Cool Kicks: Takkie loses the tacky

24 April 2014 - 09:47 By Luke Leitch
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They were separated by just a few hundred kilometres and 48 hours. Yet the crowds at Chanel's show in Paris, France, and Nike's show in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this year seemed beamed down from galaxies light years apart.

In Paris, the room was perfumed by No 5. In Barcelona, the conference hall stank of cheap deodorant. At Nike, a mostly male audience with a penchant for polyester and denim were gathered to view the unveiling of a new World Cup football boot. At Chanel, a mostly female audience with a fondness for facelifts and bouclé (yarn) were there to witness Karl Lagerfeld's next-season quilted shopping trolleys.

Planet Fashion and the Wide World of Sport might have different atmospheres, but in 2014 they have something in common, too: a passion for trainers. A genre of shoe that evolved to optimise performance, comfort and speed has suddenly found currency among women for whom style - often at the expense of their ability to walk in a straight line painlessly - has always been the only criterion in town.

The trainer thing has been bubbling under in fashion for a little while now: Valentino, Jimmy Choo, Givenchy, Hogan and Dior Homme have been making cool kicks for at least a couple of years.

These, though, were a bit like fashion sunglasses - entry-level items for those who wanted that designer name more than the design itself. Isabel Marant made a trainer-wedge hybrid that proved hugely successful - but even she recently admitted they were OTT.

Then, a year ago, slip-on skateboard trainers were featured by fashion's newest darling, British designer Phoebe Philo. That the only significant difference between her design for Céline and the venerable skater low-top by Vans was a price differential of several hundred percent mattered not: for Philo's backing granted trainers an entrée to fashion's high church.

Now, not only does the front row wear trainers - this season the fash pack resembled an unusual running club. The shoe is jogging down the catwalk, too. At Dior, Raf Simons, who moonlights for Adidas, combined a moulded trainer sole with a mid-heel pump. There were more slip-ons at Céline, this time with a sole that looked a lot like Nike's famous (if you are into trainers and smell of cheap deodorant) Air Force 1. And at Chanel, trainers completed almost every single look.

Mark Parker is the most influential designer of trainers in the world. He is the CEO of Nike - which is by some margin the world's biggest sportswear company - and the man responsible for unveiling the Magista football boot that will be worn in Brazil for the World Cup.

He runs a business that employs more than 30000 people, has revenues of $26-billion (R274.6-billion ), and boasts a globally recognisable logo.

While Nike focuses all its research and marketing oomph on serving an elite band of athletes in sports ranging from snowboarding to sprinting, the wider world is littered with hundreds of millions of immobile slobs - and now lots of fashionable women, too - who wear Nike simply because the shoes look great and are comfortable.

To service us slobs, every week the company releases scores of new designs or colour combinations, and even offers its customers a chance to design their own. The fashionability of Nike - equal to its sporting credentials - is what makes it such a success.

Millions of people buy Nike because they look cool, but Nike itself maintains that this coolness is only a by-product of making shoes that help sportspeople perform better and feel a little bit Eye Of The Tiger, too.

So what does Parker think of the sudden adoption of his sweaty specialist subject by chi-chi fashion designers?

He said: ''Our motivation isn't to make products that resonate with the luxury fashion consumer. But the nature of what we do, the design and the inspiration, I think sometimes makes it part of that world. Comfort is a factor, too. People adopt it, and put it together as part of a statement they want to make." - © The Daily Telegraph

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