PFW AW25: Converse's Paris Showroom

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Everybody wants to create the next it-shoe. Rick Owens just broke the Internet for the umpteenth time with his “kiss boots” for AW25 (“rubbish”, comments @pumenyoni on Instagram); most of the shoes I see stomping through Paris’s fashion districts nowadays are awash with fur, turning the Marais more into a zoo than a shopping district; and lest we forget 2023’s Big Red Boot affair, when MSCHF’s cartoonish stompers suddenly ascended to social media ubiquity for a fleeting, if not contested, while. 

In the epoque of the Tiktokification of fashion (and of music, and of our attention spans, and of human life as we know it), a new, near Sisyphean impetus has been placed on putting out the most original, most outrageous, and most viral pedal accoutrement as possible. But Converse’s Spring ’25 collection boldly rejects all that. (If only mostly because their Chuck Taylor Allstars – with that classic silhouette, that unmistakable canvas – have already been the cultural it-shoe for the past 108 years).

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Converse Spring ’25, pre-launched at an interactive showroom in Paris’s nucleus-like 9th arrondisement, was all about celebrating the “Chuck”. First launched in 1917 as an elite-performance basketball shoe fancied for its non-skid rubber soles and structured ankle support, the Converse has since achieved footwear seminality, a sartorial timelessness that few items – maybe other than Chanel’s Little Black Dress, or a pair of blue Levi’s jeans – achieve. Indeed, according to one estimate, 60% of Americans have owned at least one pair of Converse Chucks in their lifetime, making it perhaps the most widespread shoe in the world. 

The Chuck might have been designed with basketball players exclusively in mind, but its history has been one of an organic symbiosis with the communities who have adopted and embraced the singular shoe. The new campaign celebrates these myriad, unpredictable ways the Chuck has been appropriated, repurposed, and reimagined from the grassroots, spotlighting not only basketballers and skateboarders poached from Paris’s streets, but also dancers from its vibrant ballroom scene, a weightlifter, and an amateur boxer. By simultaneously embracing both brand heritage and the organic communities that the shoe has abetted, Converse both turns backwards, into its incomparably rich and textured history, and looks ahead, into a what’s next drenched in boundless possibility and kaleidoscope-like futurity.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

The showroom was a thoughtfully designed reflection of this ethos, primarily divided into two spaces. The first of these was the “Built For” room, a mezze board of iconic designs – the fat-bodied, star-studded 1986 Weapon; the playfully technicolour 1993 Aerojam – and archival advertisements which explored Converse’s internal development as a basketball and, later, skateboarding footwear specialist. 

The second, the “Adopted By” room, explored how communities and consumers have thrust their own interpretations onto the shoe, allegorised by the brand’s invitation for passers-by to come in and sketch onto the walls their own doodles and thoughts. A 1976 All Star Wrestling Show shoe; A 1990 Street King martial arts sneaker, complete with a comet-like fist motif; all innovations that the folk who founded Converse in 1908 as a rubber-sole specialty company likely never could have conceived. But this goes to show the true diversity of Converse’s project, even against the rich reverence for tradition and heritage that the brand continues to hold.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Hence the ultimate tagline of Converse’s prelaunch event: “pull up”, as in, come however you are, doing whatever you want, because you’re welcome in the brand’s expansive, organically cultivated and grown universe. Converse counters the contemporary pull toward the trend or the fad or the brand by focussing on the people who wear their shoes and their histories, their stories, and choosing human vitality over virality, reverence over fleeting relevance. This is the secret to the timeless shoe, Converse whisper, and come Spring ’25 many would be wise to listen. 

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)