Dick’s Sporting Goods sent over the FP Movement x ASICS GEL-Nimbus 28, a women’s collaboration, a couple of weeks ago, and you might reasonably ask why.
Because I asked them to. I wanted to shoot photos of this pair, and I wanted to write this.
Collaborations have taken a beating over the last few years, mostly because there have been so many of them. The “collabs are dead” take shows up in my feed every week. I don’t buy it for a second, and I have not for a while.
What people are actually tired of is the same person telling the same story on a different shoe. That is a real problem and it deserves the criticism. It is also not the same thing as collaboration being finished. Any time somebody declares a part of this business dead, it is worth asking whether they are describing the whole category, the four accounts they follow, or their own interests.
Years ago I watched an influencer say that full camouflage should never be used on sneakers, in a post about another brand’s collab. A little over a year later they released a full camouflage shoe with a competitor.
This collection landed in early July. The GEL-Nimbus 28 at $180 in a sunset orange, and the GEL-Challenger 15 tennis shoe at $130 with FP Movement’s paisley across it. It is FP Movement’s first footwear partnership. It sells through FP Movement, through ASICS, and through select Dick’s stores, which is how the pair ended up on my table.
If FP Movement is not a name you carry around, that is sort of the point. It is Free People’s activewear arm, which makes it part of URBN, the same company that owns Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters. It sells leggings and sports bras and tennis skirts to a customer who came in for the clothes, and it has been opening stores at a pace most footwear brands would envy. Until this summer it had never put its name on a shoe.
The sneaker read on something like this is usually dismissive. No local shop attached. No hype name. Nothing to line up for.
I look at it and see the most useful kind of collaboration in the business right now, and the reason has nothing to do with the shoe.
It has to do with which of these two companies is actually the small one, and I had that wrong until I went and looked.
