What if the runway was never really the point?
For Spring/Summer 2027, Domenico Formichetti brings PDF to New York for its first runway show in the city, but instead of presenting a collection about basketball, he builds a world around everything basketball has come to mean. Sport, music, clothes, ego, community, aspiration. The court becomes a meeting point.
Born in Abruzzo in 1993 and based between Milan and the wider international creative scene, Formichetti has built PDF – Project Domenico Formichetti – around the instinctive collision of streetwear, extreme sports, music and contemporary youth culture. Launched in 2023, the label is still young enough to feel hungry, but increasingly difficult to place inside a single category.
Perhaps that is its strength.
For PDF, basketball is not a moodboard. It is a social language.
The collection looks towards the visual codes of 1990s basketball – oversized uniforms, graphic statements, athletic proportions – but stretches them until they become something else. Sportswear gets bigger, looser, louder. Performance clothing loses its technical seriousness and becomes attitude. Proportion becomes the main form of expression.
It feels less like dressing for the game and more like dressing for everything that happens around it.
Lil Yachty, who collaborated with Formichetti on the styling, is central to this universe. So is the cast: Rich The Kid, CAMO, Liz Cambage and a mix of musicians, athletes and emerging figures from the creative community. They aren’t simply wearing PDF. They are part of the culture the clothes are trying to describe.
At the centre of the collection sits PDF x Champion, bringing the heritage of an American sportswear institution into conversation with a Milanese label that has grown up in a very different cultural moment. The collision is not nostalgic. It is generational.
Because basketball has never really stayed on the court.
It lives in music videos and locker rooms, on concrete courts and front rows, in the way a jersey can become a uniform long after the game is over. It is one of those rare cultural spaces where sport can turn into fashion, fashion into identity, and identity into a community.
This is where PDF feels most interesting.
There is no strict separation between athlete and artist, spectator and performer, fashion kid and sports fan. Everyone occupies the same visual space. The runway simply makes that invisible network visible.
And perhaps that is what a young fashion brand should be doing in 2026: not inventing another aesthetic, but recognising the cultures already happening around us and giving them a new shape.
For its New York debut, PDF doesn’t ask us to look at basketball.
It asks us to look at the world basketball created.
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