At Paris Fashion Week, a Golden Age of Footwear
As the apex of catwalk occasions, Paris Fashion Week typically crowns tomorrow’s trends today, functioning as a first look at the near-future of fashion. But the Fall/Winter 2025 menswear presentations that wrapped in late January were surprisingly of the moment — at least, as far as ankles are concerned. The clothes may have been of next season but the footwear was entirely of the here and now.
Debuted across Paris' many runways and showrooms, the FW25 footwear is a remarkable microcosm of our contemporary footwear landscape, shrinking an immediate birds-eye view into a concise selection of standout shoes.
The most visible examples include some of today’s trendiest sneakers, like the PUMA Speedcat and adidas Country. These shoes are already quite established and yet stylishly evergreen, their sleekly flat soles destined to long outlive the once-popular chunksters of yesteryear — think Balenciaga’s Triple S, Nike’s M2K Tekno.
At all recent fashion weeks, including FW25 men's, the Speedcat and Country have been present, on the runway, sitting front row, walking around outside.
They’ve also shaped a genre of barely-there footwear that's continued evolving beyond prior tolerances for flatness, demonstrated for next season by New Balance’s laceless climbing shoe to KidSuper’s squashed PUMA Palermo. These are new shoes, yes, but they're also indicative of what people are wearing right now.
Today's state of sneakers is similarly guided by a broader interest in unusual shapes that probably would've been too adventurous for mass consumption only a short while ago.
Some of FW25's aggressively normal shoes, like GR10K’s blacked-out Salomon and Post Archive Faction’s weirdo On dad shoe, and its wilder wonders, like Doublet’s plump, zippable derbies and sacai’s eviscerated UGG boots, would've likely been too outré to build buzz beyond a niche of hardcore admirers only a few years ago.
Now, though, this stuff is widely recognized as cool, evinced by its swift spread across curatorial social media pages. I mean, even we're posting these sorta things alongside Louis Vuitton's latest, which goes to show that there's an audience for both originality and big-time sneaker collaborations.
Speaking of, sneaker collabs are always king at fashion week. We all know this.
The difference here is that the latest crop of footwear team-ups aren't merely good — though they are. They're also demonstrative of modern-day footwear interests, even though they're ostensibly not releasing until next season.
Look at adidas, whose presence at fashion week was impressively potent.
This is because, instead of flooding fashion week with high-profile partnerships, adidas appeared in the right way in the right place at the right time, every time.
It created suave dress sneakers for Willy Chavarria’s debut PFW presentation; slick remixes of its classics with Pièces Uniques, Brain Dead, and Song for the Mute; a truly nutty Balenciaga-flavored shoe for Pharrell; and came correct with one of the strongest adidas Y-3 collections in years.
While adidas rides the culture’s hottest shoes to a relative financial windfall, primary rival Nike seeks to claw back relevance (and revenues) amidst waning visibility.
This aligned with the Swoosh’s scant fashion week representation, provided almost exclusively by a couple familiar Nike partners like Jacquemus and COMME des GARÇONS Homme Plus (the latter of which was, admittedly, enjoyably weird).
And, other major sportswear brands played parts indicative of their place in sneaker culture.
New Balance’s defiantly daddish directness was epitomized by its no-frills AURALEE and Junya Watanabe MAN shoes, for instance, while PUMA capitalized on its cool-kid come-up with an activation that packed in influencers, some impressively funky upcoming models, and fresh collaborations with tastemakers that included Slam Jam and JJJJound.
Yes, PUMA is now clouty enough to snag a JJJJound collab. This is where we're at!
But all of this newness was, paradoxically, quite familiar. Even with occasional all-new sneakers, most of what was on tap for FW25 fell in line with extant tastes, serving to reinforce that feeling that the FW25 is a distillation of the greater goings-on in today's footwear business. If you sat back and soaked it in, you'd see an entire industry collapsed into a single week’s showings.
The sensation went beyond sportswear, with an ample assortment of pure designer footwear proving possibly even punchier.
Lemaire, which built its $100-million brand specifically by eschewing trends, has been producing low-profile, square-toed shoes for at least a decade by now.
But, as popular taste circles back around to the modernist trail that Lemaire itself blazed, its sleek slip-ons are scoring incidental attention akin to the surprise splash made by Dries Van Noten’s humble suede sneaker earlier this year. (Anyone seeking further proof need only have waited in the long queue that formed every day of fashion week outside of Lemaire’s sumptuous Paris flagship store)
Rier, another brand that’s earned insider kudos with a patient form of grounded luxury, filtered its tyrolean heritage into tyrolean lace-ups styled with the aspirational ease of a WASP clad in boat shoes. COMME des GARÇONS-backed cobbler Phileo created resplendent Mary Janes, part craft and part cute. ROA’s prescient post-gorp trail shoes are still so hot that its appointment-only FW25 showroom became a briskly popular public hang by the end of the week.
And the great ideas just kept coming, as ingenious designers like Kiko Kostadinov — jika-tabi-style ASICS sneaker-boots! — and Mihara Yasuhiro — handbags for the feet! — twisted familiarity into freshness.
Disparate they may be, all of these shoes speak to contemporary inclinations, rather than something occurring in the far-off future.
Lemaire’s low-tops are the next evolution of the high-end answer to the Samba. Rier and ROA are evolving the contemporary yen for non-sneaker shoes (which are, of course, meant to be worn with the same effortlessness as the sneakers that they supersede). Kostadinov is pushing beyond the soon-to-be-saturated boxing shoe boom. It all ties into things happening in the here and now.
That’s very much for the better. It complements the other optimistic things happening on the ground, like swelling excitement for real-world wearables steeped in authenticity. Likewise, who doesn't prefer approachable kicks to flights of footwear fancy?
According to Paris Fashion Week FW25, the freshest footwear is the stuff that you’ve already come to know and love (or at least tolerate). At best, it's a sign that we’re living through a golden age of great footwear. And the really good news? It’s gonna last for at least another season.
