About a decade ago, Salomon discovered that its Speedcross trailrunners — at the time mostly worn by ultramarathoners who needed lightweight, grippy, sneakers to run across mountainous terrain — were selling briskly at The Broken Arm, a trendy Parisian boutique. Customers thought the sneakers looked just as good walking to the pub as they did racing 108 miles through the French Alps.
Today, Salomon is a mainstay of the modern sneakerhead’s closet. Many pairs are designed specifically for “lifestyle” customers, some in collaboration with fashion designers such as Boris Bidjan Saberi and Sandy Liang. Last year, the brand’s footwear sales topped $1 billion for the first time — with nearly one-third of that business coming from so-called “sportstyle” sneakers. Rihanna even wore a pair during her Super Bowl Halftime Show performance in 2023.
Now, Salomon is betting that its most fashion-forward customers are ready for a bit more adventure. The brand is making a major push this year into “Grvl,” a new category centered on sneakers designed to transition between road-running in cities to light trails. Salomon’s president and CEO Guillaume Meyzenq said it’s part of a larger strategy to introduce newer customers in cities like New York and Paris to the brand’s larger performance offering, which remains focused on mountain sports.
“There’s not one consumer who’s sportstyle and one that’s performance,” he said. “It is the same consumer, basically.”
Sportswear brands have been blurring the lines between fashionable lifestyle sneakers and performance footwear designed for real activity for years. It’s a proposition that’s fuelled the growth of sportswear challengers such as On and Hoka.
Now, the pendulum appears to be swinging back. While certain pockets of lifestyle sneakers are going strong — running and football-inspired releases are seeing double-digit sales increases, according to the consumer tracking service Circana — hardcore products are seeing momentum again. Overall, performance sneaker sales are up 6 percent year-to-date between January and August 2025, compared to 4 percent for lifestyle during the same period, according to Circana. Even Nike is releasing fewer Dunks and more innovative basketball and running sneakers as it pins its turnaround on reminding customers it makes gear for serious athletes.
At other brands, the pivot is less dramatic. Odds are, if anyone looks down at the sneakers they’re wearing right now, it’s a shoe that was originally designed for sports. And the rising popularity of sportstyle (lifestyle sneakers derived from sports footwear) is pushing brands to create versatile sneakers that are stylish and offer anyone at least some pro-level benefits. At the same time, athletes are looking for more stylish options, and brands are factoring looks into even their most technical shoes.
“Consumers, more and more, want the best of both worlds,” said Jordan Rogers, a sports marketing consultant who previously worked at Nike for 15-years.
Or to put it more bluntly:
“They don’t want just to be a poser with an Arc’teryx jacket but they want to have the jacket for its real intended use,” said Julien Traverse, founder of the outdoor footwear design studio All Triangles, who previously oversaw Salomon’s lifestyle footwear before designing for brands such as The North Face and Arc’teryx.
Style and Substance
Rogers doubts that hypebeasts are signing-up for marathons weeks after buying limited-edition sportstyle sneakers.
Even though sportstyle shoes may look and feel eerily similar to their athletic counterparts, fashion customers tend to never even crease their favourite sneakers — let alone subject them to a few hours’ beating on a dusty trail or a muddy football pitch. Sightings of sneakerheads playing basketball in pristine, limited-edition retro Air Jordans are few and far between.
However, Rogers does believe that with exercise routines becoming more amplified on social platforms such as Strava and TikTok, consumers are now starting to care more about the sneakers and apparel they do wear for their sweatier workouts. According to a 2024 sporting goods survey by McKinsey & Company, 51 percent of active consumers viewed fitness as a lifestyle rather than a hobby — with 55 percent of Gen-Z and Millennials defining fitness as a core part of their identity. Run clubs have replaced speed dating in some circles and even buttoned-up sports such as tennis or golf are rapidly becoming fashion-ified
So a well-designed sportstyle sneaker could open a customer’s eyes to both the technical offering of sportswear brands beyond its overall aesthetic.
“If you can make something that’s beautiful, exciting, and trendy but also functions well for an activity, it’s a win-win because that could get someone into sport,” said Colin Meredith, a designer who has previously designed for sportswear brands such as Arc’teryx and co-founded the versatile performance-lifestyle label Portal.
It’s why the 127-year-old running brand Saucony now sells an iteration of its carbon-plated race day Endorphine Elite 2 sneaker for $315 that tweaks the shoe’s upper to look more elevated without sacrificing performance. Nike’s recently released fashion-forward performance basketball sneakers and carbon-plated shoes (which they debuted at the Tokyo flagship of the streetwear retailer Union) designed to resemble trendy 1970s running sneakers.
Puma has tapped the popular sneaker collaborator Salehe Bembury to design on-court basketball sneakers while Adidas has recently released fashion-coded collaborations with Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3 and Pharrell’s Humanrace labels for its popular EVO SL running shoe. Even though they are designer collaborations, neither the performance and tech are compromised for the sake of design — and sometimes the shoes inherently look good without any high fashion tweaks, which only helps build credibility with both hardcore athletes and casual fashion consumers.
“Of course we don’t want to create ugly shoes but the starting point for us is not to create beautiful shoes either,” said Traverse. “It’s really based on the usage and how we can improve it.”
Meyzenq believes the visibility of Salomon’s longtime performance-focused innovations, such as its patented “Quicklace” system that runs like bungee-cords throughout its sneakers, is what originally captured the eyes of fashion consumers.
“If you have a good performance proposition, then people can transition,” said Meyzenq.
The Authentic Value Proposition
According to sporting goods research by RBC Capital Markets, while most US consumers still have a preference for Nike and Adidas, “technical” labels such as The North Face, Hoka, On and Saucony have witnessed the largest increases in response rates year-over-year this August. These brands resonate with active-lifestyle and fashion consumers such as Justine Agana because there’s a greater functional value attached to these labels beyond aesthetics that fall in and out of trend.
“It’s just about practical-use, versatility, and longevity, with everything that I wear,” said Agana, who adds that she’s been pickier with purchases recently. “It’s about how many seasons I can wear this piece and if I could wear it for both street style and the mountains.”
Today, nearly every sneaker a sportswear brand sells as a lifestyle shoe incorporates the same technology that powers those made for athletes. So even if a heritage running brand such as Brooks only began releasing lifestyle sneakers this year (late in comparison to competitors such as New Balance) Brooks’ director of footwear merchandising Matt Weiss still believes consumers will broadly embrace these releases because they’re already invested in the technical benefits of Brooks’ true running offerings.
And specialty retailers that currently stock brands such as Brooks, like Hatchet Supply, were arguably selling sportstyle long before the word existed.
When he opened the Brooklyn boutique in 2013, owner Gene Han remembers customers being confused by the dual focus on technical and fashionable apparel—think merchandising hiking gear side by side with Kapital menswear.
That changed during the pandemic, when many of Han’s hype-driven customers underwent major lifestyle changes that led them to embrace the outdoors.
“Our customer is looking at brands like On, Hoka, or Brooks because they’re looking for a value proposition, ” said Han. “Customers see the value in a product with the most tech or innovation to it and I believe that’s because of this performance-driven, athleticism-driven culture, permeating throughout the mainstream.”
