Reebok Classic Leather

The Reebok Classic Leather is a low lace-up trainer cut almost entirely from soft leather: a plain upper in a single colour, two narrow stripes running along each side, a small window badge at the heel, a padded collar, and a slim wedge of EVA foam above a rubber outsole. Nothing on it announces a technology. It was made as a running shoe in 1983, and the plainness that made it look modest beside the engineered trainers that followed is what kept it on sale.

Reebok was then an English name with an American owner in waiting. The company had been formed in Bolton in 1958 by Jeff and Joe Foster, grandsons of a maker of spiked running pumps, and named after an African antelope. In 1979 Paul Fireman, who had worked in his family's camping business in Boston, took the American licence, and it was his business that launched the Freestyle aerobics shoe in 1982 and the Classic Leather a year later.

What set the shoe apart, by Reebok's own account, was garment leather, the supple hide used for clothing rather than the stiffer leathers of footwear. Runners of the fitness boom bought it, and so did people who never ran; the advertisement that introduced it showed a couple on a motorcycle beneath the words "You've Arrived". By the time Fireman bought the Bolton parent in 1984, the shoe was moving off the track and into ordinary wardrobes.

Reebok has since passed to Adidas and then to Authentic Brands Group, and the Classic Leather has been sold throughout in a long run of colours and materials. Reebok now concedes that its construction no longer suits serious running, and describes it as a shoe for everyday wear. The leather, the side stripes and the foam wedge remain where they were in 1983.