Mumbai-based visual artist Aditya Damle merges Jack Kirby’s Fourth World cosmology with Indian mythology and sci-fi fantasy for a limited-edition series of heat-press artworks created exclusively for the first Footlocker store launch in India.
When Adidas Originals and Footlocker came together to celebrate the opening of Footlocker’s first ever Indian store in Delhi, they wanted something that could only have been made for that moment and that place. The limited-edition artworks Aditya Damle created for the launch party gave customers the opportunity to personalise their own t-shirts and totes on the night, making the store opening itself the event rather than just the backdrop.
The brief was to showcase the iconic Sambas collection and Trefoil logo across two exclusive designs, adapted for A3 and A4 heat-press application. Damle brought to that brief a visual language he has spent years developing: one that pulls from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, with its monumental cosmic characters and crackle-energy aesthetics, and from the iconography of Indian mythology, layering those traditions together into something forward-facing and unmistakably his own.
“I have always aspired to create an aesthetic or a style which combines motifs and aspects of my cultural heritage as an Indian, while blending in aspects of futurism,” he says.
The result is a series he calls Future Streets: vibrant, bold compositions that place street style inside a celestial register, transporting the viewer into a realm where fashion, fantasy and myth occupy the same space. The Kirby influence is felt in the dynamism and scale of the imagery; the Indian mythological thread runs through the symbolic and decorative language that structures each piece. Together they make work that feels genuinely singular rather than assembled from borrowed references.
Aditya Damle is a visual artist based in Mumbai with over eight years of experience working across mythology, flora and fauna, comic books and science fiction. His collaborations include Adidas, Hyundai, Penguin Random House and musicians Raja Kumari and King.
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Future Streets, 2024. Heat-press artworks on Adidas Originals tees and totes, A3 and A4 format. Created exclusively for the Footlocker India store launch, Delhi, in collaboration with Adidas Originals and Footlocker.
