sacai x Nike might be the perfect luxury sneaker collab. Founder Chitose Abe’s Nike shoes perpetually piece together the Swoosh’s signature shoe cues with sacai’s innate design language, yielding sneakers as wearable as they are thoughtful.
sacai and Nike’s Spring/Summer 2025 sneakers are another feather in their collaborative cap, hybridizing Nike trail running shoes into a funky technical blend.
The ensuing shoe may not be for everyone, what with its meaty upper and intentionally mish-mash sole, but I dig it.
Abe has commendably varied up sacai’s Nike footwear collabs over the years, straying from its immensely popular Vaporwaffle and Blazer shoes to enliven the Footscape and Cortez silhouettes in due time so why not keep pushing the envelope?
sacai SS25, presented before a crowd that included longtime pal Pharrell, sees Abe remixing a Nike trail shoe with impressively substantial results.
The stacked shoe looks to be a ZoomX Ultrafly crossbreed, incorporating a technical paneled upper, crisscrossing laces, blended toeboxes, and sacai’s signature layered sole atop grippy Vibram.
In short, another masterpiece of wearability and weirdness.
Due to its distinction from the classic sacai x Nike playbook, however, I suspect that this shoe might be a tougher sell for a sneaker-shopping audience acclimated to sleek shoes with classic runner tendencies.
Not that I’m complaining.
Again, with myriad footwear collabs dropping every week, it’s important to celebrate innovation whenever it occurs. Out with the old!
The results may not always be exactly what you might have wanted but challenge is healthy.
Plus, who’s to say that some time later, you won’t have acclimated to the newness?
There was a time where sacai’s Nike collaborations weren’t quite the mainstream smash they inevitably became, remember.
This SS25 collab may not be the sacai x Nike everyone wanted but it’s the sacai x Nike we deserve.