Convoy art directs Nike Atelier’s campaign for footballer Désiré Doué

Nike Atelier is a high-end, handcrafted line built around one athlete at a time, with a wardrobe of apparel tailored exactly to their measurements. Désiré Doué is its first footballer to receive this treatment, and the third athlete after tennis players Maria Sharapova and Jannik Sinner. For his 2026 World Cup debut with France, Nike produced a collection it calls Nike Atelier’s Merc Premium for Désiré Doué: a custom jacket, made-to-measure shorts and the Merc Premium boots. Paris-based agency Convoy was commissioned to art direct the campaign that launched them. “The couture framing provided a clear starting point: craftsmanship, expressed through a more minimal and elevated approach. We worked with Nike to move away from the usual football-launch codes of speed, technology and spectacle,” Co-founder Nordine Benotmane tells us, “creating more space around the athlete and the product. The specificity began with what Nike had created for Doué, from the tailored fit to the bespoke elements. Together, we built the campaign around those details, making the Atelier codes central to his story and giving the work a character that felt unmistakably his.” For the Merc Premium, Nike took the leather upper of the original 1998 Mercurial R9, a football boot, and set it on the royal blue sole of the Pegasus Premium, a running shoe. “The product already held that tension between Nike’s archive and something distinctly contemporary, and that became the basis for the art direction. We approached the shoe through a more artistic and pared-back lens,” Benotmane explains, “focusing on its form, materials and construction rather than explicitly referencing the past.”