Salomon names Heikki Salonen first creative director, leans into rugged style

Salomon just put a name on the thing it has been doing best for years: making gear that looks a little off, a little tough, and exactly right. With Heikki Salonen installed as its first creative director, the brand is not chasing clean luxury gloss. It is sharpening the weird, technical edge that already made Salomon sneakers feel like they came off a mountain, not a mood board.

The role, created on January 21, 2026, gives Salonen control over product design and brand creative direction across Salomon’s soft-goods ranges. Guillaume Meyzenq called it “a unification of brand positioning, consumer experience and product innovation,” which sounds corporate on paper but reads like a clear mandate in practice: keep the performance DNA, then make it look intentional. That is the interesting part of this hire. Salomon is not turning itself into a fashion label. It is formalizing the rugged style that already pulled sneaker people in.

Salonen is a sharp fit for that. He spent 12 years as creative head at MM6 Maison Margiela, after earlier work at Diesel, and he already knows how to make utility feel strange in a good way. He said, “I used to be a hiker in the fashion world, now I’m a fashion guy in the hiking world.” That line tells you everything about where this is headed: not a softened Salomon, but a more fluent one. WWD also said Salonen will work with longtime collaborator Laura Herbst, now studio director after stops at MM6, Céline and Maison Margiela, which suggests the design room will be run by people who understand both runway tension and gear logic.

For consumers, the forecast is pretty legible. Expect upcoming sneakers to lean harder into trail-tech detailing, protective overlays, aggressive lacing, and those deliberately awkward proportions that make Salomon look slightly alien next to a clean retro runner. The brand’s collaborations with MM6 Maison Margiela started with the fall 2022 collection and pushed Salomon farther into shoes, clothing and accessories, but the core attraction has always been the same: a product built for weather, terrain and abuse, then adopted by people who care how it looks on concrete.

That balance matters because Salomon’s credibility is not just fashion-adjacent noise. The brand was founded in 1947 in Annecy, in the French Alps, and still develops products at its Annecy Design Center in France. Its lineage runs through the 1957 Skade toe piece, the late-1970s SX90 ski boot, the 1980 SNS Nordic Boot and Binding System, the 1991 Monocoque ski design and the 2002 XA PRO trail shoe. Add the “Shaping New Futures: A Salomon Experience” showcase in Milan’s Tortona design district on February 6, 2026, plus a 2025 sales run that crossed $2 billion with about 35 percent growth, and the picture is clear: Salonen’s job is to package Salomon’s uglier, sharper instincts without sanding them down. That is where the heat is.