Willo Perron on his sound-inspired collaboration with Vans at Milan Design Week: ‘does frequency have an architecture?’

Imagine an HR Giger nightclub aboard Alien’s Nostromo, or Christopher Nolan’s Inception soundtracked with Sicario’s noises of clank and doom. Walls falling inwards like chromium dominoes, a mirrored ceiling rising from head-height to a dizzying, cathedral apogee. Multiple light shafts forming a white icicle forest, reflective tiles performing warped, digitally choreographed waves of discombobulation.

This is Checkered Future: Frequency Manifest, a multisensory installation presented by the Vans footwear brand at the Triennale Milano during Milan Design Week 2025. Showstopping, scary, synesthetic and genuinely immersive, the artwork was created by Willo Perron as a physical manifestation of the invisible elements – frequencies, waves, vibrations – that inspire the Old Skool 36 FM shoe, the latest offering by the OTW arm of Vans.

Willo Perron for Vans at Milan Design Week 2025

Working with musician Tim Hecker, the Los Angeles-based, French-Canadian creative director and cultural polymath who has designed a runway show for Chanel, stage sets for Rihanna, Drake and Lady Gaga, and also co-founded the multidisciplinary studio Perron-Roettinger with Brian Roettinger, wanted his Milan installation to posit and answer questions.

‘In their purest elemental form, what do sound frequencies look like?’ says Perron, who grew up attending Montreal raves and warehouse parties in the 1990s. ‘If colour has an emotion, does frequency have an architecture? Is a bright, tall and narrow room all about high-frequency sound? Does a wider room with a taller ceiling and wider floorspace have more bass and saturation?’

Also, why not make a soundtrack for a building? ‘We go through the complexities and emotions of building and lighting and decorating, but we never consider the idea of scoring a space – composing emotional cues and moods for architecture with music and sound.’

Central to the artwork is a sloped, grid-work embankment designed for viewers to lean against and stare upwards during the Checkered Future: Frequency Manifest installation’s smoke and mirrors extravaganza. A former skater himself, Perron based its ramped angles on a decades-long memory of Norman Engleback’s Southbank in London, the subterranean freeriding space beloved of skateboarders since the 1970s. ‘Oh, the installation grid is definitely skate-able,’ says Perron.

As for the shoe itself, the Old Skool 36 FM features a modern reinterpretation of Vans’ famous waffle pattern, comprising a compartmentalised cupsole construction that mimics modular waveforms. It is completed with an engineered-knit upper and tongue and side stripe in 3D-injected TPU, replicating the design of the brand’s ‘Old Skool’ sneakers, a perennial footwear classic.

The Old Skool 36 FM sneaker is available from vans.com

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