Why this new shoe by Fendi will have you harking back to a time before Spotify.

If you grew up in the 1990s, chances are what you listened to was quite firmly fixed. You might be into pop, indie, R&B, rap, rave or metal, but the genres rarely mixed. Then along came Napster, LimeWire, MySpace and eventually Spotify; streams were crossed and tastes broadened with broadband. The mashup emerged as the sound of the early 2000s, when it suddenly became OK to listen to both Ms Christina Aguilera and The Strokes – at the same time. Fast forward to 2019 and if someone today asked you what sort of music you’re into, the best answer would be to draw an elaborate, four-dimensional Venn diagram.

Given that music is often a driving force for wider trends, it is perhaps no surprise that the fashion industry is in the throes of its own mashup moment. Indeed, the divisions between high and low fashion have been blurred for a while, thanks to a flurry of collaborations. Whereas in 2000, Louis Vuitton slapped a cease and desist order on upstart brand Supreme for selling a skateboard deck featuring a print with more than a passing resemblance to the Parisian stalwart’s trademark monogram, by 2017, the two labels were producing a capsule collection together. In that context, the merger of iconography belonging to two very different Italian fashion marques, Fendi and Fila, today feels like a natural fit. (In fact, its possibly more surprising to learn that Fila is no longer technically Italian, given that it is now based in South Korea.)

The handiwork of Scottish designer and artist Reilly, this officially endorsed bootleg insignia of the sort that, back in the 1990s, would’ve only appeared in Adbusters was first introduced a year ago for Fendi’s AW18 collection and continues into its latest releases. But beyond the switch out of the F that Mr Karl Lagerfeld famously bashed out in seconds, the return here to the sneaker silhouette you might have seen on the playground when Fila was at its peak should also trigger misty-eyed recognition in readers of a certain age.

The low-top shoe, which lands on site today, is joined below by a pair from another venerable Italian fashion powerhouse, Prada. And where, for all the nostalgia, the former sneaker is very much the product of here and now, the latter is a reminder that even back in the 1990s, at least one high-end designer was already ahead of the game, and even giving the sportswear brands a kick up the arse.

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