TEXT Adrian Medina
CREATIVE DIRECTION & STYLING Joshey Sowells
EDITORIAL DESIGN Adrian XLVII
There is nothing particularly clean about becoming good at something.
Athletics are built on repetition. Sweat. Bruises. Failure. Trying something again until the body stops having to think about it. Long before the stadium lights, sponsorships and final scores, there is the process — the ugly, obsessive stretch of work that almost nobody sees.
HTX ORIGINALS lives somewhere inside that space.
Created by Adrian XLVII and Joshey Sowells, the Houston-based editorial takes the visual language of adidas and pulls it away from the conventional sports campaign. Instead, football, tennis and boxing become raw material for something stranger: part athletic portrait, part fashion story, part visual study of what happens when strength and beauty are allowed to exist in the same frame.
Across the series, familiar sporting objects are pushed into unfamiliar territory. A football sits beside formal tailoring and sequins. Goalkeeper gloves frame a face like an accessory. A tennis racket becomes almost ornamental. Boxing gloves are paired with an exposed torso and dramatically oversized shorts, while another look places athletic branding against a corseted silhouette. Elsewhere, a flowing red skirt and heels collide with the posture and props of the football pitch.
Nothing is separated neatly into sport or fashion.
That tension is the point.
THE ATHLETE AS A CHARACTER
Much of the project’s strength comes from Joshey Sowells’ approach to casting, styling and creative direction.
Joshey has an instinct for seeing beyond clothing alone. Casting becomes part of the styling. A face, body, pose and attitude are treated with the same importance as the garment itself.
The models don’t feel interchangeable because they aren’t being used simply to display product. Each occupies a different athletic archetype.
Football feels youthful and almost nostalgic. Tennis becomes poised and sculptural. Boxing becomes confrontational. The personalities shift, but they remain connected by a shared visual world.
That ability to build characters is what makes Joshey particularly effective as a creative director. Instead of dressing everyone according to a single obvious interpretation of sportswear, he allows contradiction into the frame.
Masculinity can be delicate.
Femininity can feel physically imposing.
Sportswear can sit beside tailoring.
A corset can belong on a tennis court.
Heels can exist next to football socks.
The later images push these contrasts even further, moving between a tennis portrait constructed around black adidas sportswear and a white corset, stripped-back boxing imagery, close beauty photography and an almost theatrical football look against a glowing orange field.
It makes athletics feel less like a category of clothing and more like a vocabulary.
DESIGNING THE WORLD AROUND IT
If Joshey built the characters, Adrian XLVII’s editorial design gives those characters a world to live inside.
Adrian’s strength is his ability to take photography and make it feel larger than the original image without overwhelming it.
The design throughout HTX ORIGINALS borrows from the authority of vintage sports advertising — oversized serif typography, aggressive adidas marks, tiny utilitarian credits and tightly controlled campaign information — but rearranges those references with the instincts of contemporary independent publishing.
The opening HTX ORIGINALS compositions are particularly direct: enormous white typography cuts across deep red backgrounds while the subjects remain dominant in the frame. Instead of decorating the photography, the typography behaves almost like another physical object inside it.
That balance is central to Adrian’s approach.
His editorial work often relies on scale, hierarchy and restraint. He understands when an image needs typography and, equally importantly, when it needs almost nothing.
Some pages are virtually untouched beyond a small adidas mark and restrained information running along the bottom edge. Others become fully constructed advertisements, using enormous logos, campaign titles and tightly packed credits to make newly created imagery feel as though it has been pulled from an archival magazine spread.
It is graphic design being used not simply to present photography, but to change its context.
A portrait becomes a campaign.
A campaign starts resembling an old magazine clipping.
An old visual language suddenly feels contemporary again.
BEAUTY IS PART OF THE WORK
Sports photography traditionally celebrates the result.
The finish line. The winning goal. The knockout. The body at the exact moment it performs perfectly.
HTX ORIGINALS is more interested in everything surrounding that moment.
The preparation.
The clothing.
The personality.
The strange rituals athletes build around themselves.
The physical vulnerability hidden beneath performance.
And maybe most importantly, the idea that beauty does not exist separately from all of that brutality.
It exists because of it.
A boxer’s body is shaped by repetition. A footballer's relationship with the ball comes from thousands of touches nobody watched. Grace in movement is produced through exhaustion. Style develops through identity, environment and community just as much as it does through clothes.
The editorial exaggerates that relationship visually. Sport becomes glamorous without losing its physicality. Fashion becomes rougher without losing its beauty.
That is why the photographs can move from an athlete standing over a football to an extreme beauty portrait seen through adidas goalkeeper gloves without feeling like two separate stories.
They are both studying performance.
Just from different distances.
HOUSTON, REINTERPRETED
There is also something distinctly Houston about HTX ORIGINALS.
Not because it relies on obvious regional imagery, but because it carries the confidence of a city where completely different references have always been comfortable existing beside one another.
Luxury and streetwear.
Football and fashion.
Beauty and aggression.
Polish and imperfection.
The title itself — HTX ORIGINALS — feels less like a declaration of where someone is from and more like a statement about how creative identity develops.
Originality rarely appears out of nowhere.
It comes from absorbing everything around you, pulling it apart, keeping what feels personal and rebuilding it into something that belongs to you.
That same process exists throughout this editorial.
Joshey Sowells constructs the people, silhouettes and visual performances.
Adrian XLVII constructs the graphic language around them.
And somewhere between the two, adidas sportswear becomes something else entirely.
Not simply clothing for the athlete.
But clothing for the person underneath one.
HTX ORIGINALS is an editorial about athletics, but more than that, it is about the process of becoming — and all the strange beauty that gets overlooked along the way.