Jae Tips Brings the Bronx to Paris With a Blooming Tribute with Saucony

When Jae Tips unveiled his latest work at Paris Fashion Week in June 2025, a love letter to home. Titled Flowers Grow Uptown, the collection transforms the everyday greenery of the Bronx into a poetic statement about resilience, pride, and possibility.

That vision now comes to life through a continued partnership with Saucony, who has teamed up with Jae Tips for the sixth time. The collaboration merges Saucony with Tips’ storytelling.

Each of the four designs is tied to a plant rooted in the borough of Virgini, the Creeper, Sugar Maple, Perilla, and Poison Ivy. What might seem like an unexpected source of inspiration becomes a powerful symbol. In a cityscape that outsiders often overlook, these plants quietly flourish, thriving in unlikely corners, just like the creative energy that defines Jae Tips’ community.

The collection represents a personal reflection. The Bronx has long shaped Tips’ journey as a designer and artist, and this project distills those years of experience into a visual narrative. By embedding botanical references into the colorways, he offers a reminder that strength and beauty often emerge from the most unassuming places.

For Tips, the spark came not from far-off landscapes, but from the rhythms of everyday life. Walking through his neighborhood, dropping his kids off at school, running errands, these ordinary moments revealed a world of inspiration hiding in plain sight. “I started to notice the leaves, the plants, the way they stood out against the concrete,” he shares. “It became a way of seeing myself and my work, like something strong that grows despite the odds.”

The metaphor is as personal as it is universal. Just as flowers break through cracks in sidewalks, Jae Tips has built a career by staying rooted in his environment while still reaching for global stages. The Bronx is the soil that nurtured his creativity, and Flowers Grow Uptown is proof of how far those roots can spread.