Sneaker with a 10cm sole

A sneaker with a sole almost as tall as a soda can is suddenly everywhere, and it comes from a label that has been building this exact look for years, not from a one-off viral stunt. (highsnobiety.com) The designer is Mikio Sakabe, a Tokyo-born fashion designer who launched his own label in 2007 and then started the footwear brand grounds in 2019. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and his work mixes Japanese street style with European fashion-school surrealism. (hypebeast.com) grounds was built around a simple idea Sakabe calls “Leap Gravity,” which means making shoes feel and look like they are changing your relationship to the ground. In interviews, he has said he wanted footwear that sits in a fashion context instead of the usual split between casual sneakers and luxury shoes. (hypebeast.com) (highsnobiety.com) The brand’s signature sole is the JEWELRY sole, a clear platform made from transparent spheres that look like oversized beads or bubbles. grounds says those spheres are designed to move softly with your step and create what it calls a “fluffy, floating sensation.” (grounds-fw.com) That exaggerated base is not a side project inside the catalog. grounds’ official store centers whole product lines around the JEWELRY sole, including loafers, Mary Janes, boots, and the JEWELRY PUFF TRAINER. (grounds-fw.com 1) (grounds-fw.com 2) The reason the shoe reads so instantly on a phone screen is that the sole does half the styling by itself. Sakabe told Hypebeast that most people now meet brands through social media first, so the first visual impression matters more than it used to on a runway or in a store. (hypebeast.com) This also lands in a market that has already been trained to accept stranger footwear shapes than it would have five years ago. Highsnobiety described grounds’ lineup as so extreme that Sakabe does not even like putting it inside the normal “shoe market,” and the brand’s Fall/Winter 2025 runway pushed that further with giant, mutated silhouettes. (highsnobiety.com) (hypebeast.com) The viral pair looks shocking because the platform is huge, but the business signal is more familiar: grounds already sells transparent-sole models from about $243 to over $400 on its United States store. When a shape that expensive and that recognizable breaks out online, cheaper copies usually follow fast because the silhouette is easier to imitate than a full luxury garment. (grounds-fw.com) So the story is less “a weird sneaker appeared” and more “a niche fashion language just crossed into mass attention.” Sakabe spent years turning bubble soles into a brand identity, and now the internet is treating that identity like a template. (hypebeast.com) (grounds-fw.com)