Bandit shot New York for three months and let the city do the talking

Welcome to New York City

For its last two collections Bandit sent the camera away. The Spring 2026 lookbook was shot on film by Joe Greer in the San Francisco Bay Area; summer’s went to Lisbon with Henry Kornaros. For fall the Brooklyn brand stayed home and changed the brief. The campaign film, released on August 24, 2026 as “City Limits,” is 104 shots gathered over three months, and its credits fit in two sentences: shot by Mike Szpot and Jeremy Herron, with Szpot filming “the signs and characters around the city while Jeremy focused on getting the running footage.”

That split is the whole film. Szpot is a Milwaukee-born, Brooklyn-based street photographer who works, in his own description, at the intersection of street photography and cinematic documentary, and whose city films have built him a following on YouTube. Herron is a director and cinematographer who also shot Bandit’s Los Angeles Marathon film in March. One of them was pointed at the city; the other was pointed at the runners in it. The edit moves between the two for two minutes and eight seconds: a run of street vignettes, then a running moment with the athletes in the fall collection, eleven months in development and 116 products deep, then back out to the street.

City Limits, the Fall 2026 campaign film. Bandit Running. Cinematography: Mike Szpot and Jeremy Herron

The city talks back

The film opens on a sign. A pink neon “Welcome to New York City,” strung with fairy lights on the back of a pedicab, and from there the signs keep coming: YOUR MOTIONS ARE BEING VIDEO-TAPED FOR SECURITY REASONS on a condo wall, PEDESTRIAN FLOW ZONE, PACE in bronze capitals on a facade, PHYSICAL and PAIN MANAGEMENT stacked on a storefront, RECOVERY MODE under a green cross, BEAUTY, and, as the last image, a yellow END sign against One World Trade at dusk. None of it was made for the film. Cut together, it is what running this city feels like from the inside: the small things that snag your attention at a crosswalk, and the ones that lodge somewhere below it and come back to you three miles later.

That is the authored idea, and it belongs to Szpot’s half of the shoot. Around the words come the characters the city supplies for free: a kid holding a wheelie beside a woman on a tempo run, men doing pull-ups on a scaffold bar with the Oculus behind them, pigeons lifting off a plaza, a dirt-bike crew, children in a hydrant at dusk. The runners never get a cleaner frame than any of this. The grade is warm and a little soft, the handheld work stays handheld, and the sound of the city is left in.

That is a choice, and it is worth saying how deliberate. Studio polish has never been cheaper; the phone in the producer’s pocket and the software on the laptop can make a lookbook gleam in an afternoon. City Limits spends its budget the other way, on time and coverage, three months of standing on corners waiting for the city to say something. What comes back is a film with the exact level of grit the subject needs and not a grain more.

It’s not about noise, but about balance: space around the body, geometry, and harmony.

BANDIT — THE FALL 2026 MOOD BOARD

Uptown, Downtown, Midtown, the Bronx

Herron’s half is the running, and it is a map. A man in a navy singlet takes the step street at West 187th two at a time. Two runners cross the High Bridge above the rail yards. A woman in the collection’s navy bra and shorts walks the platform at 137th Street as a 1 train stands with its doors open. At 135th and Riverside two runners come off the viaduct beneath a billboard that reads BANDIT FALL 2026, the film catching the brand looking at itself. A bus window frames two more crossing La Salle Street past a deli lit like a fairground. There is a track at dusk under the lights of Yankee Stadium, the Greenpoint waterfront at golden hour, a beach with pull-up bars. Bandit’s own list of where they went runs “Uptown, Downtown, Midtown, the Bronx, Ridgewood, Woodhaven, and Bedstuy,” and the film earns every stop on it.

The making was as unceremonious as the footage. The behind-the-scenes set Bandit posted is captioned “Photo/video by various iPhones and everyone using Ryan’s mom’s Lumix,” Ryan being the brand’s creative producer, and it shows a crew of a few people working from the curb with a shoulder rig beside an idling MTA bus. Alongside the film, the season’s stills were shot on film, without a digital camera in the bag. The collection they were all there to serve came out of an eleven-month brief that Ardith Singh, Bandit’s co-founder and chief design officer, built on Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” and Agnes Martin’s grids: “a uniform of focus, every detail distilled, every choice intentional,” in a palette of black, charcoal, navy and stone. The film obeys the same brief. Space around the body. Nothing decorated on.

Not the star

When City Limits cuts from the street to a run, the athletes are in fall 2026, and the camera stays on the run. The navy bra on the subway platform and the striped singlet on the track are what the runners have on, the way the Knicks jersey is what the man at the pull-up bar has on. From a brand that had just spent eleven months and six new fabric systems on those clothes, that is a decision about what the film is for. Its job is to make the city, and running in it, feel like the most desirable thing in the world. The kit’s job is to be what you would wear to do it.

This works because the city is Bandit’s, not a location. The brand was started in a Greenpoint basement in October 2020 by Tim West, packing running socks by hand; his brother Nick and Ardith Singh joined a year later, and the company still describes itself as “born in Brooklyn and refined by the NYC Running Community.” Its members, the customers who get the collection a day before everyone else, live on these blocks. So a film that treats New York as the subject is, for Bandit, a film about the customer. That is a different thing from a running brand borrowing a city’s energy for a season, and it is why the same footage would not work with another logo on the billboard.

The Standard’s panel split on exactly that question. Laurence Stoffel saw “great entertainment and distinctive piece that helps Bandit stand out”; Scott Mellin allowed that “it makes Bandit feel like an authentic running brand” but held that “honestly this could have come from 50 other running brands.” Both are right about what they saw. Fifty brands could have shot a city film. One of them lives at 190 West Street, and it shows.

It makes you want to run the city, and to be the kind of runner who does it in Bandit.

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