Issey Miyake's entire clothing practice is predicated upon toying with the human form, reshaping, curving, bending, warping, and, occasionally, even flattering it. Issey Miyake's first-ever ASICS sneaker aims to distill that approach into a shoe.

The late Japanese designer's eponymous company is a sprawling organization riddled with sub-labels like HaaT and me ISSEY MIYAKE that've been around for decades but are barely known outside of Japan. The Issey Miyake ASICS partnership was debuted during the Issey Miyake IM Men presentation — bet you've never heard of that line, either — at Paris Fashion Week earlier this year but, according to its Japanese-language press release, it's a separate thing appropriately called Issey Miyake Foot.

Issey Miyake Foot is jointly overseen by ASICS and the Miyake Design Studio, another venerable sub-label (!). Its debut shoe, presumably the first of many, is called the "Hyper-Taping" and borrows its design language from the medical technique of foot taping, typically utilized to improve foot support and relieve pain.

The Miyake ASICS Hyper-Taping sneaker doesn't have any guaranteed health benefits but its strappy lace-free upper could very well free up your dogs for maximum movement, thus helping combat soreness. Maybe.

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Whatever it does (or doesn't) do, Miyake's debut ASICS sneaker, releasing January 22 for $220, is certainly a stand-out, in that it stands out from pretty much any other shoe out there.

You could relate the Hyper-Taping's slick strappiness to ASICS' own laceless Life Walker dad shoe — not to mention the unsexy functional-looking colorways — while the low profile recalls Miyake's first (and presumably last) New Balance shoe, itself basically a barefoot shoe.

But for better or worse, nothing quite hits like the Hyper-Taping.

Its approach of putting forth ingenuity for the sake of usefulness, as opposed to conventional taste, fits the Miyake narrative. This is a company that's always proposed function in tandem with fashion, even before its founder created Steve Jobs' no-nonsense but kinda cool uniform.

The most famous Miyake imprints, like the menswear HOMME PLISSÉ and womenswear Pleats Please labels, epitomize this approach with specially formulated and permanently pleated textiles as easy-wearing as they are avant. There's nothing else like them out there but they're still surprisingly approachable.

Same for Miyake's ASICS, really.

This article was published on December 22 and updated on January 9 to reflect the sneaker's Western release date.

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