Jil Sander's Designer Explains How He Made "Rare" PUMA Karate Shoes (EXCLUSIVE)
The K-Street is Simone Bellotti’s second PUMA sneaker and it's the first PUMA collaboration in which Jil Sander’s creative director is really in the driver's seat.
To reignite their partnership, which fizzled out in the mid-2000s, PUMA and Jil Sander set the scene by reviving their luxurious 1998 football shoe last year. Now, we’re straight into the action with a Simone Bellotti-designed sneaker that’s the first original Jil Sander PUMA shoe in two decades.
“When we looked back at the previous collaboration, it was a beautiful clash of two worlds,” Benjamin Lamprey, the design teamhead for PUMA Sportstyle footwear, tells Highsnobiety. “This time, it was more about understanding that original design philosophy and asking what that approach looks like today. We still wanted to bring two worlds together, but in a more resolved and intentional way.”
The result is PUMA K-Street, a low-profile sneaker secretly unveiled in the crowd at Jil Sander’s Fall/Winter 2026 show and now releasing on April 8.
"In my opinion, shoes stand above all other accessories in terms of importance — they are, quite literally, the one item that connects us to the ground beneath our feet,” says Simone Bellotti. “That is precisely why I find myself drawn to this new shoe: It offers an almost imperceptible boundary between body and ground, a quality I find both rare and deeply appealing."
That “imperceptible boundary” refers to Bellotti’s slender leather sneaker sitting atop a sole unit so slight it’s barely there.
The ultra-thin gum sole spills onto the shoe’s front end and emerges again at the heel, leaving the middle portion of the shoe floating above the ground. When the recently hired Jil Sander creative director says he likes shoes “streamlined, with the thinnest of soles,” he’s not joking.
The K-Street is a more aerodynamic take on the already-streamlined PUMA H-Street, a recently reissued Y2K track sneaker. The “K” in the name comes from karate, since a 2004 Jil Sander x PUMA karate shoe inspired Belloti’s ultra-sleek new sole.
“We discovered the Karate shoe looking back through the archive. It wasn't the most well-known style, which we liked,” says Lamprey. “We [also] looked at the core characteristics of the H-Street and refined them: removing the webbing eyestay for a more classic approach, [adding] more consistency in fabrication, and replacing the sporty sandwich mesh with perforated suede to add structure."
All this refinement, says Lamprey, achieves "a more Jil Sander feel.” Which is to say, these old runners have been given a fresh dose of Jil Sander's distinct minimalism.
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