The Best Sneaker Brands to Buy Now—and After the Peak-Sneaker Bubble Bursts

Listen, man, I'm going to level with you: if you're just pulling up to the sneaker party now, you're more than fashionably late. The lights are coming up. The cops are on their way to shut it down. All that's left now is a few stragglers still lurching around on the front lawn and one half-dressed couple aggressively canoodling in the bushes.

As we rapidly throttle towards the precipice of a post-sneaker reality, it seems an apt time to take stock of the current options on the market. Because guess what? It won't really be a post-sneaker society. Sneakers are always going to be around. Like your long-suffering mother assured you as a child when you yet again failed to secure that sweet, sweet invite text to Sara's epic annual summer pool party: There's always the next one. Maybe if you didn't spend so much time dawdling in front of the mirror admiring your outfit before you left, you might've actually made it on time. What's that? That's just me? Fuck it, parties are never that fun anyway. (Not when I'm there, that's for sure.) The only friends I need are the ones I can I conveniently shelve and put away on a rack outside my front door.

As satisfying as it is to imagine a world where every single well-dressed dude is wearing, like, a pair of snuff suede loafers, we're still well away from making that image anything more than a fantasy your curmudgeonly older uncle reassures himself with so he can fall asleep at night. Stick it your uncle and wear a pair of sneakers to the next family reunion, and when he starts going off again about "what that PC culture has turned this country into" simply point to your shoes and smile.

Stay gold, sneakerheads.