Reebok and Maison Margiela debut footwear collaboration

French luxury fashion house Maison Margiela debut its footwear collaboration with sportswear giant Reebok during Paris Couture Week.

The collaboration combines an iconic style from each brand, Reebok’s Instapump Fury sneaker from 1994 and the Margiela Tabi split-toed shoe from 1988, and draws on themes key from the spring/summer 2020 couture collection, where Maison Margiela creative director John Galliano reevaluates the values of bourgeois dressing and the conversation between humanity and technology in the digital age.

The new statement trainers have been designed for a “new era” explains both brands, with the design being a unique blend, bringing together key elements of each style’s signatures to create a wholly new concept that simultaneously pays homage to each brand’s heritage.

Employing the technical inventions of Reebok, it is a “statement shoe for the age of the cyber-industrial revolution”, explains Maison Margiela, which has been designed to showcase progressive craftsmanship and familiar shoe codes seen in both brands.

The collaboration features both heeled and flat high-top silhouettes, with the flat sole designed to echo the Margiela Retro Fit, while the heeled version is an interpretation of the Instapump Fury sole.

The latest luxury sneaker has been revealed between Maison Margiela and Reebok

Maison Margiela’s signature Tabi split-toed calfskin upper creates the foundation for the new shoe, which has been morphed with Reebok’s pump mechanism, an inflation technology developed in 1989, the year after the Tabi, for athletes to manually condense the fit of sneakers. In the new design, the small pump fills the patch wrapped around the upper, while an adjacent button deflates it.

Like the original Reebok sneaker, the outer-sole and midsole are constructed from rubber and expansive foam across six colourways, including solid black and solid white, as well as yellow, black and red, and white, blue and red, which celebrate Reebok’s OG colours.

For optimised flexibility and stability, a sheet of Hexalite has been integrated in the sole, and for the heeled shoe, a Graphlite carbon shank connects the plateau and the heel of the sole.

The shoes also feature logos from both brands, with Reebok’s Vector embroidered on the heel and Maison Margiela in a white stitch on the upper back.

Images: courtesy of Reebok/Maison Margiela/Random Studio