Asics SportStyle grew over 40% globally in FY2025, driven by a sustained fashion-designer partnership model. The Juntae Kim Gel-Kinetic FR collaboration, built around a modular Dressneaker concept, extends that strategy into Korean cultural territory.
Seoul designer Juntae Kim has collaborated with Asics on the Gel Kinetic FR, a new silhouette built around what Kim calls the “Dressneaker.” The idea is simple: one shoe that can move between formal and street settings by adding or removing detachable, flower motif hardware. The collaboration debuted June 20 alongside Kim’s spring and summer 2027 collection, titled “Korean Sabotage,” and is scheduled to release in fall and winter 2026 in three colorways: burgundy and black, gray and black, and purple.
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Asics SportStyle’s designer playbook is paying off
The Juntae Kim project is not a one off. It reflects a long running SportStyle playbook: building fashion credibility through sustained partnerships with designers who have formal design training. Kiko Kostadinov is the anchor collaborator, alongside Thom Browne, C.P. Company and Issey Miyake.
The numbers show why the strategy matters. The SportStyle segment grew more than 40 percent globally in fiscal 2025, and 44 percent in EMEA, up from a 10.4 percent share of total company net sales in 2023. Performance running still accounts for the largest share of net sales at roughly 45 percent, but SportStyle is now large enough to shape the brand’s global narrative.
Juntae Kim and the Korean Wave
Kim is a graduate of the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion program, a 2023 LVMH Prize semifinalist and one of Fashion Asia Hong Kong’s ten Asian designers to watch in 2024. Fashion media often places the label within genderless fashion, a space defined by the refusal of binary silhouettes. Kim’s work draws on historical garment research from 17th and 18th century European construction, punk references associated with early Vivienne Westwood, and a deliberate tension between Korean and Western fashion codes shaped by years of study in the UK and a return to Seoul.
The spring and summer 2027 collection title, ”Korean Sabotage,” is a provocation about how Korean culture is consumed globally. As Hallyu (pronounced hahl yoo, meaning the Korean Wave) has become a widely recognized export, from K pop to film and increasingly fashion, some Seoul designers are pushing back against its polished, commercial packaging. Kim’s framing is not to polish Korean identity for export, but to dismantle and distort it. The Asics collaboration becomes the commercial vehicle for that argument.
The Dressneaker: one shoe, two wardrobes
The term “Dressneaker” is Kim’s own. It describes footwear that does not force the wearer to choose between formal and casual, but instead holds both registers at once. The Gel Kinetic FR delivers that idea through modular design. Flower motif hardware clips onto the upper for a more dressed up expression, then detaches completely to reveal the more utilitarian Asics silhouette underneath. One shoe, two wardrobes.
Asics describes the approach as “sustainable and flexible,” designed to work across dress codes and occasions, supporting a higher price point for a shoe that can do double duty.
The broader pattern: Seoul, London, Kobe
The Gel Kinetic FR’s role as an experimental design platform is reinforced by Asics SportStyle’s separate collaboration with Empty Behavior, an avant-garde Chinese footwear brand founded in 2020 by designers Chen Yichang and Qian Zhou. Treating footwear as an ongoing architectural “experiment,” the label is known for design “clashes”, pairing athletic or industrial cues with dress-shoe or dancewear codes, and for extending that ethos through true unisex sizing.
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Its Summer 2026 Asics Hypersync project, developed under the “Powerette” theme, bridges the wrestling mat and the ballet stage by reworking wrestling-boot proportions with pleated Tiger Stripes, a ruched satin tongue and a stripped-back, thin rubber sole; earlier collaborations included a silver GEL-Nimbus 10.1 art object and a GEL-KayanoLegacy redesign.
What links Juntae Kim to Kiko Kostadinov and the broader wave of fashion-trained designers partnering with performance footwear brands is a shared biography: European design education, a stated distance from commercial fashion norms, and a return to a home market with a different toolkit. It is, by now, a recognizable Asics SportStyle signature: find the designer who studied abroad, absorbed a different design culture, and came back changed.
Eastern views
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Analysis, insights, and expert perspectives on the sporting goods industry across Asia-Pacific — covering market trends, manufacturing, retail, and brand strategy from China to Southeast Asia to Oceania. With Jakarta-based contributing editor Yohana Belinda.
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