It’s 2026—is sneaker culture still kicking? That question lingered in the air through the last days of 2025, fueled by social media discourse amongst sneakerheads, content creators, and longtime vets of the retail and brand-collaboration world. It’s a rhetorical question without a real answer unless you’re looking exclusively at dwindling sales numbers and prices on resale platforms like GOAT, KicksCrew, StockX, and others. The real answer is a little more complicated. Sneaker culture is undeniably shifting; the peak era of Air Jordan collabs and retros ruling the market and fetching astronomical markups at resale has somewhat definitively come to a close. You can point to the resale industry, the pandemic, the Last Dance craze finally dying down a little, and oversaturation as reasons but the biggest factor in the shift is a bit simpler: things change. And here at GQ we have long believed that change is good. The tides have been changing in the sneaker scene for a minute and beneath the “what does it all mean?” discourse of 2025 there were glimpses at …