Y-3'S NISI DEBUTS ON MARK GONZALES IN PARIS

Mark Gonzales is fifty eight years old and he is still moving through the streets of Paris for Y-3, the brand that put him on a runway in January wearing a bomber jacket painted like vandalism. The new video calls it creativity in motion, the exact phrase the brand used to announce a Fall Winter 2026 show that most people have already forgotten. That show, on January 24 at the Palais d'Iéna, is the real story here, and the shoe Gonzales wore on his feet that night is worth naming first.

The NISI Is Built On the Adidas Nizza, Not a Concept Shoe

The Y-3 NISI is the brand's first ever fully vulcanized sneaker, and it did not invent a new silhouette to get there. It takes the adidas Nizza, a low profile court shoe with decades of archive behind it, and rebuilds the upper in total canvas with a vulcanized rubber sole underneath. Vulcanization is the same rubber curing process that built the Vans Authentic and the Converse Chuck Taylor, cheap to produce, hard to kill, and until January it had never touched a Yohji Yamamoto pattern. Gonzales wore the NISI down the runway himself, which matters more than a lookbook credit. He has spent forty years testing whether a shoe can survive concrete, and a designer putting an untested vulcanized build on his feet first is a statement about confidence, not marketing. The same design office that just reworked the Y-3 Stan Smith into the SQ and Lo Pro for 2027 clearly trusts its archive raids to hold up under actual use, not just a step and repeat.

Chito Turned the Three Stripes Into a Beast

Chito is the graffiti artist responsible for the spray painted graphics across Gonzales' bomber jacket, and his signature line work does not decorate the three stripes so much as attack them. Y-3's longtime collaborator Chikami Hayashi handled the collection's more restrained artwork, and the two were placed in what the brand's own show notes called a combative dialogue, refined pattern work on one side, Chito's feral tagging on the other. A beast motif that first appeared on Yohji Yamamoto's own mainline runway crossed over into the Y-3 prints and onto the NISI's upper, which is the kind of internal cross reference that only exists if a house has shown at Paris Fashion Week for over twenty years. Gonzales in that jacket is not a celebrity cameo. He is the one person on the guest list who has actually made a living off the exact kind of vandalism Chito was reproducing in spray paint.

January 24. Palais d'Iéna. Skate Ramps Instead of a Runway.

The show itself skipped the flat runway for a set built around motion, and the collection leaned into motorsport by way of a collaboration with the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team, technical wear and race adjacent layers moving through the space like a pit crew. Denim returned to the Y-3 line for the first time in over a decade, a detail easy to miss next to an F1 partnership but a real shift for a house that has mostly avoided raw cotton. Skate culture supplied the counterweight to all that motorsport polish, and Gonzales was the obvious person to carry it, since Krooked, the skateboard company he founded with Deluxe in 2002, has been putting his graphics on decks for twenty four years now. Fashion brands borrow skate imagery constantly. Very few of them put an actual twenty four year old skate company's founder on the runway to prove they mean it, the same instinct that pushed Nike SB to put nine skate shops in soccer jerseys rather than license a generic skate graphic.

Skip the Reel. Check the Founding Date.

Transworld Skateboarding named Gonzales the most influential skateboarder of all time in December 2011, ahead of Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen, and that ranking is still the fact that makes this new footage worth more than a pretty shot of Paris streets. A younger ambassador wearing the NISI would read as product placement. Gonzales wearing it reads as an endorsement from the person whose entire career is the reason vulcanized soles matter to skateboarding in the first place. Chito's beast graphic already resurfaced this year on Y-3's Spring Summer 2027 presentation at Palais Brongniart, proof the collaboration was never a one season stunt. The NISI has no confirmed price or release date yet, so this is a wait, not a buy, but the shoe is built to outlast the campaign that is currently selling it, and that is the harder thing to fake.