Lexus x AMBUSH: Inside the Future Classic Club Capsule by Yoon Ahn

Launching September 18, the Lexus x AMBUSH collection marks 25 years of the Lexus IS through fashion, film and the creative worlds of Yoon Ahn, VERBAL, Sara Choi, Reo Sano and Reiji Okamoto.

By: QEditorial Magazine.

 

On September 18, 2026, Lexus and AMBUSH will release The Future Classic Club, an ultra-limited capsule collection developed under the creative direction of Yoon Ahn. Conceived around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lexus IS, the project translates details of the sports sedan into leather outerwear, quilted construction, graphic T-shirts and engraved hardware.

The collaboration enters a crowded landscape of automotive fashion partnerships with a clear proposition: lasting identity begins with recognizable design. Lexus brings the history of a car introduced for the 2001 model year. AMBUSH brings a Tokyo-born language shaped by jewelry, street culture, music and luxury fashion. Their meeting is presented through clothing, a cinematic film directed by Xavier Tera, and a group of cultural figures whose work moves across drifting, dance, acting, music and art.

Unveiled during New York Fashion Week, The Future Classic Club asks what makes an object feel like a classic before history confirms it. The answer offered by the project resides in continuity: a silhouette that remains legible, a material that carries memory and a creative identity capable of moving between generations.

Watch the Lexus x AMBUSH Future Classic Club Film

The official campaign film follows the Lexus IS through two periods of Tokyo. Its opening inhabits an early-2000s salaryman world connected to the era of the original sedan; the narrative then moves into the contemporary city, where the car’s presence is reframed through a new creative generation.

OFFICIAL VIDEO

The Lexus IS at 25: Recognition as Design

The Lexus IS arrived for the 2001 model year with compact proportions, a performance-led stance and an appeal directed toward a younger luxury customer. Its identity was established through form rather than ornament. Twenty-five years later, that recognizability provides the conceptual foundation for the Lexus x AMBUSH collection.

The anniversary is treated as a study of endurance rather than an exercise in automotive nostalgia. Elements of the Lexus IS appear through texture, construction and graphic abstraction. Seat stitching becomes quilting. Grille lines and headlight curves become printed symbols. Chrome hardware separates from the vehicle and returns as an object designed to be worn or carried.

Lisa McQueen, senior manager of Lexus marketing, describes originality as a force capable of shaping what comes next. Within The Future Classic Club, the IS functions as both the subject and the archive: a designed object carrying enough visual memory to be recognized after its details have been rearranged.

Yoon Ahn and VERBAL: The AMBUSH Language

AMBUSH was founded in 2008 by Yoon Ahn and VERBAL as an experimental jewelry line. Its early POW! motif established the label’s instinct for transforming familiar symbols into physical objects. Apparel later expanded that language, allowing jewelry, clothing and cultural references to operate within the same visual system.

AMBUSH made its Paris debut in 2015 and became a finalist for the 2017 LVMH Prize. In 2018, Kim Jones appointed Yoon Ahn as jewelry designer for Dior Men, placing her work within one of luxury fashion’s most visible menswear transformations. The brand’s wider history includes projects with Louis Vuitton, sacai, Bvlgari, Nike, Converse, Rimowa and Gentle Monster.

Its cultural reach has also brought AMBUSH into collaborations involving Beyoncé, Naomi Osaka, G-Dragon, UGG and Coca-Cola, while Yoon Ahn and VERBAL have extended their design work into high watchmaking with Audemars Piguet. These names are part of the brand’s history and are not participants in the Lexus campaign; their relevance lies in showing the scale of the creative world from which this collaboration emerges.

For the Lexus x AMBUSH capsule, Yoon Ahn began with the established character of the IS. Rather than reproducing the car as a graphic emblem, she examined its materials and details as components of a design vocabulary. The method is consistent with AMBUSH’s origins: isolate a recognizable element, change its scale or function, and allow it to acquire a different cultural meaning.

 

Inside the Lexus x AMBUSH Capsule Collection

The collection’s central piece is the Future Classic Club Leather Fireman Jacket, priced at $2,600. Its short, structured body carries the physical assurance of driving apparel, while metal fireman closures introduce the industrial hardware closely associated with AMBUSH. Clean proportions keep the jacket separate from the literal language of a racing uniform.

The Seat Memory Red Quilted Jacket, priced at $780, establishes the most immediate connection with the Lexus IS interior. Its saturated red surface and stitched construction draw from automotive upholstery, turning a cabin detail into the visual center of the garment. The reference is direct, yet the result remains legible as fashion.

 

 

 

Two short-sleeved T-shirts, each priced at $130, introduce the Future Classic Club crest and a Lexus logo reinterpreted through IS grille lines and headlight curves. A $160 long-sleeved T-shirt places a restrained wordmark at the front and the collaboration’s crest across the back. The Future Classic Club Cap is priced at $120.

The $300 chrome carabiner condenses the partnership into engraved hardware. Its function and weight connect the capsule with AMBUSH’s foundation in jewelry, while its polished finish recalls the precision of an automotive component. It is a small object with a clear role in the collection: the point at which car, accessory and collectible become difficult to separate.

 

Sara Choi, Reo Sano and Reiji Okamoto Join the Future Classic Club

The film introduces three members whose careers reflect the project’s movement across disciplines. Sara Choi, a professional drifter and founder of the streetwear label Badseki, connects automotive technique with clothing and personal identity. Her place in the campaign gives car culture a lived presence: drifting appears as a discipline, a community and a form of individual expression.

Reo Sano works across dance, music and acting. As a member of GENERATIONS from EXILE TRIBE, he represents a Japanese performance culture in which choreography, fashion and popular media are closely connected. His film and television career adds another layer to the campaign’s movement between character and personal identity.

Reiji Okamoto, drummer for the Japanese rock band OKAMOTO’S, is also active as a DJ and curator of YAGI EXHIBITION. His work links music with fashion, art and design, positioning cultural curation as a practice capable of creating new relationships between scenes.

Sara Choi, Reo Sano and Reiji Okamoto are established within different communities, and the campaign does not force them into a single definition of influence. Their combined presence describes contemporary Tokyo through movement: the controlled instability of drifting, the physical language of dance and the connective role of music.

Can a Collaboration Become a Future Classic?

Fashion collaborations generally arrive through a compressed sequence of announcement, release and disappearance. The Future Classic Club places endurance inside that cycle. Its most resolved ideas appear where the Lexus IS has been absorbed into construction: the quilted surface of a seat, the polished language of mechanical hardware, the shape of a headlight reorganized as a graphic.

The title also carries a productive contradiction. A classic cannot be declared entirely in advance; it acquires meaning through use, memory and time. Lexus and AMBUSH acknowledge that uncertainty by building the project around people as well as products. Objects endure partly because communities continue to interpret them.

Lexus and AMBUSH describe the Club as an initiative that will grow through future cultural moments and activations. Its potential lies in developing the initial question beyond this capsule—through new creative voices, new disciplines and a sustained examination of how design becomes part of identity.

Limited quantities of the Lexus x AMBUSH Future Classic Club collection will be available beginning Friday, September 18, 2026, at midnight EDT / 1 p.m. JST, exclusively through ambushdesign.com.

 

Editor’s Note

QEditorial Magazine views the Lexus x AMBUSH collaboration as a study in how identity can be preserved through design. The capsule is strongest when automotive references are absorbed into material, structure and hardware, allowing the Lexus IS to remain present without reducing each garment to a branded souvenir. The project’s next phase could deepen this premise through conversations with Yoon Ahn, VERBAL and the Club’s creative members, extending the relationship between fashion, mobility and Japanese culture beyond the release itself.

 

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