■ Project: Mostro

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Details

Wirebound Publication

297mm x 210mm

2025

Overview

PROJECT: MOSTRO is a speculative editorial publication that reimagines the re-release of Puma’s Mostro sneaker as a classified military experiment. Developed as my Final Major Project for university, this work explores the intersection of fashion, subcultural influence, and narrative design through the lens of covert operations, surveillance aesthetics, and archival storytelling.

The brief, set by Kieran from La De La Studio, challenged us to engage with a brand or product in a way that repositions its meaning, relevance, or cultural legacy. I was immediately drawn to the Puma Mostro, a sneaker first released in 1999 and known for its unconventional silhouette, spiked outsole, and hybrid inspirations from sprinting spikes and surf shoes.

Rather than treat the shoe as a traditional lifestyle product, I chose to frame it as an anomaly, something too advanced, too disruptive, and ultimately buried beneath layers of redacted history. What emerged is a concept rooted in world-building: a publication that treats the Mostro as the product of a top-secret government experiment, designed to test aesthetic influence and cultural infiltration. Drawing on tropes from military documentation, Cold War paranoia, and analogue intelligence formats, PROJECT: MOSTRO blurs the line between reality and fiction. Pages are filled with intercepted transmissions, agent dossiers, behavioural data, and censored memos, designed to feel like a recovered field manual from a forgotten program. The design process leaned heavily into typography, texture, and tone. I experimented with distorted type, declassified layouts, coded language, and redacted visuals to craft a believable world. Each detail, from agent code names to deployment zones, supports a larger mythology: that the Mostro was never just a sneaker, but a carefully engineered tool for cultural disruption.