THE UBIQUITOUS RISE OF TRAINERS

Ben West

Trainers - or sneakers in the US - have made a huge impact on the world since the first versions appeared in the 19th Century.

Early forerunners of the shoe include the plimsolls of the 1870s, used by Victorians on tennis and croquet courts, as well as by holidaymakers. In America, the US Rubber Company launched rubber-soled shoes in 1892, while three years later in Britain, JW Foster and Sons produced shoes specifically for running in 1895. Basketball shoes appeared in 1907, and after World War One, sports shoes endorsed by American basketball and football players began to take off.

One such shoe was the Converse All-Stars, which first appeared in 1917, to be endorsed by Indiana basketball star Chuck Taylor five years later. With a huge resurgence in popularity of this design in recent years, they are reportedly the best-selling basketball shoe of all time.

The history of trainers received a further boost when the beginnings of adidas emerged in the 1920s, with German brothers Adi and Rudi Dassler’s shoes being worn by athletes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. However, after a feud in 1947, they parted ways, with Adi launching adidas and Rudi forming PUMA.

Films popular with teenagers in the 1950s that featured trainers, such as Rebel Without a Cause, propelled the shoe’s popularity even further. Later on trainers that featured in films, such as Tom Hanks in Big and Forest Gump and Michael J Fox in Back to the Future fuelled focus on trainers as the footwear of choice for many fans. Trainers feature very strongly in Disney’s 2022 film Sneakerella, a modern take on Cinderella.

Jogging took off in the 1960s, further increasing demand, with the firm that was to become Nike being established in 1964 to produce running shoes.

The music industry was another factor contributing to the shoe’s rise, with many artists choosing to wear trainers, notably including John Lennon, The Ramones, The Clash, Sid Vicious, Run-DMC and Kurt Cobain, and more recently Jay-Z and 50 Cent, the latter two also helping to design their own collections.

High profile trainers can reach crazy sums on the resale market: for example, in April 2020 a pair of Nike Air Yeezy 1s that had been worn by Kanye West sold for $1.8m at auction, which was triple the previous record for the sale of a pair of trainers.

One stand-out moment in the history of trainers was in 1984 when basketball star Michael Jordan signed a contract to wear a Nike shoe called ‘Air Jordans’ (after his phenomenal leaping ability had earned him that nickname) that went on to become an iconic brand.

A focus on fashion became more and more integral, striking designs and vivid colours increasingly appeared, and inevitably trainers have for many become a fashion statement.

What started out as a sports shoe is now one of the most popular shoe types globally - indeed, more than one billion pairs of trainers are sold annually today worldwide. They are worn in all walks of life: in the early days it would be unthinkable to wear trainers with suits and other smart clothing, yet now almost anything goes.

And people of all ages and walks of life now wear these shoes, whether presidents, politicians, hedge fund managers or rock stars, teenagers or the elderly, the poorest and billionaires. Correspondingly, the price of trainers can vary from next to nothing in a supermarket to many thousands of pounds for the most exclusive models.

The number of different designs now runs in the thousands, and the amount of counterfeit models many times that. They’re a status symbol and have almost become a religion to many - witnessed by the legions of people - often known as ‘sneakerheads’ for their love of collecting the shoes - who queue up overnight outside a shoe store in order to buy the latest shoe. The frenzied obsession to own a pair of the latest top designs has on a number of occasions resulted in a shoe shop brawl.

Design houses and top designers such as Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, Gucci, Dior, Prada and Burberry have created eye-catching top of the range trainers, often with limited-edition collections, and are invariably snapped up and attract an ultra premium price on resale.

Customisation of trainers is a growing trend too, with artists such as Chaitanya Dixit (or simply CHE), Helen Kirkum, Joshua Vides, Saigun Grover and Sugandha Tyagi with her company ShoesYourDaddy transforming individual pairs with striking, colourful designs.

An affiliation with trainers can make a celebrity huge sums, and perhaps no-one more so than tennis champ Roger Federer. One of the most successful athletes in sports history with 20 Grand Slam titles, unsurprisingly he represented Nike for more than two decades. Yet when it came to renewing his £7m annual sponsorship contract, Nike and the star parted ways.

Federer was therefore free to seek new sponsorship deals, and signed a huge £220m 10-year deal with Uniglo for apparel, not shoes - which was three times higher than the deal with Nike. He then signed an equity deal with Swiss footwear brand On Running and became their global ambassador. With him owning about 3% of the brand, and it being valued at £7.4bn on going public, his stake is worth around a further £220m.

Another trend has been the number of female buyers rising very notably in recent years: the female trainer market grew by more than 100 per cent in 2020 alone, and now more women’s trainers are sold every four hours than they did in the whole of 2016 combined.

When you look at a pair of trainers it is easy to dismiss them as a slab of plastic or rubber, a couple of folds of leather or fabric and little more. However, often with modern trainers a huge amount of cuttingedge research and development is applied. This wasn’t always the case: from around 1900 to the 1960s the technology and designs didn’t change much at all.

Such developments as the introduction of Gore-Tex, a waterproof fabric, in 1979 and in 1989 Reebok’s Pump technology, which incorporated an air chamber so that the wearer could inflate or deflateas deemed necessary, came on line.

More recently shock-absorbing, super-grip soles and the use of fabric created from recycled polyester bottles continue to lift design to new levels. Puma has introduced a ‘breathing shoe’, which has cavities filled with bacteria that eat away at the shoe’s material to create a hole allowing air to enter and circulate.

There’s a strong focus on sustainability with designs for trainers of the future. For example, adidas’s Stan Smith designs are now manufactured using Mylo, a vegan-friendly leather alternative grown from mycelium, the root-like structure of a fungus.

There may be a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, but one thing’s for sure - the interest in and market for trainers is not going to subside anytime soon.