Salehe Bembury likes to work ahead. When the 34-year-old footwear designer—best known as Versace’s sneaker guru, with the 2 Chainz-beloved Chain Reaction as his primary calling card—rolled into the first design
meeting for his forthcoming New Balance collaboration, he came armed with more than just a color palette in mind. “It was like he started with the finished sneaker on the shelf, and then walked backwards,” Joe Grondin, New Balance’s senior collaborations manager, recalls with a chuckle. “Salehe had a full vision for what the rollout was going to be, what the styling of the campaign was going to look like, how the in-store displays should be set up.”
It’s that type of full-chessboard visualization that’s fueled Bembury’s winding, two-decade climb from sneaker forum lurker to industrial design student to Payless shoe sketcher to trusted Kanye protégé to luxury house vice-president to Guy Behind the Fall’s Hottest Signature Sneaker. But even for someone bold enough to shoot his shot with a potential employer via LinkedIn DM—which is how he infamously landed the Versace gig—the idea of someday having his own shoe, one with his name on the box, was beyond even his wildest manifestations.
“Your goals grow as you grow, but for the majority of my life, this isn’t even something that I saw as possible,” Bembury tells me over Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, my name is on a New Balance shoe. My name is on a New Balance box. It's extremely surreal. It’s emotional. I’ve loved sneakers my entire life. I probably haven’t even fully absorbed it yet.”
So how did Bembury earn this milestone? What’s the special sauce that makes him the rare sneaker designer whose name holds as much cultural cachet as the brand he designs for? It might sound reductive for someone as driven and talented as Bembury, but if you ask Joe Grondin, it has a lot to do with his Instagram account. “Kids used to only aspire to be like athletes,” Grondin says. “But these days, a lot of kids are trying to figure out how to become the next photographer or the next creative director, and Salehe is a good representation of how someone can really establish a name and personality for themselves as an independent designer.”
It’s true: Scroll through Bembury’s feed, and you immediately get a sense of the mind and person behind the sneakers he crafts, from his latest vintage acquisitions to unfinished Versace samples to linkups with his famous friends (more on those later). His willingness to let his 114,000 followers behind the curtain makes Bembury relatable in a way that, say, Air Jordan obsessives in the late ‘80s never got to connect to Tinker Hatfield.
As of late, those followers have also been treated to a non-stop barrage of sweeping vistas and dusty trails, both in the hills above Los Angeles and in national parks across California and the surrounding states. Bembury first picked up hiking when he moved from his native New York to LA five years ago, and it’s become an invaluable escape from both the chaos and monotony of the past few months.
“It’s like this constant sensory experience,” he explains. “There’s beauty all around you. I’ve settled into this really nice, meditative rhythm where it’s how I have to start my days. With COVID and the protests and everything else, being 4,000 feet above it all—I think subconsciously, I started going up there to find a place of peace. There’s no disease up there. There’s no racism when you’re alone on a mountain. I’m still a New Yorker at heart—Knicks fan, the train, all that—so it’s strange to me that the outdoors have become such a big part of my brand.”