Evan Belforti Is Leading a Sneaker Revolution at Reebok

Belforti’s path to Reebok wasn’t a linear one. After graduating from the Rhode Island Institute of Design (RISD) with a degree in Industrial Design, he began applying for jobs. Despite a portfolio of sneaker drawings and ideas from school, he received denial after denial. Living at home with his mom in Framingham, Massachusetts, he worked as a machinist and welder in nearby Providence.

In 2018, after “bothering” (by his own admission) Reebok for over a year, he was brought in for an interview for a temporary position in the materials department. Belforti arrived over-prepared with sketches and samples for a technical, rather than creative, role. Once he was in the doors at Reebok, he found a footwear mentor outside of his temp duties who gave him a design brief. Belforti impressed and was eventually brought on to Reebok’s apprenticeship program. After just five months of the one-year program, he was hired full-time to the Special Projects team in 2019. Special Projects may sound like a covert government agency, but according to Belforti, it’s a way to avoid calling themselves “the fashion team.” 

In today’s landscape, sneaker culture extends beyond streetwear into high fashion and is understood by everyone from super collectors to casual consumers. Within Special Projects, shoes are either collaborations with runway fashion partners or Reebok’s more experimental silhouettes that go out to fashion distributors. “The tiers we often see sneakers sit within are starting to blend more and more,” says Belforti. “You can see that trends and styles and everything are almost opposing. They move in opposition to each other. You have the huge chunky shoe and then you move to the super slim shoe and then you have these hyper futuristic shoes. But now there's this push towards more classic footwear. It exists across all of these different tiers in these different distribution models.” Reebok’s streetwear team was established with practices and reputation, but when Belforti joined the Special Projects team, it was new and ready to be molded by its creatives.

What drew Belforti to Reebok was their extensive archive, dating back to their original company name, J.W. Foster and Sons, founded in 1895 in the United Kingdom. Its robust history and sneaker catalog, encapsulated by classic silhouettes like 1985’s Club C, provide countless creative reference points. Belforti’s focus is on creating entirely new designs, leveraging Reebok’s position in the marketplace as an underdog. “When you're smaller and you're closer to the ground, you're closer to these subcultures that are defining the industry. We're kind of down in the trenches with everyone that's shaping what the bigger names make and in that, we can make really authentic, cool things,” he says. 

On the Special Projects team, Belforti has designed sneakers for Reebok collaborations with forward-thinking brands including Maison Margiela, Pyer Moss, and KANGHYUK. “The move for sneakers into streetwear made a lot of sense and felt seamless. The leap into fashion was almost more abrasive,” says Belforti.  “Sneakers have created this ability for fashion designers to make more progressive looks. They're not locked into tradition and heritage so much. If you were making half the looks that existed in fashion shows with heels, Chelsea boots, Oxfords and all these more traditional shoes [as templates], they would look bizarre. Sneakers have acted as a catalyst for progression within the fashion industry to be able to access things that are functional, plain weird and obscure looking.” 

Belforti strives to avoid his work becoming overly serious. “In my process, I try to stay pretty playful. I think it's really important to be playful and not take yourself too seriously, even if being creative is a vulnerable process,” he says. The process he speaks of, centered on storytelling, involves a lot of mood-boarding. His days are packed, starting with early morning meetings focused on materials and color with his team in Milan. In the afternoon, he pivots from meeting mode to designing, secluding himself so he can be fully focused. By evening, he shifts his attention to his forthcoming apparel offering, Lore. 

Unaffiliated with Reebok, Lore is inspired by Belforti’s lifelong curiosity with fantasy and science fiction. Entirely unisex, it is centered around fictional workwear for occupations in an alternate universe. Harkening back to his industrial design and metalwork origin story, the first collection, titled Metallurgy, focuses on metal workers’ uniforms. Each collection will consist of 12 looks, divided by different regions of the fictional world. “I hope there will be a lot of red threads between each collection and people will have the desire to investigate and delve into this space because for me, growing up, the most interesting parts of fantasy and science fiction, even of occult horror movies, was this idea of the world that we're not actually seeing,” says Belforti. “Like all the space that existed around the story we're telling you. I want to use that as the basis for everything.”  

With both Reebok and Lore, Belforti is more interested in creating new movements than racing to the latest. Despite that, he won’t trash any current trends. “Everything is something to someone,” he says. Even if Belforti tries to keep things fresh, fun, and not too serious, he believes in sneakers enough to know that in an alternate universe, in the future, and in fantasy, sneakers are being worn by everyone and can unite us all. 

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