Throughout history, artists have been drawn to the flow of rivers through cities. From Whistler’s Thames and O’Keeffe’s East River to Shelley’s Arno and Kim Jones’s Seine for Dior, the meeting of city and water has long been a source of inspiration.

For Dongjoon Lim, founder of POST ARCHIVE FACTION (PAF), a defining body of water in his career has been Zurich’s River Limmat. Since launching PAF in 2018, the Seoul native has built a cult following among fashion obsessives through his work transforming the familiar into unexpected forms: clothes that make you look twice.

Today, on set for a documentary marking the On x PAF partnership coming full circle, Lim sits surrounded by the 30 or so running pieces that make up CURRENT FORM – the six collections created with On over the past two years. The pieces are laid out around him in a circle: a fitting arrangement for a collaboration that Lim never planned as a straight line.

Picking up the Cloudmonster 2 PAF, the first shoe released by On x PAF, Lim is taken back to 2023 and a visit to Zurich marking the beginning of his creative journey with On. After a day of meetings in the office, he was persuaded to leave his hotel and join the team for an afternoon “floating”: drifting down the Limmat in inflatable boats. Remembering it as “truly one of the happiest moments of my life”, Lim explains how the experience changed how he saw the relationship between the river and the city, helping him to see how deeply connected the two were.

He also became fascinated by the current: invisible, but tangible in its movement and force. On the water, he began thinking about how to express that movement through a design line, asking himself how an object, like a shoe, could make you imagine movement.

That became a starting point for CURRENT FORM. Lim saw On’s design language as systematic, minimal and functional “like a straight line”. PAF’s response was to “create a new curve from it”. There was another, more simple ambition, too. “I just wanted to make a pretty shoe,” Lim says. “I thought about how I could make it look pretty.” 

Turning that shift in perspective into performance running shoes was another matter. Lim had to find a way to bring PAF’s aesthetic into On’s existing engineering while keeping the shoe’s performance intact. The solution became a way of working that carried through the collections that followed: “We treated On as an excellent plate,” he says, “and focused on how to arrange our design like a dish on top of it.”

The process is always painstaking. As Lim explains, even a small change, like adding ventilation to the upper, can affect a running shoe’s performance. Samples have to be tested, adjusted and tested again. Across the collections, Lim has found himself working late into the night trying to find a way to make details work. “There have been days when I’ve stayed up until five in the morning, constantly changing and refining the design.”

For Lim, all that work comes back to the same idea he had had on the Limmat: making something still feel as though it is moving. “My goal is that people can feel the movement. Even when you’re not running, when there’s no movement there, we can imagine it from holding the shoes.”

The effort’s been worth it, though. Still, as Lim says, you never quite know how people will react. He shares a favorite memory from the very first release: arriving at PAF’s Seoul flagship to find a queue of more than 100 people waiting outside for the Cloudmonster 2 PAF. “Seeing all those people at the store really hit home,” he says. “I realised the impact could be bigger than I had ever imagined.”

While the Limmat has continued to resurface across the collections, it’s just one of several ways Lim brings the natural world into CURRENT FORM. Now, CURRENT FORM 5.0 introduces the Cloudsoma PAF, a running shoe inspired by the rock formations Lim came across while hiking in Switzerland’s Engadin region. He describes the idea behind it as “Harmonized Wilderness”: the way nature can appear chaotic while holding its own sense of order. “In nature many things seem to be placed quite irregularly,” he says, “but you can find beautiful order within them.”

Back on set, Lim is reviewing pieces around him. The circular shape of CURRENT FORM seems clear now, but, he explains, it wasn’t planned from the beginning. Instead, each collection was approached on its own terms, creating the foundations for what came next. “I focused on placing each dot well, and I thought a lot about how to connect those dots,” he says. “It was only later that I thought, ‘This could actually look like a circle.’”

That idea has since taken physical form in Tenerife, where an installation by land artist Strijdom van der Merwe forms a trail loop for runners, which will change with time and use. Created from volcanic rocks gathered on site, it celebrates the partnership – a monument to movement.

The pieces around Lim are also his own archive of CURRENT FORM: garments and shoes gathered from across the collections and kept as a record. For him, an archive has always been something personal, “something from the past that I can look back on.”

Looking at them together, he can see the distance the collaboration has travelled, even if he doesn't see an endpoint.

“I don't believe that a perfect and complete state actually exists,” he says. “However, I do believe that there is a constant effort to reach that state of perfection and completion.”

CURRENT FORM is archived digitally at Lab.zip.