Perhaps you have just landed your first full-time job at Sheerluxe and have decided to honour the occasion with a pair of Vejas, or perhaps you have been scouring street-style round-ups and felt inspired to purchase some Adidas Sambas – which almost every fashion outlet declared “the shoe of the summer” in 2023. There’s good reason as to why both of these trainers have been popularised on the street – they provide a palatable scaffolding to almost every outfit – but there is perhaps a new pretender to the Sambas’s reign: the Puma SpeedCat.
A little more unusual than the failsafe Samba – it’s more of a ballet slipper than a traditional sneaker and was originally designed for Formula One drivers in 1998 – the SpeedCat’s presence within the mainstream is beginning to mushroom. This is mostly because of EmRata – who I assume is on some kind of retainer for Puma – but also because of aspirant street stylers and fashion forecasters on TikTok. “No, no, no and no,” said one of the app’s users in response to a recent SpeedCat green screen, another said “I don’t like these”. But fashion loves a divisive shoe – and so comments like these are perhaps the most reliable endorsement of the SpeedCat’s cachet.
EmRata was once again photographed in a pair of those sneakers while strolling around Manhattan yesterday afternoon, dressed in a chore jacket, wide-legged cargos and the anti-paparazzi combination of a hoodie-plus-sunglasses. Much like Wales Bonner’s football sneakers and Gola’s Performance Ceptor TX trainers, the SpeedCats are not – as British Vogue’s fashion news editor Alex Kessler just informed me – “nice looking”. But that is the point: to wear a strange, nostalgic shoe that will simultaneously repel some people and draw others inwards. That is until the SpeedCat becomes a feature on Sheerluxe, at which point fashion will elect an entirely different shoe to moor itself on.