It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when high fashion and sneakers were mutually exclusive. It wasn’t until Gucci launched a tennis shoe in 1984 that this started to change and the lines between them began to blur.
Forty years later, we find ourselves in a world where sneakers are best-selling products for many of the OG European fashion houses. High fashion’s adoption of sportier footwear styles ushered in a new era for both – the historically stuffy and highly strung world of haute couture began to relax, and its designers helped to push sneakers into weird and exciting new territory with maximalist styling and unconventional materials.