Every Brand Is Making Sneakers Now. Here Is How the Sneaker Got Here

Why are sneakers so popular, and how did they end up tied to high fashion? The short answer lies in several decades of pop culture: advertising and the rise of street culture, the influence of hip-hop and the NBA, and men's growing interest in fashion...

Plenty of items can make you look more stylish: sunglasses, a white T-shirt, a little black dress... But flip through a year of street-style photos, watch a modern city drama (Korean dramas especially), or get close to a high-fashion runway, and you will find the sneaker impossible to ignore.

Why are sneakers so popular, and how did they end up tied to high fashion? The short answer lies in several decades of pop culture: advertising and the rise of street culture, the influence of hip-hop and the NBA, and men's growing interest in fashion...

Where the Sneaker Came From

The sneaker began in Europe and America. In 1892, the United States Rubber Company made a comfortable shoe with a canvas upper and a rubber sole: Keds.

In 1917, an advertising agent named Henry Nelson McKinney used the word "sneaker" for rubber-soled athletic shoes, because you could walk in them without a sound (stealthy). This is usually counted as the true start of the "sneaker."

The word goes back further still. In 1887 it appeared in the Boston Journal as "the name boys gave to tennis shoes," because whoever wore them could sneak up on you, unlike the clatter of the hard leather soles that came before.

Today the word covers rubber- or synthetic-soled athletic shoes of every kind, including running shoes, tennis shoes, basketball shoes and loafers.

At First, Sneakers Were a Luxury

The first rubber-soled sneakers appeared in the United States in the 1890s. Rubber was expensive and the working class had little leisure time, so generally only the elite could afford them.

In the early 20th century, and especially after World War I, people began to take exercise and sport seriously. As the first fitness enthusiasts appeared, shoe companies began mass-producing athletic shoes to meet demand. A shoe that once only the rich could afford grew cheaper and spread to ordinary people.

Sneakers Go Mass-Market, and the Big Brands Emerge

In 1921, the rubber-shoe company Converse, wanting to stand out and win the basketball market, signed a player named Chuck Taylor. He helped improve the design of the All Star line (the world's first basketball shoe), and his name went on the product.

With a famous name attached and better design and technology, the Converse All Star quickly became a craze in the United States. For a time it was a byword for the basketball shoe, and in 1936 it was the official shoe of the Olympic basketball team.

Only after World War II did the sneaker stop being a luxury. Students and workers alike could afford a pair, and in the United States it became as much a national symbol as McDonald's or Levi's.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Adi Dassler founded Adidas in 1924. It started with running and football shoes and soon became one of the world's most popular sports brands. Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Adidas shoes.

The world's first sneaker named after a person was the Adidas Stan Smith. This little white shoe is surely one of the best-selling sneakers ever: in 1988 alone it sold 22 million pairs and earned a place in the Guinness World Records.

It was not called the Stan Smith at first. In 1963, Adidas made its first tennis shoe, with a leather upper and a rubber sole. Two years later it signed the French tennis player Robert Haillet as its endorser and named the line the Adidas Robert Haillet.

After Haillet retired, Stan Smith (then the world's top-ranked tennis player) took over the endorsement. But Adidas hesitated for years over renaming the shoe. From 1973 to 1978, the tongue carried Stan Smith's portrait while the side still bore Haillet's name. Only in 1978 did the line become the Stan Smith outright.

This classic of classics is a favorite of countless street-style regulars, models, film stars and even star designers.

Converse, meanwhile, went into decline. In 2003 it declared bankruptcy and was bought by Nike. Nike, now the world's largest sports brand, is without question the most important link in the sneaker's history.

Nike was founded in 1964 as a distributor for the Japanese shoe brand Onitsuka Tiger (now ASICS), and in 1971 it formally became Nike Inc.

Nike's own sneakers began with a small story. One morning in 1970, Bill Bowerman, one of Nike's founders, was making waffles in the kitchen with his wife when it struck him that a sole grooved like a waffle would give a running shoe more grip on the track.

In 1974, Nike patented the design, and it cost no more than a waffle iron. The result was Nike's first sneaker line, the Nike Waffle Trainer.

It was Nike's other principal founder, Phil Knight, who truly made the brand. With his head for marketing and his command of the market, he carried the sneaker into the fashion world.

In 1972, riding two cultural currents, conspicuous consumption and a revived fitness craze, Nike released the Nike Cortez running shoe (known in China as the "Forrest Gump shoe") and shrewdly made sure athletes wore it at the Olympics. Its design was no longer confined to competition either: it came in a range of colors and features.

The Washington Post has said that Nike and Phil Knight pioneered creative marketing, and that this is why sneakers today are sought after, collected, talked about and treated as art. In other words, they are fashion.

Seeing a market in the making, other designers joined in. In 1984, Gucci released its signature Gucci Tennis shoe, with the brand's red-and-green stripe on the upper and "Gucci" printed on the tongue. It was the first sneaker from a luxury brand.

Then in 1985, Nike bet on Michael Jordan, still an NBA rookie, and released the Air Jordan 1. Its red-and-black colorway broke NBA commissioner David Stern's rule that shoes worn in games must be mostly white. Jordan wore them anyway, Nike paid a US$5,000 fine for every game, and the fines only drew more attention.

A love of basketball, devotion to a winning athlete (no one can deny Jordan is one of the greatest players ever), and the urge to copy his rebellion and individuality made the Air Jordan a huge success and the best-selling athletic brand, a position it still holds. Last year Jordan brand sales reached $2.5 billion, a 58% share of the sneaker market. In 2013 alone, the sneaker business earned Jordan $90 million.

In 1986, the famous American hip-hop group Run-DMC released the single "My Adidas." It marked the start of hip-hop and sneakers working together as art and commerce. The sneaker became a badge of identity (I love hip-hop, I go my own way), embraced by hip-hop kids and skater boys.

Luxury Brands Join the Game

As casual style caught on, the old high-fashion houses began to consider more elegant, finely crafted sneakers.

The New York Times once observed that sneakers took off, and luxury brands gradually piled in, largely because the brands had found a luxury market of men's own, one where men could obsess over sneakers the way women collect designer handbags and high heels.

In 1996, Prada brought the sneaker onto the runway and set the trend for high-end sneaker design. The Prada PS0906 showed that the sneaker had shed its original purpose, serving elite athletes on the field, and become a way to express style.

In 2002, Adidas teamed up with Yohji Yamamoto and Jeremy Scott to reinterpret the brand's early styles, joining sneaker culture with high fashion. The shoes kept the sneaker's original function and shape while showing each designer's own aesthetic: Yamamoto's forward-looking, architectural design alongside Scott's humor. Both still work with Adidas today.

In 2004, Common Projects was born. This luxury shoemaker, built on simplicity, was founded by an American art director, Prathan Poopat, and an Italian creative consultant, Flavio Girolami. Its shoes are made from Italian Nappa leather and stitched by hand. Their clean shape and fine quality made them a quick hit in the fashion world.

Louis Vuitton raised the luxury-sneaker stakes again. In 2009 it brought in the rapper and street-style icon Kanye West, and together they produced a collaboration of three shoes priced in the four figures (in US dollars). The celebrity was less an endorser than one of the creators. The shoes sold out almost at once.

Kanye is also the non-athlete who has endorsed and co-released the most sneakers, with repeated collaborations with Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

Nike-Air-Yeezy-2-Pure-Platinum

Adidas-Yeezy-Boost-750

Adidas-Yeezy-Boost-350 "Turtle Dove"

Louis-Vuitton-Don-Tan / Burgundy

In 2011, Christian Louboutin, the French high-heel brand famous for its red soles, released its first menswear collection. Its studded Roller-Boat sneaker, on a red rubber sole, reworked his earlier loafer. Coming from so feminine a brand, the shoe let men look stylish without giving up their masculinity.

Riccardo Tisci, creative director of Givenchy, had been obsessed with Nike's Air Force 1 for more than a decade. His mid-top sneaker line launched in 2012, followed by a high-top line in 2013. Both look a lot like the AF1, which he named as his inspiration.

2012 style

2013 style

Then in 2014 he and Nike released a co-branded pair.

As its fashion side grew, the sneaker never lost its original athletic purpose. With the running boom and China's fitness craze, several retro running shoes from New Balance and Asics took off too. In 2013 you could walk down the street and see New Balance 574s everywhere. Their patchwork fabric, thick soles and slim profile, worn with skinny pants or joggers (loose overall, gathered at the ankle), became a trend.

By January last year the casual-sport trend was only gathering pace, and Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld and Dior's Raf Simons each brought signature sneakers onto their haute couture runways.

In September, Alexander Wang put on a runway show for a collection inspired entirely by sneakers.

Other designers, such as Jade Lai of Creatures of Comfort (in New York) and Alice Temperley (in London), filled their shows with sneakers.

At the autumn shows that just ended, most of the audience in London and Paris wore sneakers, true to the rule that "sneakers go with everything." One designer once said she would never wear sneakers because... they were too low-brow. Yet in not much time at all, the sneaker has become a fashion statement. It can be stylish, expensive, minimalist, high-tech or flashy, and as more and more brands join in, the possibilities keep growing.