PUMA spent the opening weeks of 2026 introducing the CELL Geo as a clean slate, a sculptural silhouette cut from leather, suede and ballistic mesh and pitched as the direction the brand wanted to travel. On November 7 it hands that shoe to JiyongKim, the Korean designer whose whole practice is letting sun and weather finish a garment before anyone wears it. His CELL Geo arrives already used up. Aged fabric, frayed laces, surfaces marked the way years of handling mark them.
CELL is one of the older pieces of technology PUMA still trades on. The brand first showed it in the 1990s as a hexagonal midsole structure that handled support and cushioning at once, and it has been reinterpreted across basketball, running, training and lifestyle ever since, usually whenever PUMA wants to point at its own engineering rather than at its archive. The CELL Geo, which launched January 31, is the current argument for it. A decoupled, ridged CELL unit sits under the heel and carries most of the visual weight. Fluid cut lines sweep the upper and the laces are half hidden under a shroud, which is what keeps the profile reading as futuristic rather than as a Nineties reissue. PUMA’s own launch copy called the shoe a design statement for the year ahead and promised further colorways, and that part has held. The CELL Geo 1 now runs eight colorways on PUMA’s US site, with Reptilian and Biology editions sitting alongside it. PUMA’s framing of CELL has always been that it marks engineering rather than nostalgia, which is why the technology keeps resurfacing whenever the brand wants a lifestyle platform that is not the Suede and not the Speedcat.
JiyongKim’s version keeps the architecture and goes after the surface. PUMA describes aged fabrics, distressed detailing, frayed laces and treatments meant to read as accumulated time, and the decoupled CELL heel, the cut lines and the semi-shrouded lacing all survive intact. The press set shows two pairs. One is black and holds its shape cleanly, closer to the production shoe than anything else here. The other is pale and blotched, the upper mottled in a way that looks less like a chosen colorway than like a material that sat outside for a season. PUMA’s copy never names what that fabric is, which is a small but real omission from a brand that listed leather, suede and ballistic mesh by name back in January. Look closely at the pale pair and the texture breaks up unevenly across each panel rather than fading in one direction, which reads as staining rather than as a wash. The campaign commits to the same idea. The pairs are photographed on a model in flat blue light, creased and scuffed at the toe, shot as though they have already been in rotation rather than unboxed for the shoot.
Both of those descriptions came out of the same newsroom ten months apart, and that is the part worth sitting on. In January PUMA sold the CELL Geo on premium execution and a considered material mix. In November it is selling the same silhouette on staining and fray. That is an honest admission about how a brand-new shoe earns character, which is that it cannot yet, so somebody has to supply it. JiyongKim is a defensible person to ask, because the method predates the sneaker. He built a label on sun-bleaching cloth, took the 2024 SFDF, and showed at Pitti Uomo 110 as a guest designer. He has also already made a PUMA shoe. The V-S1 CRAFT came earlier this year and is sold out on his own store. PUMA has leaned on material-first collaborators all year, from Nahmias rebuilding the Suede’s Formstrip as a crochet cord to le PÈRE splitting the same shoe’s toe and a Speedcat finished in tailor’s houndstooth, but those treatments all make a shoe look more considered. This one makes it look older.
No price has been announced. For a reference point, the general-release CELL Geo 1 is listed at $150 on PUMA’s US site across its eight colorways, and the CELL Geo Biology at $160, so a collaboration of this kind will almost certainly sit above both. The more useful signal is supply rather than retail. The Black pair is limited to JiyongKim’s own channels rather than PUMA’s, and the last PUMA shoe he made is already sold out on that store, which means the pressure on this release lands somewhere other than PUMA.com. A collaboration priced and stocked like a designer release behaves like one, and the resale read on this pair will be set by how many the Seoul store actually holds.
The PUMA x JiyongKim CELL Geo launches November 7 at PUMA.com, PUMA flagship stores, selected PUMA stockists, and JiyongKim’s online store and Seoul flagship. The Black colorway is exclusive to JiyongKim in limited quantities. Japan gets the collaboration on November 14, exclusively at GR8, alongside a dedicated pop-up. PUMA has published neither a style code nor a US price, and neither has appeared on its own commerce site.
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