather than to be looked at alone. Bootleg-sublime graphics — the tribal lion, the three stars, the stretched sans — treated with couture seriousness instead of irony, worn into the light and stained with arena sand.

The world

The graphic is designed to be interrupted.

One subject, one arena, hard afternoon light. Front, back and the detail that carries the whole idea. Senegalese flags stay in frame. Nothing is styled out.

The amulets fall across the chest mark rather than beside it, the back graphic is given the frame where nothing obstructs it, and sand is treated as a finish rather than as damage. The result is a kit that reads as incomplete until it is worn correctly — which is what the campaign is arguing.

Direction & execution

Concept and creative direction. The world, its law, and the art direction on every frame. Casting, styling direction, arena, light and lens. Cultural research, sequencing, naming and copy. I did not design the garment.

Hybrid image production. Directed against fixed references for the supplied garment, arena, light and lens, so the jersey stays consistent across all three frames. Generative production was the imaging method; the concept, direction and edit are mine.

Outcome

Delivered to DAREFEARLESS. First commissioned campaign world for MAPS FORM.

Garment: DAREFEARLESS. Concept, creative direction and art direction: Mapathe Fall. Laamb is a living cultural practice; this work is an interpretation, not a documentary record.

All work · The map

We map what doesn’t exist yet and give it form.

Garment design and creative direction for independent brands. New York, working worldwide.

Nº01 THORN, Garment Design. A design study in four chapters and thirty-two pieces: outerwear and footwear, knit and jersey, denim and leather, night jersey.
Nº02 Fearless, Creative Direction. In the arena the jersey is not kit. It is worn over belief, and the belief is the real garment.
Nº03 Teinture, Creative Direction. A maison whose first material is not cloth but pigment and time.
Nº04 Plates, Creative Direction. Three ceremonies photographed at the moment they should have been abandoned.

Write to studio@mapsform.com · Instagram @maps.form

MAPS FORM, a fashion design and creative direction studioMAPS FORM, studio de design de mode et de direction créative

We map what doesn’t exist yet and give it form.Nous cartographions ce qui n’existe pas encore et lui donnons forme.

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Garment designDesign de vêtements

Campaign creative directionDirection créative de campagne

Brand worlds & visual identityUnivers de marque & identité visuelle

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