When it comes to big European cities, Berlin might not provide quite the same exposure to cutting-edge trends as, say, London's Soho or Paris' Pigalle – but it does offer a useful litmus test for when something has moved beyond saturation point. The city of techno, doner and grotesque subway trains has a peculiar way of absorbing a silhouette en masse: by the time the same thing starts proliferating, chances are it has already been bubbling away elsewhere for quite some time.
Germany’s capital exists within its own peculiar style ecosystem in which the stereotypes tend to ring true. Black, white and grey inform the dress code, while shoe preferences generally skew towards colour-starved palettes on technical designs. Think ASICS, Mizuno, On and Saucony runners: performance shoes that might have been developed with a futuristic, boundary-pushing spirit, but ironically, feel thoroughly conventional in this town through sheer ubiquity.
But this summer, even Berlin wasn't immune to the climbing shoe's newfound appeal. As die Hauptstadt melted through a brutal succession of heatwaves, climbing shoes – or, more accurately, climbing-inspired approach shoes – were suddenly everywhere, mirroring a trend unfolding in cities across the world. But how did it happen? Below, we look at how the performance footwear made the leap to one one of the world’s most sartorially singular cities and beyond.
Social Climbing
Consider the evidence. In the line for coffee, people were wearing climbing shoes. At the supermarket, people were wearing climbing shoes. At the movies, people were wearing climbing shoes. Pretty much anywhere the chances of having to scale a wall were nonexistent, climbing shoes were out in force. From the front row to the feed, co-signs from cultural shakers like A$AP Nast (as far back as 2020), then-Dior Men’s creative director Kim Jones (two years later in 2022), and Hermès’ Nadège Vanhée (just two months ago) only served to expedite the rise. Fashion, for what it's worth, has long flirted with climbing footwear: see how Stone Island teamed up with La Sportiva on a collaborative design in 2004.
The footwear itself spans an increasingly broad spectrum, from established specialists like La Sportiva and Scarpa, through adidas’ Guide Tennie, to crossover designs that are climbing-inspired (though technically not climbing shoes) such as Arc’teryx’s Konseal, KEEN’s Jasper, New Balance’s 204v and Village PM’s 1PM. Even luxury titans like Prada and Loewe have got in on the act, too.
Climbing shoes, with their wafer-thin soles and the fact they're designed for, well, clinging to the side of a rock and not falling to your immediate death, feel like the logical endpoint. So what next? Can shoes really get much slimmer? And is it just a case of waiting to see which niche outdoor movement might penetrate the mainstream next? Probably not on either count, given there's little left to strip away, which suggests the next stage is less about a new sport than about what happens when existing ones start to mix.
“If you’re looking for contemporary athletic footwear that also works for everyday use, outdoor shoes are a natural destination, particularly lighter climbing styles during the warmer months,” says Jörg Haas, founder of , the pioneering streetwear and culture platform established in 2001. “A lot of cool kids go climbing these days. I called it the new skateboarding a few years ago, so it only makes sense that they’re taking these shoes onto the streets.”
Fertile Ground
The growing popularity of climbing shoes is inextricably tied to the broader shift towards low-profile sneakers. First came relatively slim terrace trainers like the Samba. Then came even skinnier motorsport shoes led by the Speedcat. After that, things started reaching bantamweight territory as the adidas Taekwondo – effectively moonlighting as a ballet flat – whittled profiles down to almost nothing.
When GORP first emerged, it was essentially outdoor wear transplanted into a jarringly cool lifestyle context: see that now-famous photo of Frank Ocean pitching up to Paris Fashion Week in an Arc'teryx beanie and Mammut puffer, almost like he'd got lost on the way to Chamonix.
As all style subcultures eventually do, GORP has begun cross-pollinating with other genres, whether that's Veilance filtering technical outerwear through the language of tailoring, or ROA tackling hiking footwear with the sensibility of avant-garde minimalism and industrial design. Sneakers borrowing between worlds is nothing new, of course, but outdoor aesthetics tend to give the results a different complexion.
‘My generation gravitated towards sneakers precisely because they were different from what everyone else was wearing,’ says Haas. ‘These were silhouettes originally designed for running, basketball or skateboarding, taken out of their intended context and worn as everyday footwear. That unfamiliarity was part of their appeal. Eventually, brands began designing sneakers specifically for this new lifestyle context, with early models like the being a good example.’
GORP 3.0?
Some of the most interesting examples are already appearing as hybrids. Previously mentioned newcomers Village PM have taken technology and design cues from climbing shoes and repurposed them for skateboarding, citing a jadedness with how skate designs had become more restrained and generally blander than they were in the early 2000s.
Then there are the big hitters. adidas have rebuilt that aforementioned Samba, an indoor football staple-cum-lifestyle tour de force, around Stealth rubber from their own Five Ten subsidiary for a design that climbers could genuinely use, while PUMA and Danielle Guizio recently resurrected the Klim, a climbing-derived silhouette from 2003, through a minimalist, luxury lens. Brain Dead have gone even further leftfield, imbuing Five Ten designs with a typically madcap sensibility that reworks a piece of specialist kit into something altogether punkier.
Perhaps that's the trajectory. Rather than climbing shoes, taekwondo shoes, weightlifting shoes, HYROX shoes or whatever other hyper-specific discipline comes along to claim its moment, the future is when those distinctions start to collapse entirely. Performance codes are exchanged and spliced together until the original ingredients are barely recognisable. GORP footwear’s next guise won't be GORP at all, but a kind of post-category borrowing freely from every sport, activity and corner of style.
Meanwhile in Berlin, climbing shoes are still widespread. But the real sign of what comes next will be when the shoes appearing in coffee queues and supermarket aisles become harder to identify: part climbing shoe, part runner, part skate shoe, part something else entirely. When nobody can quite agree what they’re looking at, the mutation is complete.
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