Asics

ASICS began in 1949 when Kihachiro Onitsuka started Onitsuka Co., Ltd. in Kobe, Japan to make basketball shoes — driven by his belief that team sports could help Japan's post-war youth recover purpose. The company merged in 1977 with two other Japanese sports firms to form ASICS, taking its name from the Latin acronym Anima Sana In Corpore Sano: a sound mind in a sound body. The technical heritage runs through the GEL-Kayano (1993, named after engineer Toshikazu Kayano), the GEL-Nimbus, and the GEL-Lyte III (1990, the split-tongue running shoe Ronnie Fieg's Kith collaborations later returned to streetwear). For three decades ASICS was a serious athlete-first running brand. Then around 2018 — through a quiet partnership with stylist Kiko Kostadinov for ASICS Sportstyle and a wave of Cecilie Bahnsen, JJJJound, GmbH, and Kith collaborations — the brand reentered fashion's bloodstream. Today ASICS operates two parallel realities: a performance running flagship (the Metaspeed Sky+, the GEL-Kayano 30) that legitimately competes with Nike at the elite level, and a fashion-collaboration platform that has put the GEL-Lyte III and Gel-NYC on every cool kid's foot. Few sportswear companies have pulled off this duality without one side eating the other.