The Versace x Onitsuka Collaboration Is Brilliant
The minimalist Japanese sneaker that stole the runway at Milan Fashion Week 2025
On the Versace runway in Milan last Friday, most eyes were fixed on Dario Vitale. It was his first collection for the house, a debut heavy with expectation and legacy.
And yet, tucked inside the show was a quiet disruption: a collaboration between Versace and Onitsuka Tiger.
Now, here’s the thing. Versace doesn’t do quiet. This is the house of Medusa: gold chains, plunging necklines, unapologetic flash. And yet, it was a slim, restrained sneaker that stole the show. An Italian siren linking arms with a Japanese minimalist? It shouldn’t work, and yet, on that runway, it absolutely did.
The sneaker in question is the Tai Chi, a cult classic with a cinematic life of its own. Bruce Lee wore it in Game of Death, Uma Thurman revived it in Kill Bill, and for decades it has remained shorthand for a kind of stripped-back cool that doesn’t need marketing to prove its point.
In Versace’s hands, the Tai Chi hasn’t been reinvented so much as refined. Produced at Onitsuka Tiger’s Sanin Tottori factories in Japan, it has been rebuilt in Italian leather, its uppers washed and buffed to a lived-in texture. The stripes are still stitched in double, but on the tongue sits a discreet Medusa head, rendered as a small gold stud. It’s the kind of detail people notice if they’re paying attention. Alongside, the house unveiled a hybrid snoafer, crafted in Italy, pitched somewhere between sportswear and luxury finish.
High Fashion Collaborations
Collaborations between high fashion and sneakers are hardly rare. Jacquemus has Nike, Valentino has Vans, Loewe has On. Some hit shelves with genuine excitement; others vanish into the churn.
What makes this one different is that it comes from Versace — a house that has historically defined itself by surface glamour, by flash and sex appeal, not by understatement. The Onitsuka partnership like a signal: Vitale is introducing a new vocabulary. He isn’t discarding Versace’s theatricality, but he is expanding it, allowing craft and restraint to share the stage with seduction and shine.
This is not the Versace of the Met Gala gown. It is Versace in dialogue with the dojo, with Bruce Lee’s legacy, with a Japanese discipline that values precision over performance. The fact that the shoes were built in Japan with Italian materials only underscores the tension — and the harmony — at work.
Vitale’s Long Game
Vitale arrives at Versace from Miu Miu, where Miuccia Prada’s pared-back pragmatism was the ethos. To bring that sensibility into a house synonymous with audacity is a risk. Yet the sneakers suggest how he intends to reconcile the two. They are glamorous in material but modest in form; they refuse spectacle while still commanding presence. For a debut collection, they felt less like a flourish than a thesis statement.
As Miles Socha observed in WWD, Vitale’s Versace skewed more East Village disco than baroque fantasy. That distinction is important. It situates the brand in a register of everyday glamour, where jeans, sweaters, and sneakers can carry the same charge as an evening gown. In this sense, then, the Tai Chi was a punctuation mark in the story Vitale is beginning to write.
Why It Works
In 2025, the luxury-sneaker market is saturated, almost cynical in its frequency. But this collaboration cut through the noise because it felt necessary rather than opportunistic. For Onitsuka Tiger, it reinforced its cult status in the fashion landscape. For Versace, it was evidence that glamour can coexist with restraint.
No official release date has been set, though Spring 2026 is the target. Expect limited availability through Versace flagships and online, with all the scarcity politics that entails. But the bigger takeaway is this: in Vitale’s first turn at Versace, the most resonant gesture was not a gown, a cut, or a colour — it was a sneaker, made in Japan, carrying a Medusa small enough to miss.