Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes, as the idiom goes. But then again most sneakerheads won’t let you near their precious boxed-up kicks, let alone put your feet in them. That doesn’t stop us from judging the shoes, though. The new school year welcomes a fresh intake of sneakers. Do they score top marks? Scroll down to find out.

The Nike Dunk should need no introduction (but if you’re interested, we wrote the definitive one here). A nod to the shoe’s original 1985 “Be True To Your School” roster of colourways, this latest drop in a contrast “colourless” white and deep blue (think photo-ready tux blue) combination makes for the smart choice ahead of the new term. This is especially true if you’re attending Villanova University, the Pennsylvanian institution that inspired this particular two-tone iteration. But you don’t have to be a Villanova Wildcat to lust after these shoes. And the history of this fabled model is perhaps academic anyway given the sway it still holds over sneaker lore.

From a Nike heritage piece to its current cutting-edge collectors’ item, the LDWaffle. Last month, we featured the Sacai collab with additional input from Mr Hiroshi Fujiwara’s design studio Fragment. Now Ms Chitose Abe has enlisted Hong Kong streetwear label CLOT to remix the shoe. The result comes in an eye-catching colourway that treads on the toes of CLOT’s legendary 2006 take on the Air Max 1, the deliciously monikered “Kiss of Death”, also reissued earlier this year. As if the vivid Orange Blaze, Deep Red and Green Bean details weren’t enough to demarcate this shoe, note the triple-threat branding on the heel and the translucent panelling, drawing on the AM1’s see-through toe box.

“Genius is making complex ideas simple,” as Mr Albert Einstein once proposed. The Sail edition of Sacai’s Vaporwaffle is just that. Where designer Abe has gone all-out in terms of the references she’s pillaged from the Nike archives, this pared-back colourway is perhaps the most effective iteration of the shoe. It looks deceptively straightforward when reimagined in white with off-white details, offset with a gum outsole.