adidas Originals and Foot Locker bring back the FORUM silhouette: featuring Collective Last Night In Paris

adidas Originals have partnered with Foot Locker to bring FORUM out of the archives, an iconic silhouette rooted in basketball that channels the energy and spirit of the courtside.

This summer FORUM will be brought to life through a series of digital content that highlights basketball’s cultural impact across four European cities: Barcelona, London, Milan, and Paris. Following crews from each city as they reimagine tomorrow on their energy-driven journeys of expression. 

In London, we caught up with Jordon and Taurean, co-founders of collective Last Night In Paris on how they created their tribe, being part of the FORUM series and why slow progression is their game plan.

TJ: Why do you call yourself Jordon Wi-Fi?

J: The Wi-Fi – what does the Wi-Fi stand for? It’s kind of a name given to me by my peers and kind of very accidental but a lot of people say it’s because I’m connected or I have connections. 

TJ: So LNIP are self sufficient, you’re a creative collective, all of you wear lots of different hats, you do everything. You all specialise in your own areas to make your creative visions come to life. Music, film, fashion, art, you guys do it all. I know it’s kind of bigger than you 5 or 6 now – is this what you always imagined it to be when you guys started out and how did you go about finding your tribe?

J: I think when we started LNIP, the reason we’ve always said collective, and the reason we branded it the way we do is because I wanted it to always be bigger than one person. I wanted it to live forever and I didn’t want it to be a thing where, you know in the industry when something’s hot they rocket to the top and they’re the biggest thing for that time, and then they’re gone. Or you get the odd ones that rocket to the top and they stay there. For me, it was always about slow progression, trying to stay underneath the headlights, and being low key but always having it as a collective. We’re not a band, you can do whatever you want to do underneath the umbrella and we’ll help you, wherever we can help we’ll help. Even if you need someone bigger and better, we can help you with that. 

But how did we go about creating our tribe? It was a lot of just hanging around each other, and teaching each other this or seeing someone that has a hunger – they may not even know what they want to do – but we have the outlet of being able to maybe test out directing, test out shooting, swag you up, anything – we can find your lane. You can almost [be] like let me try this, let me try that. Jordon’s doing that, I might as well make some hoodies myself or I might as well rap now because these guys have said I’m good in the studio, why not? 

This thing for me could run for the rest of my life, [for the] next generation and the next generation, and be broader than music and film but if that’s the case we’ve got to be able to be in the same room for months, and chill. Take flights with each other, go on tour with each other, have arguments with each other and still come out the other side as friends first. 

TJ: Was basketball ever something you ever bonded over? 

J: We play basketball amongst ourselves all the time, we’re not very good though. Last Night In Paris is kind of like a sports team. We’re a basketball team, sometimes people turn up and they’re the star player, and some people go to training – you know what I mean? We have the risk, we have the support for each other, we have moments where we’re losing and we’ve got to have the team talk or there’s times where we’re winning and we’re like we’re unstoppable. So we relate. 

TJ: That was a good analogy, I like that. You guys have been together for a while, I think you guys have known each other since you were 15? Or something like that? 

J: I’ve known T from birth, same nursery, same [secondary] school

TJ: So it’s definitely a family affair 

J: Yeah. 

TJ: So how have you guys stayed in sync for that long? 

J: We were almost in sync before it became a thing.

T: We’re very similar, everyone’s very similar. We’ve got a lot of the same tastes, we all like the same stuff. We’d be friends even if we weren’t creatives so I think that’s the foundation of what we do. 

TJ: How’s the visual playlist going?

J: The way we did it, we just used behind the scenes images that we took, mixed it with some references we found on the web of inspirational basketball players that wore the same silhouettes, our song that we were listening to that day. 

TJ: Over the years how would you say your taste has changed in music, fashion and art? Has it been a drastic change or have you always been into kind of the same vein of things?

T: I mean it’s always got the same root to it. We like stuff that makes you feel good, stuff that makes you feel anything type of vibes, you feel me? It’s just about finding this feeling with something. We don’t really like things that are just fleeting. Our taste has always been rooted in that really. 

J: Our fashion change has gone through waves – but like T said it all roots into our idea of taste. We feel we have a certain taste, not saying it’s better or worse than anyone’s but it’s like we came from a place where we really appreciated art. He was a fine artist, he used to paint pixel paintings, I used to create these sculptures and we used to study and our teacher made us rework everything. So everything we used to do we used to find ways in which we can rework it, add a layer to it, add a texture to it, make it different to someone else’s because we’re all inspired by the same thing but you have to dig deeper. 

Discover more from GUAP’s Fashion section here