Athletes Who Shook Up the Sneakersphere in 2025
In 2025, sneaker culture loosened at the seams. Influence drifted outward rather than upward, carried by athletes who stepped away from the traditional machinery of endorsements and instead treated their footwear choices as expressions of taste, autonomy and identity. This was not a year shaped by corporate directives, but by athletes quietly – and sometimes loudly – rewriting the terms.
Yes, the big brands still shifted product by the container load, with or without collaborative partners. But the real pulse of 2025 came from those who tore up the brief in real time: the rule-breakers, the pioneers, the athletes whose choices shaped taste rather than mirrored it. Here’s a selection of the most compelling examples from across the last 12 months.
Shohei Ohtani
Baseball has rarely dictated sneaker trends – until Shohei Ohtani recalibrated the entire equation. In 2025, he emerged as a new kind of global sneaker athlete: bilingual, bicultural, and beloved from Shibuya to Seattle.
His take on the New Balance 990v6 became a masterclass in turning an already-revered silhouette into an instant must-have. Ohtani reimagined the chunky shoe through the lens of his past, subtly referencing the colours worn by both his high school team, Hanamaki Higashi, and his first professional club, the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
Rather than pushing baseball into sneaker culture, Ohtani expanded sneaker culture to meet him – a global athlete with a global product for a global audience. Simple in theory, quietly revolutionary in practice.
Sabastian Sawe
Long-distance running hasn’t always been invited to sneaker culture’s cool table, but Sabastian Sawe pulled up a chair anyway. His 2025 season delivered a stream of frighteningly consistent performances, but what transformed him into a footwear influencer was the aesthetic world orbiting those results.
Campaign imagery leaned into Kenyan running romanticism: red-dust roads, dawn training sessions, a focus on ritual over spectacle. His limited-edition adidas Adizero Pro Evo 2s, which he wore for his 2:02:27 at the London Marathon, quickly became cultural objects beyond the marathon community. Fashion kids with no intention of running a mile snapped up the Pro Evo SL – adidas’ more accessible lookalike – for its design language alone.
Sawe helped re-centre running’s global story, shifting it away from glossy Western tech rivalries toward something more grounded, soulful, authentic – and yes, carbon-plated.
Coco Gauff
2025 was undoubtedly Coco Gauff’s year. Alongside three (yes, three) Grand Slam wins, she also became one of sneaker culture’s most reliable style accelerators, with New Balance finally offering the creative runway she deserved. On-court, her updated NB performance silhouettes evolved into some of tennis’ sharpest designs: lighter uppers, sleeker profiles, and colourways that matched her confident, contemporary approach to the sport.
Off-court, she helped cement New Balance as one of the category’s most culturally fluent footwear players. Tunnel ’fits, magazine editorials, and Fashion Week appearances saw her styling NB models far beyond their intended context, pairing them with oversized varsity pieces, reworked tailoring, and vintage athleticwear. Suddenly, tennis looked different.
The brand leaned in, releasing limited-edition Gauff drops and athlete-led campaigns blending youth culture, heritage tech, and her unmistakable Gen-Z polish. What defined her 2025 wasn’t a single model (though the Coco CG2 certainly delivered), but a cumulative effect: tennis sneakers became genuine fashion items.
New Balance finally had a tennis star with cross-cultural gravity, and Gauff finally had a platform that matched her ambition.
A’ja Wilson
If 2025 has a thesis, it’s this: women’s basketball sits firmly at the centre of sneaker culture – and A’ja Wilson is the throughline. Everything she touched this year, from signature silhouettes to PEs to campaign stories, carried a weight rarely seen in modern performance footwear.
Her debut signature model, the A’One, blended technical prowess with personal storytelling: palettes inspired by her upbringing, carefully considered details that nodded to her legacy, and a shape engineered for her powerful, positionless style of play.
The cultural shift reached further still. Men wore her shoes. Editorials styled them as fashion items. Resale markets validated her influence in real time. Wilson not only entered the sneaker conversation on a permanent basis, she helped redefine its centre of gravity. Women’s footwear isn’t emerging – it has arrived, and decisively.
Jaylen Brown
The most rebellious sneaker move of 2025 belonged to Jaylen Brown, who last year declined multi-million-dollar deals from industry giants to launch an independent brand, 741. Not a celebrity vanity line – a bona fide start-up.
Arriving right at the beginning of 2025, 741’s debut sneakers were sculptural, premium, thoughtful, and unmistakably reflective of Brown’s worldview. They didn’t resemble traditional basketball signatures, but looked more like boutique design objects with performance capabilities built in.
Brown’s stand made waves across the NBA and beyond: you don’t need a megabrand to build a meaningful footwear legacy. In 2025, ownership became the new flex.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
Few athletes speak fashion as fluently as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and in 2025 he finally received the footwear canvas worthy of that fluency: the Converse SHAI 001. Unveiled at All-Star Weekend, it instantly became part of the year’s cultural vocabulary.
With its sculptural lines, exaggerated curvature, and future-leaning materials, the SHAI 001 hovered between basketball shoe and art object. Styled with boxy tailoring and archive streetwear, it became one of the most editorially photographed sneakers of the season.
Every element – from tonal palettes to the engineered locking zipper allowing multiple styling configurations – mirrored Shai’s versatility. In a landscape crowded with predictable signatures, he delivered something rare: a shoe with a point of view.
Frances Tiafoe
Frances Tiafoe offered one of 2025’s most enjoyable deviations with a fresh kind of endorsement deal: a new apparel partnership with Lululemon, paired with K-Swiss footwear. On paper, it felt chaotic. On court, it worked remarkably well.
K-Swiss – a brand that had long coasted on retro goodwill rather than contemporary relevance until the release of its Anwar Carrots x K-Swiss Racquet Club (KSRC) footwear line earlier this year – suddenly had a charismatic global athlete wearing its product at the sport’s biggest tournaments.
Tiafoe’s physicality made the shoes look technically credible, and his easy charm made the partnership feel refreshingly genuine. Within weeks, K-Swiss saw a rare lift in sales, relevance, and cultural chatter – not bad for a brand many hadn’t considered since the early 2000s.
Sometimes disruption doesn’t need to be loud. Sometimes, it’s simply choosing the unexpected – and making it make sense.
Andrew Reynolds
Few athletes hold the kind of unimpeachable cultural currency in their field that Andrew Reynolds does in skateboarding. His influence is timeless, making him precisely the right person to reinterpret one of New Balance’s most beloved lifestyle icons in the Numeric 993.
The result retained all the heritage charm of the classic 993 – the chunky silhouette, the plush cushioning, the unmistakably NB look – but beneath the familiar exterior was a shoe rebuilt for real skating. Reinforced overlays, a sturdier outsole geometry, and subtle board-feel adjustments reflected the needs of someone who has spent his entire career pushing the sport forward.
Because it was Reynolds, skaters trusted it. Because it was the 993, sneakerheads wanted it too. And together, that combination gave the Numeric line a well-earned credibility bump.
The model quickly became one of those rare shoes that moved fluidly between worlds. It was being styled in editorials yet destroyed on ledges, worn by streetwear kids and core purists alike.
If nothing else, Reynolds reminded the industry that skateboarding remains one of sneaker culture’s purest foundations, and that when a legend applies his touch, even a classic can find a new edge.
These are the people stretching the edges of sneaker culture, widening its vocabulary, and giving it permission to evolve. Where they go next, the industry will inevitably follow – though perhaps at a more hesitant pace. Influence, after all, is most powerful when it’s self-directed.
Thirsty for more? Check out our definitive list of 2025's best performance shoes.