EXCLUSIVE: Coperni & PUMA Turned a Football Boot Into a Dress Shoe
Curious what the future of shoes looks like? Coperni and PUMA's collaborative shoe is it. Both familiar and utterly alien, the sneaker recalls Coperni's fantastically entertaining runway shows where cutting-edge tech melds with clothing design of the here and now.
Coperni and PUMA's debut sneaker thus looks like something from then, now, and later, translating inspiration from the past into a shoe so incredibly of the moment that it's ahead of its time.
Forget day-to-night dressing: in a few centuries, we'll all be wearing Coperni's PUMA shoes from the football pitch to dinner rehearsals.
The unnamed Coperni x PUMA sneaker "is constructed exactly like a football boot but looks like a dress shoe," Heiko Desens, PUMA's Global Creative Director, told Highsnobiety. "The shoes live in the future. Our vision of futuristic tech, this product and the engineering behind it look towards the future."
Coperni creative director Sébastien Meyer and CEO Arnaud Vaillant concur, though they also point to influence from the similarly prescient Mostro, one of their favorite PUMA shoes, and the PUMA Future boot.
Bear in mind that this is no mere collab. Coperni is only the second fashion brand to effectively create its own signature PUMA shoe.
"The shoes are inspired by movement and brutalist architecture," they said. "We love the fusion of futuristic elements into a design that remains entirely wearable. The shoes are mainly designed with straight lines, which is very unexpected for a pair of sneakers."
Unexpected indeed. Coperni and PUMA created a sneaker untethered from time, a low-top shoe with a minimalist outsole that looks like a football boot sans spikes.
"Football and high-tech innovation are two big aspects of the product, even down to the mini studs on the outsole," Desens continued. "From a production point of view, the key innovation is the material lamination. With a football boot, you have this hugging effect that holds your foot in; very stretchy, but also very durable.
"From a material standpoint, it’s strictly performance. We stayed very close to the material specifications of performance boots. It’s the same construction package."
As is typical of Coperni, its PUMA shoe is available in subdued monochrome colors. However, the bold yellow iteration feels like the design's truest iteration, the screamingly loud hue deliciously jarring against the sneaker's understated ethos while calling back to its sporty inspiration.
"The concept is straightforward-design clothing and footwear that effortlessly transition from workouts to everyday life," said Meyer and Vaillant.
That means function but also fashion: unlike any football boot you'll ever see, Coperni's PUMA sneakers sport a chiseled square toe.
"One of the signature elements of Coperni’s footwear, the square toe is the strongest design feature that takes it out of the athletic world because it's such a classic shape," explained Desens. "It represents a high-fashion shoe."
Coperni's PUMA sneaker is quite timely, arriving at a moment where terrace culture is informing all aspects sportswear. Football jerseys are trending hard, for instance, and Rihanna just restarted the Fenty PUMA line with her own boot-inspired sneaker.
It's just that, while everyone else is designing for 2023, Coperni and PUMA created kicks for 3023. Luckily, we've only got to wait a few months until the shoe releases in January 2024 via Coperni's website, PUMA's web store, and a handful of stockists.
