Step in Line

Tommy Hilfiger and the Keith Haring Foundation's trainer collaboration would certainly have been worn by the pop artist himself.

Not for Keith Haring the snobbery and obsession with money found in the art market in 1980s New York. An obsession, indeed, that is even more rampant today. Haring’s art – linear graphics celebrating leaping, dancing human figures, dogs, babies, snakes and any other objects that could be rendered by his hand in a sinuous black line – turned up on subway station walls, street corners, badges and extremely large pieces of paper. Haring took art to people even when those people were on the street busily trying to head elsewhere.

Which makes the collaboration between Tommy Hilfiger and the Keith Haring Foundation a neat marriage. The artist’s figures and buzzing hieroglyphs are emblazoned onto trainers and boots – so you pull the art onto your feet and then hit the street in them, making them far away from the refined world of the gallery where most art would like to see itself comfortably leaning on a pristine white wall.

Both Tommy Hilfiger and the Keith Haring Foundation help youngsters through education and support for those affected by AIDS. Both these foundations are linked by developing these trainers.

Haring’s tragically short life – he died at 32 in 1990 of AIDS – was full of a prodigious creativity and an intense work schedule making his art some of the most recognized and loved of the past thirty years. The exuberance and child-like charm of his work is life affirming like a vertical plunge on a roller coaster with you hands thrust in the air. And, of course, trainers are just the right footwear to be leaping through life in.

As the Haring himself said, "I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached.” He wrote these words in 1978 when he first arrived in New York. Which if you change the word art to fashion, this works as a manifesto for how we dress today.

The higher top ankle boot styles are the style cognoscenti’s choice this summer and I’ll be wearing the ones in bright blue. If you’re going to wear a cult-artists designs on your feet then why be shy by hiding them in black or grey?

Men’s trainers from £89.99 exclusively at Dover Street Market from 7^th May