At ComplexCon Los Angeles this past weekend, streetwear veteran Heron Preston and Formula E offered a first look at their new creative partnership with an installation that was hard to miss: a Formula E GEN4 car positioned vertically and wrapped in a custom Preston-designed livery.
The dramatic display served as the centerpiece of a collaboration that looks beyond simply putting a fashion designer’s name on a race car. Preston and Formula E are exploring how the worlds of fashion and motorsport can approach materials differently, with a focus on recycled resources, performance, and what happens to products after their intended use.
At the core of the partnership is Preston’s eX-Ray concept, which looks at a product from the materials up, examining how fabrics are made, where they come from, and the processes and people behind them. That approach was applied to recycled cotton pieces made from pre-consumer factory off-cuts and production scraps. The discarded material is sorted, shredded, and re-spun into new yarn before being developed into a heavyweight fabric.
That material-first approach has been a recurring part of Preston’s work. His 2016 UNIFORM project repurposed decommissioned New York City Department of Sanitation uniforms and secondhand garments, while his 2021 collaboration with Mercedes-Benz transformed crash-test airbags into garments that preserved the distinctive qualities of the original material.
Formula E approaches reuse from a different angle. Its electric race cars rely on regenerative braking to recover energy that can be put back into performance, creating a natural connection between the championship’s approach to energy and Preston’s interest in giving existing materials another life.
The partnership brings those ideas together through the lens of motorsport fashion, with the two sides looking at how material choices can influence apparel, fan merchandise, accessories, and other products connected to the sport.
The GEN4 itself offered a physical representation of that philosophy at ComplexCon. Designed to be 100 percent recyclable or reusable, with at least 20 percent recycled materials across key components, the car demonstrates Formula E’s broader push to connect performance with resource efficiency.
The ComplexCon installation was positioned as the first look at a longer-term partnership. While the GEN4 livery provided the most immediate visual statement, the collaboration is expected to expand into performance, fashion, fan merchandise, accessories, and products made from upcycled materials sourced from the sport.
For now, the vertically positioned GEN4 offered a preview of where Preston and Formula E are looking to take the relationship: somewhere between the race track, the design studio, and the growing conversation around what the future of motorsport fashion can look like.
