FW26 CITY TUNDRA
Business as usual in a city that never warms up
For FW26 we set out to change how Moose Knuckles talks about winter. Cold isn’t something you escape. It’s part of the city, a force you live with every day. We called that world City Tundra.
Nobody in the campaign fights the elements. Our cast moves through them unbothered. No one explains it and no one mentions the cold. Their attitude carries the story, and the jacket is what makes that attitude possible
Role: Brand Creative Director.
Agency: Excetera.
Director: Jamie Webster.
Photography: Conor Cunningham, Ed Gumuchian.
Styling: Skye Kelton.
To make City Tundra real, we built it. With Excetera, we turned a backlot in Bucharest into a city of its own, with five vignettes and a fictional brand universe tucked into every corner.
There was La Moose, a restaurant. Knuckles Repairs, a repair shop. An MK coffee cup and an MK chess clock, small details made to reward a second look. We cast five people who already move through the world this way: Miles Chamley-Watson, AntsLive, Isabella Lovestory, Mel Ramirez and Blondey McCoy.
To announce our new Michigan Avenue store, we wheatpasted City Tundra across Chicago.
Snowbound street scenes and close portraits went up under the L tracks, across construction hoardings and through Fulton Market, with one line and an address: Chicago, we’re here.
We ran it in early fall. The posters showed a blizzard on sunny sidewalks, a city getting a preview of the winter it already knows is coming.
Role: Art Direction
CHICAGO WE’RE HERE
KADEWE BERLIN
We took City Tundra off the screen and into a window at Berlin’s most famous department store. The campaign plays on a screen in KaDeWe’s corner window, and below it the snow comes into the room as sculpted drifts and ice formations. The product sits right in the middle of it, worn on mannequins. A small city skyline frames the scene, so the window works as one more corner of the world we built.
Role: Concept mockup, video edit, execution with the Moose Knuckles Visual Merchandising team.
COMPLEX CON
At ComplexCon we packed City Tundra into a shipping container. I wrote the brief and concept, then worked with Matte Projects and Coffee House Industries to turn an industrial container and booth into a city buried under a storm.
The phone booth was the game. Visitors stepped inside, picked up the receiver and got a cryptic code for a chance to win a jacket or sticker packs. There were no leaderboards and no screens to tap. The whole game was the world itself, and a reason to step inside it.
The details carried the story through the booth: a CCTV camera feeding a frost-covered CRT, a metal counter with the MK logo embossed under a dusting of snow, and Loading Crew tees made for the event.
Role: Brief, Concept and Creative Direction through execution. Production: Matte Projects. Fabrication: Coffee House Industries.
