Matthew M Williams Joins Oakley to Lead Apparel, Footwear, and Accessories

Matthew M. Williams is taking on a new brief as Creative Director of apparel, footwear, and accessories at Oakley, a role that drops him into a structure where Travis Scott already sits as Chief Visionary Officer and Cactus Jack has begun reworking archive product. The appointment points to a more joined up push to bring Oakley’s non eyewear categories up to the same cultural and design level as its frames.

New Role, Clear Mandate

Oakley has created the apparel, footwear, and accessories creative director role specifically for Williams, giving him oversight of the AFA division across both performance and lifestyle. The brand and parent company EssilorLuxottica frame the move as the ideal time to scale these categories off the back of Oakley’s technical heritage and renewed cultural heat.

Williams will work in close collaboration with Travis Scott, whose Chief Visionary role, announced in 2025, covers campaigns, archive reworks, and future eyewear and apparel concepts through the Cactus Jack lens. Together, they form a two headed creative structure: Scott sets broad direction and cultural narrative, while Williams translates that into a coherent, season to season product system.

What Williams Brings in

The appointment leans on three specific parts of Williams’ résumé: his work on the Nike MMW line, his 1017 ALYX 9SM hardware driven universe, and his tenure at Givenchy from 2020 to 2023. At Nike, he built modular, system based footwear and apparel that treated performance gear as a design language, not just a spec sheet; at ALYX and Givenchy, he proved he could merge utilitarian hardware, sharp tailoring, and luxury codes.

Williams will also work in close collaboration with Travis Scott, who currently serves as Oakley’s chief visionary officer. Caio Amato, global president of Oakley, stated, “Matthew brings in his belt a lot of knowledge, not only in design: He understands about the business landscape. He understands about the cultural nuances between different countries all over the world. He can talk with the same energy and passion about design as he can talk about distribution, customers and as well as operations and sourcing. Matthew is incredibly good at seeing the 360 – and that’s what Oakley needed.”

Williams himself has described Oakley as part of his California youth, and says that alignment with the brand’s technical and innovative direction was a key reason to accept the role. Williams, the new creative director of Oakley AFA, said, “Oakley has such a rich heritage, with a history rooted in both performance sports and global culture. It is an honour to join the company, and I look forward to leading the brand into a new era with Travis and all the Oakley teams.”

Performance Meets Lifestyle

Under Williams, Oakley says AFA collections will be centred on performance and lifestyle, with a strong emphasis on material innovation and product functionality across both lanes. The idea is not to chase fashion for its own sake, but to clarify where running, outdoors, and action sports product sits, and how lifestyle capsules can grow out of that instead of floating separately.

EssilorLuxottica leadership has tied the appointment to a wider push around moments like the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Games, where Oakley’s performance presence will be high, and apparel and footwear need to match that visibility. Williams is expected to split time between Milan, where AFA is based, and key markets like Japan and Brazil, reflecting how global Oakley’s non eyewear business has become.​

Why this Matters

Oakley’s move fits a broader pattern of performance and heritage sports brands recruiting high profile fashion designers to sharpen categories that sit next to, but not inside, their core. In Oakley’s case, eyewear has long been the hero; apparel, footwear, and accessories have been present for decades but never as clearly defined or consistently elevated.

Bringing in Williams under Scott’s top line vision suggests that future Oakley collections will treat gear as a unified system across goggles, shoes, outerwear, and accessories, with a design language that feels as intentional as its most iconic lenses and frames. For consumers, that points to a future where Oakley shows up as a head to toe proposition in both performance and lifestyle, rather than as primarily an eyewear brand with supporting pieces on the side.