Is the "mismatched shoes" trend making a comeback?

In the last sporting weekend, the trend of playing with different shoes seems to be back in the limelight. The contact points are nearly 7,000 kilometers away: on one side the brand new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (or New White Hart Lane if you prefer), on the other the Wide World Of Sports Cheer Arena in Orlando, Florida. In North London the protagonist is Erik "el Coco" Lamela who in the last match against Newcastle (1-1) used the 2012 F50 Adizero Leather (right) and the new Adidas Copa 19.1 (left) at the same time. The former Giallorossi is not new to experiments of this kind: already in the Europa League preliminaries match played against Shkëndija he had used two different shades of F50 Adizero at the same time. The reason, according to what the specialized sites report, would be the greater adherence and the different type of friction that the kangaroo leather generates.

In the NBA bubble, however, LeBron Raymone James - one of the League's most underrated sneakerheads - dominated in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals playing with his Nike LeBron 17 PE in two different colors (unofficial because only in game version and not still on the market). The lime/fuchsia and the classic yellow and purple attract attention in the first half of the match that gave the Lakers the NBA final, the tenth of his career for Akron's talent. As often happens, King James changes shoes in the second half and leaves the mismatched strategy.

The game shoes in the world of football have always had a fluctuating importance. The great innovations of the 90s - both in terms of performance and in stylistic terms - did not last long and despite the fact that technology has always produced cutting-edge and technically valid results, the aesthetics were not up to par. The attention paid to football boots is essentially relative, except when the eyes are magnetically captured by a player who has shoes of different designs and/or colors on his feet.

Also in this case we are talking about trends, because often high-level athletes and sportsmen have decided to show off and play with different shoes. An aesthetic quirk that has set a trend in the last 10 years, even if ridden in flashes. The brands that created limited edition packs that offered their own shoes in different colors have also noticed this. This is the case of PUMA, which in 2015 launched the EVO Power Pack with shoes in blue and pink - one of the first to wear them was Mario Balotelli. It's not just Super Mario that has followed this trend; over the years players like Yannick Bolasie (Nike Mercurial Vapor in ash gray on the right and Nike Mercurial Vapor VII mango version on the left), Djibril Cisse (a pair of adidas f50.7 in red-white and in blue-red), Feng Renliang (on the right a pair of Nike CTR 360 II and on the left a pair of Mercurial Vapor 7 with the colorway "dark obsidian / white / cool mint"), Benoit Assou-Ekotto (with a pair of adidas f50 and a pair of Predator) they decided to take the field with "mismatched shoe colors".

Even in basketball it's not such a rare event: from Tracy McGrady at the 2004 All-Star Game to LeBron James with a blue and an orange LeBron VII in Portland in 2010, through Kyrie Irving in 2017 and the entire team of North Carolina in the same year, until the "Equality" message sent by LBJ about a white shoe and a black shoe. In the USA, paradoxically, the eyes fall much more on the shoes of the players, where the business of sneakers is far more developed culturally and economically.

The examples of the past create historical memory, while the examples of the present consolidate a trend that over the years has never completely disappeared, resisting in a transversal way among the athletes of every sport. Is playing with two different shoes really coming back into fashion?