Past, present and future of the sneaker game

There is no precise moment in history when the sneaker world has gone from a niche phenomenon to a mass phenomenon, a single fact identifiable as a turning point in the history of the sneaker game so important to explain the explosion of an entire movement. It does not exist, but surely something has happened, because never as in recent years has the sneaker market experienced an unprecedented popularity capable of exponentially increasing demand, but not supply. While the public was buying and asking for more and more, brands have exploited this renewed popularity in the worst way, looking to the past and the present while completely ignoring the future.

With the renewed success of historic models such as the Dunk and Jordan 1 at Nike or the Superstar at adidas, the companies have decided to concentrate a large part of their efforts on capitalizing on the success of their old models, forgetting the need to look at sneakers. game of tomorrow. While the fashion system continues to constantly talk about sustainability and circularity, the world of sneakers does not seem to want to meet these renewed needs, continuing to produce and market more products than are actually sold but above all without trying to wear their silhouettes, historical or not, towards a different dimension. Obviously, with the explosion of the sneaker market, all the brands decided to have their say by creating models that inevitably looked to the most successful competitors for inspiration, thus triggering a vicious circle in which everyone had their own sneaker but no one had one in able to really stand out from the others.

If on the one hand the future of the sneaker game is frightening for its unconventional shapes, on the other hand the success of models such as the Yeezy Foam Runner or the Nike Go FlyEase testifies that it is the great players who have in hand, also thanks to the hype, the ability to shape and even impose change. For every Virgil Abloh short of ideas, there are designers and creatives ready to rewrite the rules of the game, ready to bring the world of sneakers to a new dimension capable of looking to the future without forgetting the past and the present. We talked about it with Domenico Formichetti, designer and creator of Formy Studio, and with RAL7000, a collective of Italian designers already at work with adidas, in the fourth episode of the second season of The SneakerPod, the nss magazine podcast produced in collaboration with StockX.