Jisoo takes Salomon's trail shoes into a global fashion campaign
Salomon's "In the Open" campaign uses Jisoo, Seoul and three winter-ready XT shoes to connect technical performance with fashion culture.
Technical trail shoes have spent years escaping the trail. Salomon's XT silhouettes now show up in city wardrobes, fashion-week collaborations and everyday styling, so putting Jisoo at the center of a global campaign feels less like a category jump than a way of making that crossover impossible to miss.
The BLACKPINK member is fronting Salomon's Fall/Winter 2026 "In the Open" campaign, her first global campaign for the French mountain-sports brand since becoming an ambassador earlier this year. Shot in South Korea, the work places her between open landscape and city skyline, using the same tension that has made Salomon interesting to fashion audiences: technical footwear that still makes sense once the mountain disappears.
Table of contents
- Why Jisoo fits Salomon's city-to-trail crossover
- What "In the Open" puts on screen
- Why Salomon is leaning into culture, not just performance
- What marketers can take from the campaign
Why Jisoo fits Salomon's city-to-trail crossover
Salomon's own Sportstyle materials describe a business that has moved well beyond specialist outdoor use. The brand still builds around trail running, winter sports and technical performance, but it also talks openly about XT-6 sneakers appearing in urban life and fashion settings.
Jisoo gives that transition a human face. Her existing brand portfolio is heavily associated with fashion and luxury, including Dior and Tommy Hilfiger, while her earlier Alo partnership already placed her inside the performance-lifestyle category. Salomon can therefore use her without pretending its technical roots have disappeared.
That fit also has a measurable precedent. WWD reported, citing Launchmetrics, that Salomon's May announcement naming Jisoo a global ambassador generated US$2.2 million in media impact value within a week and lifted the brand's overall performance nearly sevenfold on the announcement day.
What "In the Open" puts on screen
The campaign is built around a literal meeting point between city and nature. Salomon's first-party campaign page describes "city and nature in the same frame," while ELLE's coverage shows Jisoo photographed against grassy terrain with a hazy urban skyline behind her.
The product story is equally direct. "In the Open" centers on three Fall/Winter 2026 silhouettes: the XT-6 Protective, XT-Whisper Gore-Tex and XT-4 OG Gore-Tex. Across the collection, Salomon emphasizes weather protection, ripstop construction, Gore-Tex and the ability to move between different conditions.
Jisoo's role is to make that versatility feel personal rather than purely technical. In a statement carried by ELLE and WWD, she said she naturally prefers "light and comfortable movement" and likes that Salomon footwear works for both everyday wear and outdoor activity.
The Fall/Winter capsule is scheduled to launch globally on October 7.
Why Salomon is leaning into culture, not just performance
Salomon has already been building the bridge that this campaign dramatizes. Its 2026 Paris Fashion Week activity highlighted collaborations, Sportstyle showcases and the XT-6's evolution from a trail-running product into an urban style object.
That matters because the company does not need to choose between performance credibility and fashion relevance. Its advantage is the tension between them. The technical details give the shoes a reason to exist. Fashion, celebrities and city styling give more people a reason to notice.
Jisoo helps widen that frame further. The campaign does not recast her as an athlete. Instead, it places a globally recognized fashion figure inside environments where the product's outdoor identity is still visible. That lets Salomon stretch culturally without erasing the category cues that made the footwear distinctive in the first place.
What marketers can take from the campaign
The useful part of "In the Open" is not simply that Salomon hired a K-pop star. Celebrity scale is common. The stronger move is how closely the campaign's talent, setting and product all reinforce the same brand transition.
For marketers, three things stand out.
First, an ambassador works harder when the person already represents the audience shift a brand wants to make. Jisoo can move between luxury fashion, lifestyle and performance categories without the campaign having to explain that range from scratch.
Second, product functionality can become part of the cultural story instead of being hidden behind it. Gore-Tex, ripstop construction and trail heritage are not treated as obstacles to fashion positioning. They are part of the reason the shoes look and feel different from ordinary lifestyle sneakers.
Third, the setting does strategic work. Seoul's mix of urban space and open landscape turns Salomon's positioning into something visible. The campaign does not need a long explanation of "outdoor meets city" when the image itself carries the idea.
That is a useful model for brands crossing categories. The more ambitious the repositioning, the more important it becomes for the talent, product and creative world to tell the same story.
