KENZO and Paraboot rework the Michael into a collegiate dress sneaker

KENZO just turned Paraboot’s Michael into the kind of shoe that can walk into a campus library, a fashion week venue or a downtown bar without changing costume. For its first-ever collaboration with the historic French shoemaker, Nigo recast the 1945 derby as a collegiate-leaning dress sneaker, finished with buttery leather, a creamy suede toe box, chunky soles and an oversized K detail that makes the branding impossible to miss.

The styling is the point. KENZO’s Spring-Summer 2027 collection pushes the Michael away from pure heritage territory and into that sweet spot where polish starts flirting with streetwear. KENZO says the shoe is reworked with workwear-infused accents and bold varsity lettering, which gives the silhouette a more muscular, more youthful read than Paraboot’s traditional version. It still has the weight and seriousness of a proper dress shoe, but the proportions and branding tilt it toward the kind of wardrobe that already lives in oversized jackets, pleated trousers and beat-up loafers.

That balance matters because Paraboot’s Michael is not some obscure archive pull. The company says the model was created in 1945 by the second generation of the Richard-Pontvert family, named after Michel Richard, the company’s current chairman, when anglicized names were in fashion. It is built with Norwegian welt construction, a detail that gives the shoe its robust, repairable character, and Paraboot has been making shoes in the French Alps since 1908. The brand has also leaned hard into the Michael’s recent resurgence, calling it a wardrobe essential that has kept moving across genres and trends.

KENZO is tapping that momentum rather than fighting it. Nigo has been mining collegiate codes and archive references at the house, and the Michael fits neatly into that lane without feeling lazy. The SS27 collection also marked a return to Place des Victoires in Paris, where Kenzo Takada opened his flagship boutique in 1976, so the collaboration sits inside a very specific Parisian heritage frame instead of floating as another luxury mashup. KENZO also folded in a first-time Converse project, which makes the Paraboot link feel like part of a broader footwear strategy: classic shapes, sharpened with subcultural energy.

The result is the kind of crossover that can widen both audiences at once. Paraboot gets a cleaner path into streetwear closets that already appreciate heavyweight construction and old-world craft. KENZO gets a shoe with real pedigree, not just borrowed nostalgia.