A Shoe That Looks Great on Everyone

Writing about clothes can sometimes make me feel like a virologist, tracking trends as they leap from one population to another. Recently, rock-climbing-derived sneakers broke containment.

Actual wear-these-to-touch-rock “approach shoes” have long been sold by outdoor brands like La Sportiva, Keen and Scarpa for around $150 or so. (Their name comes from their use case: You wear them when approaching a climb.)

Then they got absorbed by men’s wear’s shaggy, gorp-inflected universe. Their low-to-the-ground design, with laces that snake down to the toes and a gummy sole creeping upward at the heel, tickled that eternal yen within male shoppers for something different, but not drastic.

This summer, the style started to appear in more haute climes — and on more women. In June, when I interviewed the Hermès designer Nadège Vanhée, she walked in wearing a pair of yellow and red La Sportiva approach sneakers.

“This is the dichotomy of the style,” Vanhée said when I asked about her Joshua Tree footwear. “You can pretend to be sportif.”

A few weeks ago, at a Neiman Marcus in suburban Illinois, I came across a pair of approach-looking Prada sneakers with elastic laces, evoking the drawstring of a chalk bag. They’re called the Speedrock and sell for $1,170. When I looked them up online later, I found they were available in men’s and women’s sizes.

Last week, Karen Brown, the creative director of women’s Polo Ralph Lauren, shared images from that brand’s new lookbook on Instagram. One model wore a navy cable-knit, straight trousers and a pair of red sneakers with rubber creeping up over the toe. The $228 nylon Polo Sport sneakers were unmistakably derived from approach shoes. They looked great. I would’ve worn them, but I just as well could’ve seen my wife in them.

Many of today’s trends flourish across fashion with no accounting for gender. Gen Z, in its quest to dress for maximum chaos, has dispensed with almost all context surrounding an article of clothing, including gender taxonomies.

Oversize button-up shirts, wan baggy jeans and, yes, gorpy shoes — these sparked first in men’s wear and then wiggled across gender lines.

Since the low-profile sneaker began its ascent, we’ve cycled through the Adidas Samba and the Onitsuka Tiger’s retro Mexico 66. We’ve seen a surge in Dries Van Noten’s $630 suede trainer and the Bad Bunny-endorsed “ballerina” sneakers. Lissome approach shoes are, well, the natural next step.

“People are continually searching for new reference points, especially within women’s wear,” said Charlotte Lee, a design manager at New Balance whose team worked on the 204V, a sneaker with an up-the-ankle closure reminiscent of a climbing shoe. The sneaker, whose design was led by Elena Krupicka, is a wild, “what is that” creation. With maximum reach in mind, that shoe is sized from a woman’s 5 to a men’s 15.

Tellingly, the first time I saw it in the wild was on a female colleague.