PRO-Keds are about to arrive in Italy

American culture has given streetwear lots of its symbols, but there's one of the most famous American brands in the New York basketball scene that had not yet made an appearance in Italy – at least until today. The brand in question is PRO-Keds, an icon of 70s and 80s aesthetics, which next month, thanks to the Wolverine Worldwide group, will arrive in Italy with its SS21 collection. The General Manager of Wolverine Italia, Andrea Rogg, explained:

PRO-Keds has an incredible history: it's one of the founding brands of sneakers culture in New York. It's a brand with a unique identity that saw its boom in Harlem and the Bronx in the 1970s. Bypassing the boundaries of gyms and playgrounds – they were born for basketball – they became the reference sneakers on the streets of New York and are often worn by the founding fathers of Hip Hop and the b-boys of the time.

The PRO-Keds, in addition to being an icon of the basketball world since the 1940s, are also part of one of the OG sneaker brands, Keds, founded in 1916 after U.S. Rubber (Uniroyal) launched it as the first brand that produced sneakers with rubber soles. And although the design of the latest collection has been updated to maintain the high technical standards that have always distinguished the shoe, the silhouette has not lost any of its vintage aesthetic, including the blue Powerstripe that made it loved by VIPs of every age from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Marylin Monroe, from Humphrey Bogart to Ariana Grande.