The fashion-meets-trailwear partnership returns for SS26 with shrouded sneakers, mutant XT-MM6s, and enough gorpcore tension to survive another season
Some collaborations burn bright, drop once, and disappear into resale folklore. Others keep mutating. MM6 Maison Margiela and Salomon clearly belong to the second camp.
For Spring/Summer 2026, the two brands are back with another release, continuing their strange and highly successful dialogue between alpine performance gear and Margiela’s more anonymous, off-kilter language. The collection is set to arrive April 29 through MM6 and Salomon’s online stores, their boutiques, and selected retailers.
The centrepiece this time is the Cross Dust, a new silhouette that looks less like a sneaker and more like something engineered for a future pilgrimage. Its covered upper gives the shoe an almost sealed, protective quality, while MM6’s numeric branding sits across the surface like a quiet act of defacement. Early previews show the model in monochrome black and khaki versions, both leaning into the sculptural side of trail footwear.
Alongside it, the collaboration brings back the XT-MM6, the partnership’s now-recognisable hybrid model. This season, it appears in three new colourways: black, volt yellow, and off-white. The shape keeps Salomon’s technical DNA intact, but MM6 pushes it into stranger territory, turning a performance object into something closer to a fashion artefact.
That has always been the strength of this pairing. Salomon brings the functional skeleton: grip, structure, outdoor credibility. MM6 brings the distortion: anonymity, numbers, odd proportions, and the feeling that the object has been slightly misfiled from another system. Together, they make sneakers that feel both practical and emotionally unavailable.
It also arrives at a moment when trail shoes have fully crossed over from niche outdoor culture into fashion’s everyday uniform. But where many gorpcore-adjacent sneakers now feel softened by trend fatigue, MM6 and Salomon’s work still has a certain awkwardness to it — and that awkwardness is the point. These are not clean lifestyle sneakers pretending to have climbed a mountain. They are technical objects made a little uncanny.
