A Chuck Taylor with Ideas Above Its Station

Jonathan Anderson keeps returning to the same question: what happens when you put the wrong sole on the right shoe, the wrong proportion on the right silhouette, until wrong becomes its own kind of correct. His work at Loewe has been doing this for years with handbags and knitwear. The Run Star Hike does it with a Chuck Taylor.

The base is a classic All Star canvas upper—one of the most typographically fixed objects in footwear, so well-known it reads as symbol before it reads as shoe. Anderson attached a running sole to it and added a saw-tooth platform that gains height through pure serrated aggression, a three-layer construction of upper, midsole, and outsole that looks simultaneously athletic and sculptural. The white version replaces the usual canvas with linen, which shifts the register from sporty to almost handmade. Handwritten-style markings and a 1917 stamp near the ankle patch—the year the All Star first appeared—are the kind of details you only notice on close inspection, which means they reward it.

Anderson has described the pairing as being about highlighting different proportions: Playing with proportions has always been part of my design aesthetic, he said, which sounds like press-release language until you look at the shoe and see that it’s actually true. A glitter variant was also in the pipeline, which tips the whole thing into something more overtly theatrical and probably more honest about what it’s doing. Most collaboration sneakers announce themselves at full volume—two logos, two histories, doubled branding energy. This one manages to be both deeply familiar and slightly off, which is harder to pull off than it looks.