Nestled inside a repurposed industrial warehouse in a quiet pocket of Brooklyn sits the atelier of Melitta Baumeister. The studio feels more like a working lab than a traditional fashion space, where ideas are realized, tinkered with and reworked in real time. While it may appear pristine and polished for the day’s visit, the remnants of leftover materials and racks of archival clothing hint at a studio perpetually mid-process.

Tools and works-in-progress exist side-by-side in Baumeister’s workshop. Tucked between boxes of orders from the eponymous label’s latest Nike drop are hand-carved platform heels from its inline women’s footwear. Look closer and, between another stack of boxes, you’ll find screen-printing equipment built entirely by hand. Less discreet is the full-scale storefront constructed inside the studio itself, used to shoot the brand’s Vomero Premium and Pegasus Premium campaigns with Nike. Functioning as a physical extension of the brand, everything here feels considered, intentional, and built by hand.

If you’re new to Melitta Baumeister and assumed the recent Nike drop was a breakout moment, you’d be mistaken. The German-born designer has been building toward this for years. An obsession with clothing that began at age 12 eventually led Baumeister to Parsons, where she graduated with an MFA in fashion design in 2013 before launching her label. For her, fashion was never just about appearance, but rather how it makes you feel. “What you wear is who you are, and you can build yourself through fashion,” she explained in an interview. That sense of intention has since been stitched into every part of the brand’s DNA.

Not long after, Baumeister was joined by her partner Michal Plata, who now serves as the brand’s art director. The two first crossed paths years earlier while studying in Germany, connected by a shared fascination with form, proportion. and unconventional design. Today, Plata, a former BMW car designer turned multidisciplinary artist, operates as the force behind much of the brand’s physical world beyond the garments.

The wood beams that divide the studio into two levels were cut and installed by him. The screen-printing unit tucked between boxes was also built in this very space. When Nike pushed back on the idea of sculpting Baumeister’s head out of butter for a part-performance, part-footwear showcase for the launch of their “Run Like No One Is Watching” project in Fall 2025, Plata made it himself. That instinct to figure it out and build it anyway runs through the entire team.

Speak to senior designer Larissa Falk, who was one of Baumeister’s earliest interns, and that same ingenuity reveals itself through the brand’s favored materials. “It starts with fabrics. When something comes in that feels right, we explore it,” she says. “If something is missing, we create our own fabric to get there.” Within Baumeister’s studio, a pleat is revisited, reworked, and reinterpreted until it behaves differently. A skirt is engineered, sometimes with foam and sometimes through tension, to hold a shape that feels unfamiliar but intuitive.

The resulting garments feel less like conventional ready-to-wear and more like wearable structures. Ballooned sleeves jut outward with architectural volume. Monochrome dresses fold and twist around the body through boning, pleating, silicone, wool, and silk. Oversized silhouettes challenge the instinct to dress for what’s traditionally flattering, instead asking the wearer to adapt to the shape itself. And yet, despite their sculptural appearance, comfort and movement remain central to the experience of wearing them. Her work blurs the line between fashion and sculpture, transforming everyday dressing into something more thoughtful, experimental, and physical.

A similar rejection of convention extends to how the brand presents itself. Rather than participating in the traditional runway system, Baumeister often favors immersive installations, intimate presentations, and performance-driven environments that allow the clothes to exist in motion rather than spectacle alone.

Hands-on experimentation is what gives Baumeister’s work its distinct point of view. Known for challenging traditional silhouettes with sculptural forms that feel as futuristic as they are minimal, as architectural as they are free, her work is grounded in direct experimentation. “I work directly on the body instead of sketching first. I even drape on myself instead of mannequins because I want to feel how fabric moves,” she says. It’s also what earned her the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2023. In an industry driven by trends and scale, often flattening design into something uniform, her work moves in the opposite direction. Imperfection is absorbed into the process and the making remains visible.

That philosophy becomes even more apparent in her debut Nike collaboration. Baumeister’s spin on the Nike Vomero Premium and Nike Pegasus Premium reimagines familiar running silhouettes through her own eyes — quite literally. Served in “Total Orange and Orange Chalk,” the Vomero Premium arrives with a smudgy hand-painted exterior intentionally designed to embrace imperfection. Black smears wrap across the shoe’s mesh upper and sculpted sole unit, making the sneakers feel less distressed than physically worked on. The “Volt” Pegasus Premium follows a similar approach, this time featuring a giant eyeball stamped across the medial side of the shoe.

“The eyes are Melitta’s. The hand inside the shoe is Melitta’s. Everything is personal,” Plata explains. Her eye motifs appear throughout the collaboration, from the side panels and insoles to the bottom of the Vomero’s visible Air Zoom units, where graphics of both eyes sit beneath the sole. Hidden underneath the insole is another detail entirely: Baumeister’s closed eyelid.

In a year already saturated with releases, the two silhouettes have quietly become some of 2026’s most interesting sneakers. At a glance, they read as pre-worn, neon-bright runners, but that impression doesn’t hold. Each pair carries the evidence of process. The hand-painted finishes aren’t simulated but applied directly, layer by layer. “We wanted to make our hands dirty, which we literally did, and painted the shoes by hand,” Baumeister says. “We convinced Nike to do that on the assembly line as well, so every shoe is painted by hand. None of the shoes are exactly the same.”

Even the tissue paper inside the box follows that same logic. Created by wrapping the shoe itself and painting directly onto it, it captures a full imprint of the form in a single pass. As Plata explains, “The paper itself was developed in a similar way, wrapping the shoe and painting over it. What you see is the actual graphic. This is not stamped, this is not printed. It’s done in one go.”

That level of consideration extends beyond the product and into how it’s distributed. When discussing how the team approached the release, Plata recalls their initial online drop: “It wasn’t active. It was set up to go live behind a 32-digit password. In six minutes, all our inventory was gone.” He pauses. “So at that point, we were like, who’s actually going to be able to get these?”

It was a new experience for the team. In response to bots overwhelming early access, they reworked the buying process to slow things down. Instead of a standard checkout, users were prompted with questions before completing a purchase, allowing the team to be more deliberate with selection. The response extended far beyond the fashion crowd or expected sneaker audience. “People left crying. That’s not what you expect from a sneaker launch,” Plata says of the project’s original activation back in the fall of 2025. “We wanted to create something intimate. Something people feel.”

The work of Melitta Baumeister has never been about reaching everyone or selling out. With Nike, it was about “creating something fresh that people can feel was made with care,” as she puts it. The focus is on reaching the right person: someone willing to engage, to understand and to wear something that doesn’t immediately resolve itself. As Plata explains, “If something is cool enough, gender becomes less important. It’s a different proposal of coolness. Not obvious, not traditional.”

In that way, the Nike collaboration doesn’t feel like a departure from her practice. It reads as an expansion, proof that even at scale, craft can still lead within one of the world’s largest sportswear ecosystems.

Let’s start from the beginning. How did you come into fashion, and when did it become something more than just clothing?

Melitta Baumeister: I always loved to mix clothes because my mom had sewing machines and I was surrounded by fabrics. I met this woman when I was around 12 and she said she was changing people’s lives because of how they feel after wearing her clothes, that they feel like a changed person. That was very inspiring to me. It made me see fashion not just as something I liked to wear, but as something with purpose. With age, I understood how important it is. What you wear is who you are and you can build yourself through fashion. That made making clothes feel more important.

Was your entry point always design, or did it begin more with the act of making?

Baumeister: It was really the making aspect first. I loved to create clothes. I would rather make things than look at magazines. I went to tailoring school when I was 16. After that, I understood there’s more to making. I started to love aesthetics and drawing. It became a transition from making into understanding design.
Your work today feels rooted in physical process.

How did your education shape that way of thinking?

Baumeister: I did my undergrad in Germany at a school influenced by Bauhaus. It started with painting and sculpture, so it was very artistic and not fashion-focused. It was a slow transition from art into design. Then I moved to New York for my MA at Parsons.

That artistic foundation shows up in how you approach form. When did working directly on the body become central to your process?

Baumeister: I was always interested in how fabric drapes. Draping was very important. I would work directly on the body instead of sketching first. I even draped on myself instead of mannequins because I wanted to feel how fabric moves. So I created silhouettes through dimension, not through flat sketches.

You launched the brand immediately after Parsons. What did those early years teach you about building something from the ground up?

Baumeister: I never thought I could do it right away. I thought I needed more experience. But New York has this spirit of just doing it. I had to learn everything while doing it. Production, sales, operations. I did pattern-making myself and I did sales myself. It was the best way to learn. Even if you hire people, if you don’t understand the process, you can’t guide them. So I learned everything from the ground up.

That hands-on approach extends beyond the garments. How important is it for the team to physically build things rather than outsource them?

Michal Plata: I think it’s just years of doing things ourselves. We’re not too stuck up to do something. If we need to build something, we just do it. If we need to paint something or put up a floor, we do that. So we know we can get a lot done even without a big team.
Your garments challenge traditional ideas of fit.

How do you think about shape in relation to the body?

Plata: We always say you bring the body, we bring the shape. It’s not about forcing someone into a silhouette, it’s about placing a form onto the body. That allows for more openness. A shape can be strange and still feel right.

Baumeister: We always try to balance it. It should be wearable, but still have volume and presence. It’s about giving someone confidence in everyday life. You don’t feel over the top, but you still feel special.

Your process seems less about sketching and more about reacting in real time. How do pieces actually come together?

Plata: Usually brands start with a base block. We don’t have that. Everything is either built from something before or we start completely from scratch. We don’t sketch much. Sculptural shapes don’t translate well on paper. Instead, we negotiate with the fabric. We try to understand what it wants to do so we don’t have to force structure into it.

Baumeister: It’s really about feeling the fabric around the body. That’s where the shape comes from, not from drawing first.

Where does material experimentation come into play?

Larissa Falk: It starts with fabrics. When something comes in that feels right, we explore it. If something is missing, we create our own fabric to get there.

Plata: Sometimes the fabric dictates the silhouette.

Falk: For example, we wanted something strong but couldn’t find the right material. So we experimented with bonding foam, printing, and painting until we found the right balance.

There’s a tension in your work between control and imperfection. How do you define something as “finished”?

Plata: We don’t accept something being unfinished. But imperfection can be beauty. A handmade accident can be valuable. We’re very controlled, but our idea of what good looks like is broader. Something unpolished can still feel perfect.

Baumeister: Everything comes from a hand in the end. Even if it’s not perfect, those imperfections feel magical. There’s always intention behind it.

Before Nike, how did you think about collaboration as a brand?

Baumeister: We were very cautious. We didn’t want something transactional. We wanted a partner that gives creative freedom. Nike has the capacity to be playful and support that level of production. It allowed us to push things further.

The Nike project feels like an extension of your practice rather than a departure. What was the intention going into it?

Baumeister: Our idea was to have a hands-on process and make the shoe feel less industrial, more sculptural and more played with. I wanted it to feel very experimental. Even though it is a colorway, it shouldn’t feel like we’re choosing a color and applying it. We wanted to make our hands dirty, which we literally did, and painted the shoes by hand. We convinced Nike to do that on the assembly line as well, so every shoe is painted by hand. None of the shoes are exactly the same.

You also built a narrative around the shoe. Where did that come from?

Baumeister: The idea was “Run like no one is watching.” It’s a play on “Dance like no one is watching.” It’s about running in everyday life, especially in a city like New York. It’s not about your Strava achievement; it’s about starting to run or being a beginner and running freely.

Plata: The eyes are [Melitta’s]. The hand inside the shoe is [Melitta’s]. Everything is personal.

The project resonated beyond fashion, especially within sneaker culture. Why do you think that is?

Plata: If something is cool enough, gender becomes less important. It’s a different proposal of coolness. Not obvious, not traditional.

Baumeister: It’s about creating something fresh that people can feel was made with care.

Your activation created an emotional response that most product launches don’t. Why is that important to you?

Plata: People left crying. That’s not what you expect from a sneaker launch. We wanted to create something intimate. Something people feel.

You’ve avoided traditional runway formats. Why question that system?

Falk: It takes time, money, and the right people. We would want to do it differently.

Plata: Fashion is conservative in format. We’ve tried alternatives like videos and storytelling, but they don’t get the same attention. Often the coverage misses the point. That discourages us from participating in the system as it is.

How do you evolve while still allowing people to understand what you’re building?

Plata: We used to push for constant change. But customers need time to understand something new. Now we allow repetition so people can connect the dots.

Falk: It’s like teaching the customer the language of the brand.

After more than a decade, what continues to drive the work forward?

Baumeister: It’s a very difficult question. I just want to keep pushing things forward. To do things we didn’t expect we could do. To keep that spirit of play. Play as your life depends on it.