Needles x Albino & Preto Is the BJJ Collab That Nobody Expected but Everyone Needs

Summary

• Albino & Preto and Needles have announced a collaboration collection
• The butterfly, a core symbol within Needles’ visual language, anchors the collection’s design identity, carrying dual meaning across both brands as a motif of transformation, adaptability, and evolution drawn from both Japanese fashion and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu culture
• Campaign imagery features Fabio Clemente, Zata, and Vedha, BJJ practitioners chosen for their longstanding personal connection to Tokuro-San and their relationship with A&P

Needles and Albino & Preto have announced a collaboration dropping June 1. The collection draws its design language from the intersection of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu culture and Needles’ refined Japanese craftsmanship, with the butterfly serving as the object that makes both worlds legible in a single image.

The butterfly’s presence in the collection is not decorative. Within Needles’ design vocabulary it has functioned as a recurring motif across decades of output, a symbol the brand has used to signal transformation and a departure from convention. Within BJJ, the butterfly carries equivalent weight: it references a specific guard position built around adaptability and fluid movement, but more broadly it maps onto the art’s underlying philosophy — that progress is achieved through constant evolution, resilience under pressure, and the willingness to change. For a collaboration between a Japanese fashion house and a BJJ-rooted apparel brand, finding an icon that functions fluently in both systems is a design problem that most collaborations skip. A&P and Needles resolved it by starting there.

The collection’s material approach blends technical function with elevated design, applying Needles’ Japanese craftsmanship and vintage sportswear sensibility to garments informed by the demands and culture of martial arts training. That combination — the precision of Japanese garment-making meeting the physical specificity of BJJ apparel — gives the collection a construction brief that neither brand would arrive at alone. The result sits between training wear and considered streetwear, occupying the same cultural space as the people who wear both.

The campaign talent selection reflects the same philosophy. Fabio Clemente, Zata, and Vedha are not brand ambassadors in the conventional sense. They are BJJ practitioners with genuine personal ties to Tokuro-San, developed through years of training together in New York, and longstanding members of the A&P community. Their inclusion in the campaign imagery is not a casting decision but a documentation of the relationships that preceded and shaped the collaboration itself.

The Needles x Albino & Preto collection releases June 11 via the A&P website and app, in-store at Nepenthes Los Angeles, and in-store at Nepenthes New York. Nepenthes Tokyo follows June 12.