It's so easy to throw around words like "genius" and "brilliant" when talking about fashion design. In this industry, words are cheap and hyperbole is the verbal equivalent of parsley: an easily discarded garnish that's nevertheless always expected.
That being said, Coperni's PUMA sneaker collaboration is genius. And brilliant.
First revealed by Highsnobiety last year just prior to Coperni's Spring/Summer 2024 runway show, the Coperni x PUMA 90SQR shoe holds the kind of promise, ingenuity, and excitement that you wish more luxury-meets-sportswear moments would ever actually attain.
No shade to anyone else doing sneaker collabs or whatever, but how many times are we gonna see a brand slap a logo on an otherwise ordinary shoe colorway and call it a day?
And, sure, there's often not enough money, time, or availability to justify a big project at the scale of what Coperni and PUMA have done here but, hey, it just makes genuine freshness that much more invigorating.
Now, there's the adjectives. Let's get to the nouns.
Coperni took PUMA's FUTURE football boot and transmogrified it into a sort of ballet flat-inspired sneaker, as the shoe's campaign imagery makes abundantly clear.
Actually, just a second to talk about that imagery: it's a brilliant amalgamation of PUMA and Coperni's shared ideals. On one hand, a celebration of sport and physical achievement. On the other, an artistic, cold presentation of humanity that's at once familiar and alien.
Where are the model's heads? Are these even people? Is the imagery AI-generated? It's not, of course, but given Coperni's proclivity for experimental futurism, couldn't it be?
It makes you think, really. How many other campaigns for collaborative sneakers could say the same?
Anyways, the shoe itself.
Coperni cleverly reframed the PUMA boot into a square-toed shoe as bleeding-edge contemporary as Coperni itself. Its make is as technical as the football boot that inspired it: PUMA's global creative director, Heiko Desens, described it as "pure performance." In 1,000 years, standard-issue football boots will look just like this.
"The shoes are inspired by movement and brutalist architecture," Coperni creative director Sébastien Meyer and CEO Arnaud Vaillant told Highsnobiety.
"We love the fusion of futuristic elements into a design that remains entirely wearable. The shoes are mainly designed with straight lines, which is very unexpected for a pair of sneakers."
As alien as the imagery that presents it, Coperni's PUMA shoe is unique in every sense of the word, shaped by a distinct mold that ensures that there has never been and never will be anything that ever resembles it.
It belongs in the here, it belongs in the now, and yet it also belongs somewhere down our evolutionary road, like something that we as humans don't quite understand yet.
Viewing Coperni's PUMA shoe is the closest thing that folks today can feel to what it must've felt like to first witness Pierre Cardin's dresses in the '70s and Zaha Hadid's architecture in the '90s.
Hyperbolic? Maybe. But of the sincerest variety.
The PUMA x Coperni 90SQR sneaker releases in three colorways from January 19 at Coperni's website and select stockists from January 22.
