Each style traces back to a popular silhouette. To my bespectacled eyes, the ultra-slim-soled CELINE Flat and Racer look like ultra-luxe takes on the PUMA Speedcat and Nike Cortez, while the rubbery Alan is to a pair of vulcanized Vans as the CT-04 Trainer is to the AF1, especially in its clean all-white colorway. And that fat-tongued Huntington skate shoe? It’s giving lovechild of Converse Jack Purcell and Nike Dunk — assuming said lovechild got the best genes of both parents (and maybe indulged in a little looksmaxxing). 

CELINE’s sneaker game is on fire. This all hits different now that we’ve left the distinctly slim, indie-sleaze vibe of Hedi Slimane behind — which, to be fair, did double CELINE’s sales to over €2.5 billion. 

In just three collections, CELINE’s latest creative director, Michael Rider, has brought a preppier, sportier vision to the brand after six years at Polo Ralph Lauren (and, before that, a decade-long stint at Phoebe Philo’s Céline). The brand’s elevated take on classic sneakers is now paired with rugby shirts, trim sweaters, striped shirts and pinched-waist blazers, matching the lightness of Rider’s creative vision. 

When Rider debuted his first solo menswear collection earlier this year, he wrote a letter that championed “character over costume.” His focus, he said, was on building a new kind of CELINE with “classics with bite, when discretion and restraint make the right kind of noise.”

That’s not to say there isn’t the odd oddity loudly asserting itself. The vibrant red Ballet Lace-Up, for example, has an upper half that is defined by strips of leather that allow your toes to poke out like they’re in prison. But CELINE’s sneakers seem to mostly adhere to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Or, maybe that’s “if it ain’t broke, make it better.”

As we wade through a sea of odd shoe silhouettes, from the sneaker-mule to the Tabi-fication of seemingly everything, it’s refreshing to just see a really, really well-done take on sneakers that’re beloved for a reason. 

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“We wanted to look back at the largely untold history of Berlin fashion, which is to most people quite unknown, and find our place in the history of Berlin,” Huseby tells me in the courtyard of the stately Kronprinzenpalais, a former Royal Prussian residence where just moments before 38 models — including avant electronic music pioneer Arca and Daniel Julez J. Smith, son of Solange and a previous Highsnobiety cover boy — had presented GmbH’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection. 

Huseby and Işık researched the couturiers who defined Berlin’s bustling early 20th century fashion scene, such as Joe Strassner, a costume designer on British sci-fi film Transatlantic Tunnel (1935) alongside Elsa Schiaparelli, and Uli Richter, one of Germany’s most famed dressmakers whose celebrity clientele included Grace Kelly. Many of the looks referenced prints or colors or shapes created by Berlin designers of yesteryear. 

One of the challenges of assembling this de facto retrospective was how difficult it was to find source material. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime dealt a fateful blow to the German city’s fashion industry by destroying the archives of Jewish designers and essentially reducing the industry to a few state collaborators. After World War II, few designers returned to the city; Berlin’s fashion scene is still recovering to this day.

“When we started the brand, it was absolutely necessary for us to go to Paris and show our work on the center stage of fashion… Berlin was not ready at the time so we had to go there,” says Işık. (SS27 is the brand’s fifth season showing in Berlin rather than Paris.) “I don't think any of us would have been here 10 years ago. Being here today and being able to tell the story is quite serendipitous. It feels as though it's the right time to do it and to be here.”

As well as weaving in tropes from bygone designers, like the collar from a 1934 coat by Clara Böhm, the duo looked at their own decade-old archives, reworking former favorites and building on their codes. Alongside the couture references, Işık is quick to point to SS27’s “sexy sportswear,” a GmbH specialty that is embodied in tank tops so slight that they cover hardly any of the wearer’s torso, as well as the sharply exaggerated tailoring, as seen in one broad-shouldered black overcoat with a tightly nipped waist — styled without pants but with thigh-high shiny black leather boots. This is all classic GmbH: sporty, kinky, and with an overtly political story. 

The show, and its moment within Berlin Fashion Week,  signals a new era for the brand, where it has a new mission outlined in the show notes: “To make fashion accepted as a serious cultural expression in Germany.”

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Since founding Dagger in 2020, Rainey has drawn on his experience as a queer skater kid in the working class seaside town of Portrush, Northern Ireland, to create this little cast of characters that populates a “rose-tinted-lens version” of Portrush. 

For his Spring/Summer 2027 collection, “Lifestyles of the Bored and Disenfranchised,” Rainey brought back many models from last season’s runway debut at Berlin Fashion Week and built on the codes he established, this time adding an extra bit of tenderness. “Normally, we have a lot of hardcore graphics, denim, and canvas, but this time I needed some romanticism, because I'm also a very soft person and I want that to be felt," Rainey says backstage after the show.

Also forming a throughline was his own working class background: Rainey launched the brand after being laid off, with only a few hundred dollars in government benefits to his name, and built it from the ground up, from primarily hawking graphic tees and sweaters to forming a full-fledged fashion label. 

During his post-show bow, Rainey wore a T-shirt that read “Employ Working Class Kids,” but this wasn’t a collection concerned with pushing any overt socioeconomic message; he was too busy having fun. Guided by a sense of unbridled optimism that only comes with youth and hot summer nights, his Dagger SS27 collection was unexpectedly joyous, considering how many models' knees were scraped and knuckles bruised. 

“I wanted it to feel like the kids had been partying in the sand dunes all night long,” he explains. “It's summertime, so they've gotten their first jobs and have a little money, and they're walking home in the early morning after some new experiences, thinking about who they might become beyond where they are now.” 

The collection was packed with graphic tees — a personal favorite being a blue hoodie reading “Summer Time Sadist" (a cheeky take on the Lana Del Rey track) emblazoned above a gimp mask; plus a great range of distressed denim — sometimes faded or acid-washed, other times scribbled with marker or sun-bleached with florals and stars. More quintessential skatewear came in the form of board shorts, animal-print button-ups, and canvas pants, but there were also some surprises, like a beautifully tailored jacket in a soft blue with a cinched waist and a contrasting white collar — not your usual fare from a skate brand but, then again, most skate brands aren’t staging runway shows. 

Also carrying over from Dagger’s previous collection: partnerships with Apple and Vans. “I wrote Apple a letter in the beginning about growing up queer in [my hometown],” Rainey says. “I got a lot of abuse, so I'd keep my headphones in to block out the noise around me, and they became my safety. Apple responded to that, and I started shooting the lookbooks on the iPhone 17 Pro with just natural light; it felt really honest to me.” Last season saw the entire Dagger runway show filmed on iPhone, and this season went one step further with models taking selfies mid-runway walk or with AirPods Max slung around their necks. 

Vans, meanwhile, approached Rainer early on, having seen him wear its shoes for years. After his first custom shoe became the talk of Dagger’s Paris showroom, the new SS27 collection featured models walking in slip-ons customized with metal stars, scribbled with marker, and given a round of distressing to perfect that lived-in look that defines the brand. 

It's clear that Rainey has put in the work to elevate his craft, buoyed by the positive reception to last season’s debut runway show. “I realized I had to make a more elevated product [using] better fabrics and learning more about technique, which I've taken really seriously,” he says. 

If the ecstatic crowd of Dagger-clad guests at this year’s show is anything to go by, the alt-version of home that Rainey has built, season by season, has seen its population boom beyond the core cast of characters he sends down his runway. The designer may be far from Portsrush, but Portsrush is never far from mind. 

“This is where I draw all my inspiration from,” he tells us backstage. “It's weird because I didn’t have a romantic youth at all; it was actually the opposite. I guess this is how I'm healing, in a way: showing that experience as something beautiful and creative, rather than as it really was.”

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Meet the new summer-ready colorway "Hyper Pink."

Originally designed for the court, hence the name, the Tennis Classic has spent long enough with skateboarders to feel just as at home on grip tape as it does around a baseline. 

Slim and refreshingly uncomplicated, it's a reminder that not every skate shoe needs to look like it survived a monster truck rally.

This latest pink edition doesn't exactly do subtle either. Wrapped in premium pink leather with sharp black accents, it's the kind of colorway that refuses to blend into the background, whether you're skating it or simply wearing it to the coffee shop. 

The playful graphics are a nod to "Club 58," the independent skate shops that helped shape Nike SB's identity from the very beginning. 

It's a fun reminder that some of Nike SB's best releases aren't the loudest in construction, just in personality. The Tennis Classic proves that a good silhouette doesn't need reinventing, sometimes it just needs a fresh coat of pink.

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The 005 is what norda calls a trail super shoe, made for race days using Formula 1-level materials and the same fiber as bulletproof vests, which makes it all near-enough indestructible. Now, that shoe has evolved.

The norda 055, officially unveiled here by Highsnobiety, is the Canadian running label’s newest model. It isn’t an upgrade on the previous edition per se, but rather, as the brand’s founder, Nick Martire, described it in a press release, “a specific tool for a specific purpose.”

“When we set out to create the 005, our focus was on making a shoe that was as light and fast as possible, swift and powerful while still maintaining the elevated level of durability that we’re known for,” Martire tells Highsnobiety. “On the other hand, the 055 is a shoe for a very different purpose. It takes a ‘more is more’ angle, with a higher stack, deeper lugs, and a more structured upper.”

Along with the frankly insane technologies it experiments with — the 055 includes a bespoke bio-circular material woven from Dyneema, the world’s toughest fiber and over 15 times stronger than steel by weight — what makes norda distinct is its approach to releasing shoes. It rarely brings out new designs, only doing so to fill gaps in the brand’s range, and its updates to older models are purely performance-focused, free from gimmicky cosmetic upgrades. As Martire told me before the release of the 005, he hates the concept of “putting shoes out to market every year for no reason other than driving sales,” and wants norda to act as the antithesis of all the sportswear giants who do so. Every new shoe is, as he calls it, a new “tool” in norda’s expanding selection of trail weaponry.

In this case, “The 055 is an all-terrain, all-distance shoe,” he says. “It’s rugged enough for high-mountain racing, but fast and propulsive enough for speed sessions or less technical trails as well. It’s also our first shoe with a knit sock collar, as typically we’re known for more minimalist heel designs.” That latter point is vital, as the new collar means better protection from mountain debris entering inside.

So far, the 055, releasing globally on July 9 for $325, has proven itself as a useful tool. Test runs included Jason Schlarb, norda’s trail team manager, racing in Colorado mountain ranges wearing 055s while experienced explorer Ray Zahab tested them in extreme environments like Death Valley, and Rachel Entrekin ran a record-breaking over-56-hour performance at the 2026 Cocodona 250 wearing the new mid-top model. The 055 is helping break records before it’s even released.

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adidas is atemporal, and everyone knows it. But if there was any lingering doubt, the Three Stripes 3D-printed training boot is here to hush that noise.

The Climacool Laced football boot is a lightweight sneaker that hugs the foot like a glove with the breathability of a sandal. If beach-side soccer is your vibe, there is quite literally no better shoe out there.

Inspired by architecture, the Climacool Laced sneaker's multi-dimensional lattice adapts to the contours of the foot while adidas' Climacool technology wicks away sweat for enhanced comfort and 360° airflow.

Stuffy foot feel? Not ‘round here, partner. Not ‘round here. 

Standard adidas Three Stripe branding takes over the midfoot, adding some aesthetic balance to the coral-toned sneaker. Of course, this shoe was designed for the fields, but it still takes pride in its good looks. To be fair, though, this is adidas' established MO at this point.

Beyond its functional purpose, the ventilation throughout the Climacool Laced gives the athletic sneaker an aesthetic edge. As it stands, perforated uppers are far from the standard when it comes to soccer cleats, but adidas is so far ahead of the curve that it's only a matter of time until the rest of the industry gets in on that action.

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The ACS PRO 2 marries a floating cage system with an asymmetrical lacing system, giving the hiking shoe a utilitarian disposition that sits at the intersection of practicality and architectural aura. It's caged-in, in a good way.

Elsewhere, the ACS PRO 2 wears a mesh upper and frayed midsole detailing which adds an element of deconstruction to the rough-and-tumble sneaker.

From vibe to construction, this sneaker is virtually bulletproof. No, literally. The upper is made with Kevlar mesh, which is literally bullet-resistant. bulletproof. 

Despite the intentional fraying and disassembled aesthetic, the sneaker possesses an undeniable sharpness that pushes the ACS PRO 2 into voguish territory, even though it's a real-deal hiking shoe. Classic Salomon branding lands at the tongue and heel counter, rounding out the ruggedly chic sneaker.

Previously, A-COLD-WALL collaborated with brands like Nike, Converse, and Eastpak, so suffice it to say the British label is well on its way to establishing itself as a cultural behemoth. Now with a Salomon collab under its belt, there's truly no denying the current trajectory A-COLD-WALL is on.

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