In the early fall of 2023, I traveled back to London after being away—mostly in New York—for most of one year. And right on arrival, when I emerged from the tube station close to where I live in the early morning of a late September day, the first thing I noticed was that everyone around me, regardless of age, gender, or any other visible trait, appeared to be wearing almost identical, brand-new shoes—more than brand new, box-fresh, as they say over there. Yet conspicuously, and incongruously, as all such shoes looked like old Adidas sneakers. As I was myself wearing a pair of tired Adidas NMDs—which were old, and looked old—I was intrigued, and looked closer. Those were no NMDs, nor even trusty Stan Smiths (of which I have owned a functioning pair, without interruption, since I bought my first, around 1979). What I was witness to was an entirely new phenomenon, as sudden as it was inexplicable. After a more careful perusal of the floorscapes of Bloomsbury, Marylebone, and Clerkenwell in the days that followed, I came to the conclusion that the entire population of London—or at least a sizable slice of it— had just bought a newly made pair of historic Adidas Sambas or Gazelles, athletic shoes originally from the 1950s and 1960s, respectively, but largely redesigned in the 1970s. And if Adidas had released new edits of the late ’70s versions of some of its oldest models—which by itself would be enough to rile any respectable footwear philologist—and could sell millions of them in a matter of few months, then, I thought, something big must be happening in the sneaker market—and, by an evident and generally accepted metonymy, in contemporary consumer taste, if not, simply, in our culture and civilization at large.
I was not the only one to notice. Only a few weeks later two articles by leading European newspapers, El Pais in Madrid and the Financial Times in London,¹ claimed—with different nuances but similar arguments—that the revival of the vintage Samba had saved Adidas from the financial ruin that many had predicted would follow the termination of the hugely successful, and trend-setting, Yeezy collaboration between Adidas and American rapper, designer, and entrepreneur Kanye West (now known as Ye). Yeezy produced over 250 models of shoes from 2013 to October 25, 2022, when the German company denounced Ye’s notorious antisemitic statements and unilaterally rescinded the partnership. Announcing the split to investors, Adidas reported that it expected to take a hit of 250 million euros to its profits for that year. A few months later this had ballooned to a projected loss of 700 million euros for 2023. Yet in the ensuing months the projection was twice lowered, and in October 2023 it was reduced to 100 million, due to the liquidation of the remaining Yeezy stock, and to unspecified improvements in the company’s “underlying business.”²
The sneakerati vote with their wallets—as well as with their feet.
Adidas had already released a redesigned model of the full suede Gazelle in 2016, and there was chatter in the sneakersphere of an early Gazelle revival in the spring and summer of 2022; the 2023 El Pais article also claimed that Adidas had boosted the production of Sambas in May 2022. Yet the company itself did not attribute its financial turnaround to the revival of its vintage models until the end of April 2024, when its new CEO, Bjørn Gulden, told journalists that the demand for retro sneakers, Sambas in particular, was so strong that he had decided to postpone the relaunch of the Superstar (another vintage model from 1969). Only a few days earlier, then–British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had appeared in box-fresh Sambas at a Downing Street interview meant to promote his tax policies, which commentators argued would make the Sambas uncool for decades to come; when asked about the incident, Gulden answered that he did not expect it to impact sales.³
By that time, however, Adidas had already built up quite a reputation for inaccurate forecasting. The timeline of the company statements and profit warnings since October 2022 in particular suggests that when the Yeezy line was shut down, management did not have a plan B. Instead, it would appear that an unrelated, sudden shift in consumer sentiment created a surge in the demand for vintage sneakers which took management by surprise, and as it happens, rescued the company.
Something big must be happening in the sneaker market—and, by an evident and generally accepted metonymy, in contemporary consumer taste, if not, simply, in our culture and civilization at large.
The sneakerati often use the terms maximalism and minimalism to describe big and bulky sneakers or lean and clean, understated ones, and it would be tempting to see this story as evidence of a wider, ongoing transition from American-style maximalism to European-style minimalism. However, sneaker styles have always inclined to maximalism in North America, and to minimalism in Europe; London in particular always cherished the suedey Gazelles, which already had a moment in the 1990s, when they were popular among the fashion crowd. But in this instance, and considering Kanye West’s stated design ambitions, and his occasional forays into architecture proper,⁴ it may be fitting to look at this design story in design terms.
If the first Yeezys, from around 2015, were not very different from the first Adidas NMDs, almost coeval, and with which they reportedly shared the same “boost” sole technology, the Yeezy line acquired over time a more and more maximalist look, at times organic, convoluted, fluid, or otherwise distinctly smooth, flowing, and curvy. Architectural historians can tell at a glance where that style would have come from: That was the style of the fold, of the blob, of spline-modeling and digital streamlining; the style of the first digital age, which rose in the early 1990s and by the end of the millennium had come to signify the new technical logic of digitally intelligent design, immortalized by epoch-making buildings by the likes of Frank Gehry, Wolf Prix, Thom Mayne, Foreign Office Architects, UNStudio, etc.
The story of digital streamlining in the 1990s has been recounted many times. Its rise has been ascribed, in the first instance, to the conflation of a new generation of CAD software and of various design ideas derived from postmodernism and architectural deconstructivism. But the spline-modeling technologies that powered computational design at the end of the millennium were based on research from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Pierre Bézier, an engineer, and Paul de Casteljau, a mathematician, working in Paris for car manufacturers Renault and Citroën, respectively, devised new mathematical notations to calculate the unwieldy “lines of the stream,” or streamlines, that shipbuilders had always tried to bend and mold—intuitively—in order to facilitate the flow of water around a hull. Sixties car makers needed that technology in order to speed up the design and construction of aerodynamic car bodies; a bit later, aircraft makers were key in developing computational tools to tackle similar aerodynamic problems, but as of the early 1990s, new user-friendly software put the design of these smooth and curvy lines, called “splines,” at the disposal of every desktop computer—and of every architectural office. As a result, streamlined surfaces, always notoriously difficult to calculate let alone build, became an affordable design option—one that could be almost routinely applied, as it soon was, to many ordinary design tasks and run-of-the-mill architectural programs.⁵
The ideal technical object of the digital world was supposed to be a curvy, flowing, and seamless monolith—ideally, all made in one go.
To be sure, just as the rise of digitally intelligent architecture in the 1990s did not directly relate to the history of cybernetics or artificial intelligence, digital spline modelers in the 1990s took no notice of the invention of streamlining in the 1930s, when the principles of aerodynamics were first applied to industrial design by Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, or Henry Dreyfuss—a monumental historical precedent that computational designers never acknowledged. In his 1932 book, Horizons, Bel Geddes showcased vehicles (cars, trains, planes, ships) designed to minimize drag (or air resistance) when moving at speed⁶; crucially, however, Bel Geddes also extended the same aesthetics of flow and flush to the design of objects never meant to either fly or float, such as stovetops; to the design of interior decoration; and to architectural design proper. Loewy made “cleanlining” (cleanly simplified, streamlined design) famous, but it appears that it was Dreyfuss who, when designing a streamlined toilet seat in 1936, made a more literal connection between cleanlined surfaces and hygienic cleaning: As the easier water flow makes disinfection more effective and avoids the retention of grime, dirt and germs, cleanlining keeps surfaces, well, clean. As the art historian Christina Cogdell recently remarked, the rise of streamlining in the 1930s is coeval with the cultural invention of constipation, and the same principles of flush and flow that streamliners applied to the quest of aerodynamic performance were equally applied by physicians and nutritionists of the time to the quest for efficient bowel movements.⁷
Cogdell also makes a less straightforward connection between the first age of streamlining and eugenic theories of the ’20s and ’30s, but be that as it may, it is safe to assume that most observers at the time—regardless of technical expertise, or engineering background—would have seen streamlining, in the first instance, as a sign of fluids in motion and speed. The first digitally streamlined building, Gehry’s Barcelona Fish of 1992, was streamlined in the literal sense of the term: As fish are naturally streamlined to move in water, Gehry’s Fish was designed and built using software originally developed for aerodynamic purposes—famously, by French aircraft maker Dassault. But, while scholars and critics in the 1990s often invoked more or less esoteric references (to Deleuze, the baroque, Leibniz, complexity theory, poststructuralism, etc.) to elevate the cultural relevance of spline modeling, the most immediate, indexical reference of streamlining to speed, floating, and flying was lost; and in the confusion that followed, toward the end of the millennium digital streamlining came to be seen as, simply, the sign of a new world in the making. The main visual features of this new world were fluidity, smoothness, and flushness; the ideal technical object of the digital world was supposed to be a curvy, flowing, and seamless monolith—ideally, all made in one go. Thus, alongside junctions and joints, digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printing would eliminate the labor of assembly—and perhaps all labor. Seen from, say, 1999, that was the visible form of a new technical logic at play. In 1999 this is what our digital future looked like—and this future, seen from 1999, looked good.
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
Zaha Hadid converted to streamlining relatively late in her career—around the turn of the millennium, in fact, with buildings like the MAXXI in Rome (or National Museum of Twenty-First Century Art, designed in 1998 and inaugurated in 2010) or the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck (1999–2001). But when she abandoned her signature deconstructivist angles for digital curves, Hadid brought spline modeling to new heights—both in terms of mere size and of technical mastery, and her office went on to build some of the most stunning, colossal splines ever built. Beginning in 2007, Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s codesigner, elaborated a new theory of digital streamlining, which he rebranded as “parametricism” and situated within the long history of Western architectural history and theory⁸; the term is now generally accepted, both by the design professions and by the scholar community, but it is often associated with Schumacher’s own vocal political creed—a mixture of old-school libertarianism and technofuturism.
This may be one reason why, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, a new generation of computational designers openly rejected many principles and theories, as well as the general aesthetics, of digital parametricism. At the time of writing, in early 2025, digital parametricism, now a forbidden word in every educated design conversation, and effectively banned from design education in Europe and in North America, is also vastly unpopular among the design professions in most of the world—with the partial exceptions of the Middle East (where, however, the wind now appears to be shifting too), and, more significantly, of the People’s Republic of China, where Hadid’s version of digital parametricism has caught on, extraordinarily. Digital parametricism is today something akin to the national style of the People’s Republic of China—an oddity that invites many intriguing explanations. It is, however, the pariah of architectural styles almost everywhere else.
Except, that is, if instead of looking up at buildings we look down at the sidewalk. Hadid herself rarely designed shoes,⁹ yet until the Yeezy debacle, digital parametricism and the technofuturist worldview that streamlining and parametricism always connoted, while named and shamed in every respectable university of the global North, thrived in the sneakersphere—and in the crepidarian world of sneakers popular subculture. Sneakers were the last beach of Western parametricism: digital parametricism’s last stand.
And now, even that last sanctuary of computational futurism is gone—annihilated by the double whammy of Kanye West’s precipitous fall from grace in the US and by the retro sneakers craze in Europe. Evidently, vintage sneakers index the past, not the future. The new-old Adidas models are for the most part new editions (not anastatic facsimiles) of sneakers designed, or redesigned, in the late 1960s and 1970s—which suggests that the vast majority of those wearing them now are too young to have seen those sneakers in the original, or to have known the world those sneakers belonged to. I am old enough, however, to remember that world, and those sneakers (some of them, at least) in their prime, and that is not a world I am particularly nostalgic of: a world of oil crises, social unrest, nihilist extremism, and suicidal leftist policies which led, at the end of the 1970s, to the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But the specific historic period we choose to cherish is irrelevant in this context—what matters, in more general terms, is that many today appear to have concluded that the past, not the future, is the best alternative to an unsavory present; and that looking backward is the best way of moving forward.
Digital parametricism is today something akin to the national style of the People’s Republic of China—an oddity that invites many intriguing explanations. It is, however, the pariah of architectural styles almost everywhere else.
Nostalgic crepidarianism is still more conspicuous in Europe than in New York, where the retro-sneaker wave came late and is only now slowly gaining traction. However, every keen observer of New York City sidewalks will have observed that the gap left by the demise of the Adidas Yeezys and by the abrupt decline of Nike (of which the causes appear to be mostly foreign to the topics here under discussion)¹⁰ has been filled by two European newcomers, Hoka and On, both founded almost at the same time and, curiously, not far from one another, in the Western Alps. The Savoy-born Hokas were soon bought by a US firm, now headquartered in California, whereas On is still a Swiss company, based in Zurich; the two brands, however, are more visible in the US than in Europe and On, in particular, is a remarkable American success story.¹¹ Due to their bulbous, flowy chunkiness, Hokas can be seen as an evolution and continuation of the spliny lineage, but one with a weakened phenotype, even understated when compared with the flashier Yeezys of yesterday, and likely more suitable to the lifestyle of a mainstream Democrat—better if a seasoned veteran—than to a Zoomer. Indeed, Joe Biden was seen wearing them in the sunset days of his presidency, and the sneakerati are waiting to see if the endorsement of the 46th US president will have the same consequence for the Hoka brand that the UK prime minister’s endorsement of the Adidas Sambas had in the spring of 2024—only a few weeks before the UK Tories were led to one of their most resounding electoral defeats.
The current North American popularity of the Swiss-designed On sneakers, however, invites a different range of considerations. Ons are, in many ways, the opposite of Hokas; regardless of how they are made—and I have no reason to doubt the technical proficiency of the teams of computational designers behind their success—Ons are the antidigital sneaker par excellence. Their style embodies and epitomizes a tectonic tradition I have seen rising in Swiss academia—and in Swiss design culture—for the last thirty years: one that abhors the seamless whole and cherishes instead the assembly of discrete parts and the display of voids, hinges, and joints.
For this is the thing: While most boost and cushion sole technologies make use of compressible foams or elastic thermo-fusions cast in molds, exposed as marshmallowy padding or encased within smooth, flowing bulges, On’s CloudTec sole achieves a similar press and release (boosting) and cushioning effect via a system of interlocking, pincer-like cells. Crucially, however, On designers appear to have decided from the start that their proprietary sole technology should not be hidden within the shoe, but displayed in full. In spite of the elasticity of the material out of which the alveolar pincers are made, On’s soles look like a conspicuously intricate, clunky machine—halfway between the inner works of a squeeze box and the claws of a winter tire.
Many today appear to have concluded that the past, not the future, is the best alternative to an unsavory present.
Some designers hide machines, some show them. The monumentalization of the machine is evidently more frequent in technophilic ages, and a crankshaft aesthetics of mechanically moving parts, in particular, was popular in the 1960s, when it inspired many memorable Archigram drawings and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, or Piano’s and Roger’s 1971 design for the Centre Pompidou; it is the same mechanical spirit extolled by Reyner Banham, and celebrated by many buildings of the so-called High Tech current, in Britain and elsewhere, even to this day. That is mech-in-tech, or mechanical engineering interpreted and romanticized by designers who often have no clue of what they are looking at: It is, at its best, mere fascination—and at its worst, nostalgia—for the power and the glory of a mechanical civilization that is no more.
More people buy sneakers than can commission skyscrapers. Therefore, if we want to take the pulse of today’s prevalent ideas of design, the sneakersphere is in many respects a more reliable source than the scant, bland, and often mercenary architectural criticism still published by the mainstream media and newspapers of record. And if we are looking for an opinion poll on design styles, sneakerati vote with their wallets—as well as with their feet. The retro-sneaker wave in Europe, and the nostalgic mech-in-tech boom in the US, alongside the general obliteration of parametricism, all partake of the same story: the story of declining rich countries that doubt they can ever be great again, fearful of the future, clinging to an idealized notion of yesterday’s mechanical technology—the technology that made them prosperous—and suspicious of a new computational technology that has been hijacked by our own tech-industrial complex, and is being retooled to undermine what remains of our democracies. Our sneakers show us that we are trading a shared future of bits and bytes for an insular past of nuts and bolts. This is what many of our politicians appear to be doing, too.