After years of the ever bigger, ever bulkier sneaker, there seems to be bit of a backlash: Sneakers have become sleek, streamlined and, in a word, skinny.
“There was a shift, I think it was in the fall of 2023, where you saw a lot more Sambas on the street, with that slick sole,” said Federico Barassi, the vice president of men’s wear at the Canadian e-commerce site SSENSE, citing the popular Adidas style. “People started to have some fatigue with those big bubble-y, older sneakers.”
Recent runways were awash with aerodynamic and attenuated versions, from Prada’s slipper-like Collapse sneaker with its elasticized foot opening ($975) to Dries Van Noten’s suede sneakers ($475) that referenced 1970s running shoes. Ganni is offering little ballerina lace-ups ($495), while Maison Margiela has released a flattened and cleated riff ($820) on its own popular Replica style. Miu Miu, the reigning cool girl brand, recently released the low-profile Plume ($895), an elegant entrant into the slim sneaker canon.
Larger sportswear brands have picked up on this sylphlike silhouette. Puma brought its classic Speedcat, first introduced in 1999, out of retirement last summer, while Adidas revived its svelte Taekwondo and Tokyo models. Nike is resurrecting the Total 90 III, with a futuristic feel and off-kilter laces, this spring and summer; in late-January the designer Jacquemus sent the horizontally inclined Moon Shoe, a track sneaker introduced in 1972, down his runway as part of a collaboration with the company. In addition to a smaller, sleeker appearance, these styles often have a smooth, tapered profile, akin to a bullet. Or, as GQ recently named them, “torpedo sneakers.”
“It really benefits the big brands that have been around for long enough to have shoes from those eras like the 1960s and 1970s,” said Brendan Dunne, who heads up sneaker coverage at Complex and who also name-checked the Samba’s popularity as a catalyst for the current movement. “One of the interesting things happening in sneaker consumption right now is the rise of brands like On or Hoka taking market share from big brands. And if you think about the slim sneaker trend, I don’t think On or Hoka can participate in that because they’re all about techy shoes and shoes that just have a little bit more girth to them.”
In keeping with fashion’s cyclical nature, these shoes can be seen as a pendulum swing away from what came before, best exemplified by Balenciaga’s influential Triple S sneaker. That shoe, with its built-up sole, created a mania for brawnier footwear and led to the popularity of “dad sneakers” from brands such as New Balance and Asics. In a quest for newness, brands are now countering with slender designs. (Balenciaga, it should be noted, has remained dedicated to its bigger-is-better approach.)
These footwear offerings are also a reaction to the changing cut in ready-to-wear, namely the looser clothing silhouettes dominating apparel, seen particularly in the rise of fuller, relaxed-cut trousers. “Skinny pants and jeans are fading away,” Mr. Barassi said. “And you can style these with the wider trousers, and bell-bottoms, that are trending right now.”
Wide-legged pants are gaining so much traction that they’ve even infiltrated the formal wear category, as demonstrated by flashier dressers like Colman Domingo, Omar Apollo and Robert Downey Jr. at last week’s Academy Awards ceremony.
“The shape of the shoes and the shape of the pants we wear, there’s this inverse correlation,” Mr. Dunne said. “Look back eight years ago when every rapper was wearing skinny jeans and gigantic Balenciaga trainers. Now it’s the other way around: slim, low silhouettes and gigantic pants.”
Additionally, these shoes build upon the already crowded overlap between sport and fashion. They’re leveraging activities like martial arts, rock climbing, wrestling and even the enduring popularity of ballet slippers.
“There’s all these adjacent gorpcore shoes, or low-pro shoes, that put us in this zone,” Mr. Dunne said. “I think of something like the popularity of the Salomon XT-6, which isn’t in this same zone, necessarily, but it sets us up, it bridges the gap between the chunky shoe and this.”
These sneakers also faintly recall the popular shoes of the Y2K era, a now-mythical pre-internet time that continues to cast a spell on younger generations.
“I remember the Prada America’s Cup, everyone wanted that sneaker,” Mr. Barassi said of the brand’s futuristic patent leather and technical mesh sneaker introduced in 1997. “And it had this thinner profile.”
Torben Schumacher, who oversees Adidas Originals, the fashion and lifestyle division of the company, said that once the company noticed the popularity of its Samba and the Gazelle styles, it began to search for new models to resurrect from its archives. Ultimately, it landed on the Tokyo and Taekwondo.
“The latter was designed for martial-arts athletes in the 2000s, but one look at the shoe and you can immediately envision it on a runway or city street,” Mr. Schumacher wrote in an email. Still, Mr. Schumacher wrote that, regardless of the cultural factors leading us to this moment, perhaps the most compelling reason to wear a slim shoe was the most straightforward: “There’s a sense of effortlessness to these low profile styles — both in style and in function.”
