This Designer's Radical Idea? Treat the World's Simplest Shoe Like a Work of Art (EXCLUSIVE)
Hed Mayner may have won the very first Karl Lagerfeld Prize over a half-decade ago but he's still very much a designer of the emerging sort. His terrifically advanced silhouettes defy convention and as a result, mass consumption, so the Paris-based designer long weighed approachable workarounds that'd invite a wider audience into his world.
With Reebok, Mayner cracked the code. For a few years now, he's created collaborative Reebok clothes and sneakers that translate his elegantly askew approach through some of the world's most approachable shoes. His take on the NPC sneaker, for instance, is anything but an NPC, and his revived basketball shoe was so huge that it towered over even those offered by Balenciaga.
"My clothing work brings attitude and emotion into the [Reebok] collaboration," Mayner tells Highsnobiety. "The two influence each other in ongoing ways."
For Spring/Summer 2026, Mayner transformed the utterly quotidian Workout Plus OG, one of the all-time ordinary white shoes, into a veritable work of art. Now, "wearable art" descriptors are a dime a dozen in the footwear-writeup biz but Mayner's sneaker actually rings true.
“There’s something modest about the way the shoe looks, and I really like how the leg appears when wearing it,” Mayner says. “Part of the idea was to let traces of time appear on clothes and shoes, and the distortions that emerge through use. The processing adds irregularity and softness, and aligns closely with my collection.”
This means hand-washing and hand-painting the shoe to give it a lived-in look that's also hyperreal, not quite the kind of wear or tear a sneaker would achieve in real life. But that's the beauty of Mayner's updates, which transition the shoe into a theoretical aesthetic space. No two sneakers are alike, with subtle distressing jarring against the subtly luxurious rock-tumbled leather uppers.
Of all the shoes available on Reebok's website, where Mayner's Workout Plus arrives on February 5 for $165, these are the only ones that offer that are comparably individualized. Not bad for one of the world's simplest shoes.
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