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Hiroshi Fujiwara is perhaps the most dramatically lit person Ive ever interviewed on Zoom. Joining me at his preferred time (midnight) from Tokyo, the man known as the godfather of streetwearwho launched his own label at 26, was among the first hip-hop DJs in Japan, wrote a regular column for Popeye, and now runs his own consultancy, Fragmenthas met with me to discuss his latest collaborations with Nike. But when I dig in, asking about the hidden details lurking in his shoes? He admits, I don’t really want to talk about it, without an ounce of rudeness. Sometimes, if you see a movie and you don’t really get the ending, you have to guess what [the creators] think. I like that kind of situation. In a world of overt and overstated sneaker collabs, Fujiwara prefers to operate with a soft touch. The semiotics of streetwear like much of fashion are born from winks and nodsan if you know you know mentality. His three new pieces for Nike celebrate that. At the same time, Fujiwara insists he isnt only trying to build enigmas that people can investigate it forever. When he visits Nike, he still designs the shoes hed like to wear. [Photo: Nike] I always like black shoes! His three new shoes start with his take on Nikes new Air Liquid Max (April 1, $225)an organic expansion of its Air Max technology, where the air bubbles almost seem to melt or morph underfoot like the toes of a tree frog. He didnt touch the materiality or the silhouette. And youll need to squint to notice the light white text like Fragment Concept Testing on the side. But he turned the swoosh chrome, and filled the three printed layers of pigment on top of the shoe with various flavors of black. I imagine that in person it almost shimmers like snakeskin (which wouldn’t be the first or even second time Fujiwara used animal textures on a sneaker). I always like black shoes! Fujiwara says. I like colorful shoes also, but I wanted to have the black one for myself. Especially that shoe. I always like those air bag shoes. Many [designers] want to do the Jordan 1, Air Force One, or Dunk. No one really want to touch the newest things. I always do that. For the Mind 001 (March 18, $95)Nikes brain-calming slide shoe, which uses little nubs in the bottom to activate a sense of mindfulnessFujiwara also wanted to go with black. But for the nubs, he chose blue. Black and military blue are the trademark colors of Fragment. [Photo: Nike] Small details are really, really important. I see some comments, people say, Oh, its only changing color; Its only little things, Fujiwara says. But the little things are really important, especially for the shoe. Like even 1 millimeter really makes it different. Indeed, the Mind 001 reads completely differently in blackready to outfit an ensemble of broody technical garments beloved by corners of the fashion scenein a way that the Mind 001s original infrared and orange colorway did not. Yet black and blue seem like the worst colors to use to stand out: an almost stubborn choice on Fujiwaras part to squint through their universality to see his fingerprint. Is there more to them? When I asked about his exact approach to blue at Fragment, he did share more on its origins. The first Air Jordan I had in the 80sthe original Air Jordan 1that was black and blue, Fujiwara says. And I always like black and blue. The shoe left such an imprint on his mind that he adopted Nikes colorways for himself, which he occasionally, circuitously, reapplies to the brand. [Photo: Nike] An excuse to look closer Fujiwaras collaborations with Nike trace back to the 90sat one point, he even teamed up with Nike design god Tinker Hatfield and CEO Mark Parker on a special line called HTM (Hiroshi, Tinker, Mark). Hes always seen his role as translating Nikes performance approach to a more fashion-forward audience. Fujiwara himself flagged his use of croc leather on an Air Force 1 as being the sort of polarizing choice even Nikes designers didnt get at the time (about 20 years later, it seems like a downright common treatment to realize a luxe sneaker). When I started working for Nike with a collaboration in the late 90s, there were many rules. You couldnt touch a swoosh. And at first, it was difficult. But then I got used to it, and I kind of started enjoying it, Fujiwara says. Nike already had their own creative design, so I don’t want to mess around too much. . . . I talk to the designers, I like to respect what they do. That mentality carries across Fujiwara’s collaborations and projects. He keeps his design simple. He keeps his staff simple. He keeps his business simple. Fragment is a creative team of three, which ensures he doesnt have the overhead and payroll of managing his own brand. But Ill admit that I appreciate it when Fujiwara takes a firmer touch with Nikes silhouettes, as he demonstrated with his Nike Mind 002 (March 18, $140). He requested a new upper made of Flyknit, while breaking free of black and blue by introducing a second color scheme in particle gray. A closer look reveals more nuance. The top of the shoe is fuzzyalmost reading like fleece. All of that softness is caged by a one-pull performance lace system, managed with Fragments own tooling that can lock down the shoe like a bolo tie. While the silhouette itself stays the same, Fujiwara introduced a new sock liner that raises the heel of the shoe, giving it more forward momentum than what we see in the Mind 002 (a silhouette that Ive thought looks stuck in place, given that its outsole and upper peak in the center like a triangle). Sneaker critics have been gushing about Fujiwaras approach to the Mind 002, and his most overt statement is what fans appear to want. But ultimately, Fujiwara asks that you keep looking closer. When I was really young, the information I had was just pictures in magazines. Like, pictures of my favorite people. Id want to see, what do they have in the closet? Or what do they have on posters? Those kinds of small details, he says. But many people [dont get there now] because they have so much information already.
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For some time now, reporting around Apples folding phone has coalesced around two beliefs: the device is set to drop this fall, and it will have a significantly less visible display crease than previous folding devices. That sounds like a typically Apple feature to prioritize, and it could well explain why the company is late to the category. Folding phones are cool, but the creases in their inner screens are undeniable imperfections. Whether its capacity with music players, user interface with smartphones, or the overall form factor with tablets, Apple tends to avoid making products with clear compromises in their defining elements. But is it even possible to make a crease-free folding phone? There are huge engineering challenges to making a phone with a glass display that bends back and forth and flattens seamlessly, much less one that stays that way over time. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Multicore\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It\u0027s written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/\u0022\u003Emulticore.blog\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454027,"imageMobileId":91454030,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Well, a new phone announced today might well have upstaged Apple. Oppo, one of Chinas biggest phone brands, has revealed details of how its Find N6 is addressing the crease; a full launch will follow next week. Close to zero crease I thought last years Find N5 was the best foldable phone on the market, at least if you could get your hands on itOppo only sold it in China and South East Asia. At launch it was the thinnest smartphone available anywhere, and Oppo made some bold claims about its almost invisible crease. That was broadly true unless you turned the screen off or tried to use the phone outside; you could also still physically feel the crease in the middle of the panel. This time Oppo is marketing the Find N6 as having a Zero-Feel Crease. Ive been using this phone for a week, and I would still say zero is an exaggerationbut only a slight one. The N6s screen is a big improvement on the N5s, which was already well ahead of competitors. The crease is very difficult to see unless youre really looking for it, and its also hard to feel in actual use. Its clearly there if you press deeply against the screen and run your finger across it, but this is the first time Ive felt like it was truly unobtrusive and unlikely to ever bother me in a real-world situation. Oppo isnt necessarily reinventing the technical wheel here. The company says it achieved the new crease by refining its existing design, including by widening the waterdrop-style hinge by 11% to avoid acute stress on the display. Oppo is also using liquid 3D printing with photopolymer droplets to smooth out individual imperfections in every manufactured hinge. According to the company, the industry standard for height variance in folding hinges is 0.2mm, but this technique has reduced it to just 0.05mm in the Find N6less than the width of a human hair. Exceptionally flat While its impossible to test these claims right now, its also worth noting that Oppo says the Find N6 will remain in its pristine, flat state for significantly longer than other foldables. The company says it should stay exceptionally flat through 600,000 folds, while the phone has been certified by TÜV Rheinland to remain functional for more than a million. The results are impressive, but Apple is unlikely to take the same technical approach. Oppo has been iterating on its folding phone design for a long timethe first Find N came out in late 2021 after more than three years of developmentwhereas Apple is coming in fresh. Well-connected analyst Ming-chi Kuo has suggested that the folding iPhone will make use of a new type of metal plate to distribute bending stress across the panel and thereby reduce the impact of the crease. The solution is said to have been developed by Samsung Display, which itself showed off a demonstration Advanced Crease-less panel at CES 2026 in January. The Apple response Apple rarely takes off-the-shelf solutions, however, and if theres one thing Id expect from its design team, it would be to relish the opportunity to come up with a mechanically novel kind of hinge. It would be surprising if there wasnt something unique to the new iPhone that Apple could tout in its marketing, even if it does substantially rely on technology from a partner like Samsung Display. What matters, though, is that Apples desired outcome has more or less already been achieved by someone else. With the Oppo Find N6, the crease is no longer a serious drawback to usability or aesthetics. That means that whatever Apple was planning to compete with before, theres now a new benchmark to judge the first folding iPhone by when it eventually gets announced. On one hand, this is good news for Apple fans: the prospect of a truly crease-free iPhone seems more plausible than ever before. On the other, it might be bad news for Applethis new iPhone could be less differentiated than the company might have hoped for. Oppo has left some room for improvement with the Find N6s screen, but not a whole lot. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Multicore\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It\u0027s written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/\u0022\u003Emulticore.blog\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454027,"imageMobileId":91454030,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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In the months following Elon Musks $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, my experience with the platform (and perhaps yours too) got quickly, dramatically worse. My algorithmic timeline, better known as the For you tab, devolved into a broken fire hydrant of tweets from blue-checked engagement farmers, shameless meme thieves, clout-chasing Republican politicians, and pseudonymous YouTubers posting weird, uncanny rage-bait. For a brief period, X even made For you the default setting, nudging users toward this slurry of boosted content and away from a simple chronological feed of posts from the accounts they chose to follow. As a result of these changes, anytime I opened the app and neglected to select the chronological feed, I was not really experiencing Twitter as Id previously experienced it, or wanted to experience it; I was using a new and different version of Twitter that a reactionary billionaire thought I ought to see instead. Eventually, I stopped using the site, which Musk rebranded as X, because I perceived the platform (whatever the name) as feeding me a steady diet of right-wing slop, and I did not want to upset my stomach any further. Today the site’s basic mechanics remain weighted toward feeds that incorporate some form of algorithmic input. The For you tab still appears to over-index on Musk’s posts and perspectives. The Following tab defaults to ranking posts by their popularity, which can make it very challenging to try and follow breaking news stories on the app. Finally, a dropdown menu allows users to adjust the Following tab to display more recent posts first, which, of the available options, most closely approximates the Classic Twitter experience. A recently published study from a team of researchers in Europe attempts to measure the degree to which Xs algorithm is poisoning the brains of those who continue to use it. The study, which took place in 2023, randomly assigned around 5,000 X users to view either their algorithmic or chronological feeds over a seven-week period, and then measured the effects on users political attitudes and online behavior. For anyone who does not have a vested interest in the financial success of X, the findings are pretty grim. The researchers found that the For you tab shifted users political opinions toward more conservative positions on certain issuesfor example, the then-ongoing criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, and Russias invasion of Ukraine. They found that the algorithmic feed increased user engagement, promoted conservative-coded political content, and demoted posts from traditional news sources, which appeared in users algorithmic feeds 58.1% less often than they did in users chronological feeds. Finally, and maybe most troublingly, the researchers found that these effects were asymmetricthat although turning the algorithm on changed users views, turning it off did not move views in the other direction. After the study, the chronological feeds of participants the study exposed to the algorithm contained 60% more posts from conservative accounts and 28% more posts from conservative political activists, relative to the chronological feeds of study participants who did not use the algorithmic feed. The researchers attribute these results to the types of accounts that users encountered in the For you tab and eventually chose to follow, thus adding those accounts to their chronological feeds, too. In other words, once the X algorithm moves you to the right, you probably stay there. And if you use the X algorithm long enough, even on those occasions when you decide to peruse the Following tab, you will probably see more conservative-coded content than you would have if you had never checked out the For you tab in the first place. The researchers noted that the algorithms persuasive effects were stronger among self-identified Republicans and independents than among Democrats, whose views the researchers describe as largely unaffected by the experiment. But even if Xs design choices are not turning unwitting liberals into brainwashed MAGA dead-enders overnight, the implications for democracy remain, to say the least, troubling. A 2024 Pew survey found that among social media platforms, X had the greatest proportion of users (59%) who said they used it to keep up with politics. Another Pew survey from the same year found that about two-thirds of X users utilized the platform to follow the news, and that half said they got news from X regularly. Again, X stood out from its competitorsTikTok, Facebook, and Instagramas the only platform for which a majority of users listed keeping up with news as a reason they used the site. Against this backdrop, the results of the study suggest that the segments of Xs user base that are more open to conservative ideas are also likely to be in the market for political content when they doomscroll. Similarly, depending on which tab they decide to browse, X users looking for news might be less likely to encounter news reported by actual journalists, and more likely to encounter mendacious agitprop designed to make them angry at Democrats, afraid of immigrants, and/or sympathetic to Donald Trump. Part of the reason influential conservatives so loudly profess their trust in X these days is that right-wing echo chambers make them feel comfortable: Xs algorithm amplifies content that soothes their egos, affirms their priors, and inexorably pushes them further to the right. Around the time that Musk was taking over at Twitter, he said he wanted to build a maximally trusted and broadly inclusive platform on which a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner. In the time-honored fashion of conservative culture warriors masquerading as principled champions of free speech, he also said that the platform must be politically neutral, which, he noted, would entail upsetting the far right and the far left equally. The reality was simpler and much more grotesque: Musk, who dove headlong into Republican politics shortly thereafter and remains the platforms most-followed trafficker in conspiracy theories embraced by white supremacists, wanted the platform to both reflect and promote his worldview. The study helps quantify the success of this effort: Over the past four years, Musk has transformed X into a disinformation-ridden radicalization machine that occasionally spits out AI-generated nonconsensual pornography, too. If those are things you want from your social media experience, X is serving your interests more capably than ever. If theyre not, X is doing its best to change your mind every time you give it a chance.
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