Why 2020 will be the year of the formal shoe A trend that has grown in recent seasons and exploded this year

During the streetwear wave of the past years, each brand has produced its own sneaker with quite alternating results. This year, however, the fashion industry has scaled back its role, giving it a minority position compared to more formal footwear solutions. Perhaps Virgil Abloh's prophecy about the death of streetwear also applies to sneakers too. How many collaborations and reissues can you collect? How many different versions of the same adidas Superstar can be made? How many colorways and eccentric reinventions of the same Air Jordans will we have to see again? According to a report by Lyst, the leading search engine in the fashion industry, the 2020 statistics speak of a return to the origins and minimalism with regard to footwear, with a movement that sees simpler and more discreet sneakers come back into vogue. If confirmed in the coming months, this trend could indicate an imminent and broader change that will involve the entire phenomenon of streetwear, of which, in the last ten years, the sneaker have been the focus: the return of the formal shoe.

Whether it's boots, Derby shoes or loafers, anyway, this was the year the formal footwear made its big comeback, in the wider creative context in which fashion designers tried to update past masculine dress codes finding a middle ground between the timeless elegance of the past and the creativity and relaxation that the phenomenon-streetwear have made part of the new aesthetic canon. How will the public react to this change? To some extent it could be said that the public has already reacted, as reports such as Lyst's collect data in retrospect, recording phenomena occurring independently. It could be assumed that the formal shoe, whose appeal is more classic and durable than the trends that affect the world of sneakers, could respond to the needs of an audience segment that tends to favor products with longer life and high quality that an expensive build-up of collectible sneakers. What is certain is that in the future we will see changing the codes of formal clothing and soon what for many represents a simple and monotonous divided will become the new playground for old and new generations of creatives.