Rhythm & Roots: Foot Locker and Adidas Celebrate the Culture That Makes Carnival

Every August, London transforms - Foot Locker (now in its fourth year of showing up at Carnival) knows this better than most. Bass travels through West London before the sound systems are even in sight. Food, flags, feathers, football shirts, whistles and trainers fill the streets, while generations move through the same neighbourhoods to rhythms carried across oceans and passed down through families.

But Notting Hill Carnival has never simply been a party. It is memory. Resistance. Community. Caribbean heritage. Black British culture. And sixty years after Carnival first took to the streets of Notting Hill, that history continues to evolve through the people creating within it.

For Carnival 2026, Foot Locker and adidas are stepping into that conversation with a project bringing together film, photography, art, music and style - through a distinctly London lens.

Rather than centring on a single expression of Carnival, the project moves across several. Brothers and directorial duo Meeks + Frost capture its visual world through a hero campaign film and accompanying imagery; London artist Teoni Hinds brings her artistic language to an exclusive merchandise design; while Foot Locker takes the project directly into Carnival itself with a very special stage partnership (being fully unveiled next week!) marking the festival’s 60th year.

Together, each element looks at the people, creativity and cultural traditions that continue to shape Carnival now.

Seeing Carnival Through The Eyes of Meeks + Frost

The campaign begins through the lens.

Directed by Jamaican-British brothers Meeks + Frost, who Foot Locker invited to tell their Carnival story this year, the hero campaign film takes viewers into a deeply personal visual world.

Across the accompanying imagery, shot across London, adidas icons including the Samba, Superstar and Gazelle appear naturally within scenes rooted in identity: Jamaican uncles grilling jerk chicken and bonding with the younger generation, alongside familiar London streets and the colours synonymous with Caribbean culture, all become part of the campaign’s wider portrait of community.

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There is something intimate about the way Meeks + Frost approach the campaign. The shoes are present, but they aren’t screaming for attention. Instead, style becomes part of a much bigger portrait.

And the people within that portrait matter.

Rather than filling the campaign with faces detached from the culture it is referencing, its cast comes from music, art, fashion, dance, food and football. Electronic artist Ricki Soltau appears as The Musician. Teoni Hinds becomes The Artist. Chloe Hartlett, whose relationship with Carnival stretches back as long as she can remember, is The Dancer. Stylist and content creator Nyah HB becomes The Stylist, while Soulfood Peckham’s Fitzroy Hawes appears as The Chef. Fourteen-year-old Brentford academy player Chais Simpson completes the cast as The Baller.

That feels fitting for Meeks + Frost. Working across film and photography, the brothers have built a practice rooted in culturally rich storytelling, with previous work spanning music visuals for Little Simz, Pa Salieu, Odeal and Wretch 32, alongside their V&A East-commissioned film The Music Is Black: A British Story.

Here, their interpretation of Carnival is less interested in spectacle alone and more interested in the world surrounding it. Because some of Carnival’s most recognisable moments don't begin with the parade.

They begin before it.

In bedrooms while outfits are being decided. In barbershops. On estates. Around speakers. On street corners with friends and family. That familiarity is what gives the campaign its warmth.

Carnival isn't treated as an exotic backdrop to place a trainer in front of. Instead, the Samba, Superstar and Gazelle sit inside a much broader visual language of Black British life.

And naturally, adidas trainers are everywhere. These silhouettes have travelled through football terraces, music scenes, dancefloors and generations of street style. 

Teoni Hinds Turns Carnival Into Art

If Meeks + Frost document the atmosphere surrounding Carnival, Teoni Hinds takes its visual language and turns it into something you can wear.

The London-based artist has developed a practice centred around people, identity and everyday life through figurative painting and mixed media. Her work often captures moments that might otherwise disappear expressions, relationships, vulnerability and the quieter interactions sitting behind bigger cultural narratives.

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For Foot Locker, Hinds has created original artwork inspired directly by Carnival, which will appear across adidas Originals Trefoil Essentials tees in black and white during the weekend itself. 

It's a relatively simple object a T-shirt carrying something much larger.

Carnival has always generated its own visual language. Costumes are part of it, of course, but so are the things surrounding them: flags tied around bodies, football shirts, jewellery, customised pieces, old trainers, new trainers, colours borrowed from somewhere else and clothes styled in ways their designers probably never imagined.

Style becomes documentation.

What someone wears can tell you where they're from, what music they listen to, which team they support, which generation they belong to or simply how they wanted to feel that day.

Hinds' contribution taps into that relationship between clothing and memory.

The tees will be given away to attendees and FLX members during Foot Locker's Croydon in-store event on 28 August before appearing on the shoulders of talent across Carnival weekend.

From the Streets to the Sound System

And then comes the part without which Carnival simply would not exist: music.

On Sunday 30 August, Foot Locker will take Rhythm & Roots from campaign imagery into the streets of Notting Hill through a Carnival stage partnership marking the festival's 60th year.

For the brand, it represents a landmark moment: moving beyond documenting the culture surrounding Carnival and becoming physically present within one of the spaces that has defined it.

That distinction matters.

Sound-system culture isn't simply the soundtrack playing behind Carnival. It is part of its foundation.

Speaker stacks transform streets into communal spaces. Music travels between houses and bodies, carrying generations of Caribbean sound through West London. The experience is physical as much as it is musical: bass heard through windows, felt beneath your feet and shared between thousands of people occupying the same streets.

It is difficult to separate the history of Carnival from that relationship with sound.

So, the stage becomes another chapter of this Foot Locker celebration. Next week, an exciting partnership with one of Carnival’s most storied sound-systems, and one of the most exciting contemporary talents in London’s nightlife scene, will be announced. 

It also places Foot Locker within a significant moment in Carnival's history.Sixty years on, the anniversary is as much about where Carnival is going as where it has been. Traditions survive because people continue to participate in them. New artists enter old spaces. Sounds evolve. Style changes. Younger generations inherit something and inevitably make it their own.

The roots remain.

The rhythm moves forward.

The Style of Carnival Was Never Just Fashion

Maybe that is what sits at the centre of Rhythm & Roots.

Carnival style has never existed neatly inside the boundaries of fashion.

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It lives somewhere between music, heritage, sport, art, food, migration, neighbourhood and self-expression. A football shirt can carry as much meaning as a carefully constructed costume. A pair of Sambas can belong to several different subcultures within the same lifetime. A T-shirt can become a canvas. A street can become a dancefloor.

And none of those things exist separately.

They overlap.

Because Carnival has never stood still.

New generations arrive. New artists add their own language to something built long before them.

But every August, the streets fill again.

And London remembers where the rhythm came from.