Flowchart: How to Style Sneakers

It is always fascinating to hear young women exclaim that they are not “sneaker people.” To say that seems unequivocally parallel to saying you’re not a “food person” or that you’re not into sleeping on a bed because you really prefer cement surfaces. Does she-who-withholds-from-trainers truly not enjoy the notion of walking around in lace up clouds? It seems doubtful. Maybe she just doesn’t feel like a sneaker person because sneakers, and because even though they are the physical manifestation of comfort, they can also appear vaguely difficult to pull off.

Maybe you feel stocky, or like whatever minute height offered from a pair of shoes-proper is better for your morale, but thanks in large part to the proliferation of sneakers among denizens of the upper echelons of fashion, the choice shoes are now also quite difficult to avoid. You might think that wearing them with a dress is a style choice reserved predominantly for your friend from Bushwick — that you couldn’t be the girl who wears her Breton stripes with tennis shoes because you don’t know how to play tennis, or that blazers and cropped trousers with rubber soles are for the commuting woman of 1985 but frankly, you might just be rejecting a movement out of fear that if you don’t, it will reject you.

So let’s not fight a God-given right to embody Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream” and instead work through ways to make three particular sneaker styles — the brainchildren of PUMA’s second collaboration with the inimitable Solange Knowles — seem further digestible. We’ll do it together the good, old-fashioned Man Repeller way — with a flow chart.

Images courtesy of Puma shot by Paul Jung, illustration by Charlotte Fassler.  Written in partnership with PUMA, now available at MadisonStyle.com.