Nothing signs BTS member V as global ambassador

A musician for the headphone line

On 29 September 2026, Nothing names V, the BTS member Kim Taehyung, as its new global brand ambassador.¹ The announcement comes with Headphone (1) Pro, the London company's latest over-ear model, and with a campaign shot in Seoul by photographer Dorothea Sing Zhang, in which V also wears Ear (3a), Headphone (1), Headphone (a) and Ear (3).¹

V is not the first name in the role. In May 2026, Nothing presents Charli xcx as its first global brand ambassador, a role that comes with a stake in the company, and Carl Pei frames that partnership as a rejection of an increasingly "monotonous" technology industry.² With V, the ambassador programme becomes a series rather than a single gesture, and both names come from music, the field in which Nothing's audio products compete. A musician speaks for a pair of headphones more directly than an athlete or an actor could, because the product exists to carry their work.

What Nothing says it sees in V

Carl Pei, Nothing's co-founder and chief executive, explains the choice through temperament rather than reach. "V has an instinct for fearless experimentation," he says, adding that "he follows his creative instincts, not tried-and-tested formulas".³ He connects that directly to the product: "that's exactly what we wanted to capture with Headphone (1) Pro".³ V calls the headphones "a design grounded in creative expression" and adds: "I look forward to our journey together."³

The reasoning mirrors how Nothing describes itself. A company that sets out from the view that "most consumer technology looks, sounds, and behaves the same" looks for a face whose public image rests on changing sounds and styles.⁴ The ambassador is chosen to stand for the brand's attitude, not only to wear its products, and Pei places the choice in a wider frame when he speaks of defining "technical excellence for the next generation of creatives".

A campaign built on moving images

The campaign borrows from the history of music video and film. Nothing names Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity", Gene Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" and the work of Spike Lee as references, along with Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photography, and sets the film to Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner".¹ The references place the product in a lineage of visual invention, a context in which a pair of headphones reads as part of a creative practice rather than a set of specifications. Shooting in Seoul places the campaign in the city most closely associated with K-pop, while its references remain rooted in Western music video and cinema.

The specifications are still there. Headphone (1) Pro uses a triple-driver system, ten microphones for active noise cancellation, a flat EQ mode developed with London's Metropolis Studios, a transparent design with glass panels and metal details, and up to 68 hours of battery life with noise cancellation switched off.¹ It follows Headphone (1), Nothing's first over-ear headphones, designed in collaboration with the British audio brand KEF and presented in July 2025.⁵

Meeting the fandom on its own terms

Within hours, Nothing turns to a joke that V's fans already know. The phrase goes back to a Vogue caption from October 2025 about V watching performances at Vogue World: Hollywood, which creators then reuse as filler text until it becomes a meme that places V in unrelated posts.⁶ Nothing changes its Instagram bio to "V stepped into the crowd wearing Nothing".⁶ On X, it posts a fill-in-the-blank line, "V looks at [YOUR NAME] while playing [YOUR FAVOURITE SONG]", which passes a million views, according to Gulf News.⁶

The move shows a brand speaking the language of the community it wants to reach. Rather than relying on the formal announcement alone, Nothing joins the fans' own humour and invites them to put themselves into the picture. For a celebrity partnership, that turns a one-way endorsement into something people take part in, and it gives the campaign a life beyond paid media.

What V adds to Nothing

The appointment is reported as widely by the Korean entertainment press as by Western fashion and technology titles, with Star News introducing Nothing to its readers as a British technology brand founded by Carl Pei in 2020.⁷ For a company whose name is still new to many buyers, that coverage carries the brand into an audience that follows V across categories.

The risk with any famous face is that the person outshines the product. Nothing's answer is to give its ambassador a role in the brand's own story, as a figure of experimentation for a company that presents itself as an alternative to sameness, and then to let the fans finish the sentence.