Celine has eight colorways of the Reebok Freestyle Lo live on its own site, every one of them $750, every one of them in women’s sizing, and every one of them missing the detail that made the shoe readable from across an aerobics room. The vector logo is gone from the sidewall. What is left is a lambskin version of a shoe Reebok still sells for $75, with a Triomphe printed on one heel and a Reebok logo printed on the other.
The Freestyle is not a borrowed icon for Reebok, it is the founding one. Reebok introduced it in 1982 and still describes it on its own site as the first athletic shoe designed specifically for women’s fitness, which in 1982 meant aerobics, and aerobics meant a customer nobody else had bothered to build a shoe for. The high top with the double ankle straps is the version most people picture. The low has spent four decades as the quieter half of the same family.
Soft garment leather was the point from the beginning. It was chosen because it broke in quickly and moved with the foot through lateral work on a hard floor, not because it read as expensive. That is the detail that makes the Freestyle such an easy shoe for a fashion house to pick up. A silhouette already built out of soft leather does not need re-engineering to carry a higher price. It needs re-sourcing, and a label.
What kept it alive after the aerobics boom cooled is that it never looked like a gym shoe. The Freestyle is low, flat and closed, closer in proportion to a plimsoll than to anything built around a visible cushioning system, and that made it easy to wear with clothes that had nothing to do with exercise. Reebok still lists twenty five Freestyle makeups on its site today, which is the actual reason a fashion house can reach for it. A shoe still in production in 2026 does not need reviving. It needs a reason to be looked at again.
Celine’s version is lambskin through the upper with a polyester lining, and most of the design work here is subtraction. Reebok’s side logo comes off entirely, which leaves a blank panel of leather where the shoe usually announces itself. The perforated toe stays, so does the rubber outsole, and both houses debossed their logos underneath it where nobody will ever see them. What branding remains is pushed to the ends: a jacquard label carrying Celine Paris and Reebok logos, a printed Triomphe on the back of the right shoe and a printed Reebok logo on the back of the left, and a removable leather tag with both marks on it. Optic White, Beige, Peanut, Butter, Dark Brown, Fluo Red, Oxblood and Black are all live at once, which is a wide opening swing for a shoe most people first saw on a runway in June. Every pair is made in Vietnam.
The interesting decision here is which Reebok got picked. A fashion house shopping that archive usually comes back with the Club C or the Classic Leather, because both are neutral enough to vanish into an outfit. Celine took the one with a gender written into its origin story and then sold it in women’s sizing only, which reads as faithful to the shoe rather than opportunistic about it.
It also lands at a moment when Reebok’s own product attention is somewhere else. The energy is in a signature basketball line and in 3D printed experiments, while the heritage catalogue goes out on loan to whoever wants it. That is a reasonable way to run a brand with a deep archive and a smaller marketing budget than it used to have. It is also how a company ends up better known for what other people do with its shoes than for what it does with them itself.
Reebok sells the Freestyle Lo on reebok.com at $75, with premium makeups at $80 and $95, and the Freestyle Hi between $80 and $110. Celine is asking $750, ten times the floor price of the same silhouette. Lambskin and Vietnamese manufacturing are real costs and they do not account for that gap. The gap is the Triomphe, which is the trade every luxury sneaker collaboration offers. Measured against Celine’s own shoe wall rather than Reebok’s, $750 is unremarkable.
The Freestyle Lo by Celine/Reebok is available now at celine.com in women’s sizing at $750 a pair across all eight colorways. References run 368915533C with a two character colorway code, so Optic White is 368915533C.01OP and Fluo Red is 368915533C.27FR. Celine has given the collaboration its own Celine/Reebok section on the site, and sizes in the louder colorways are already thinning out.
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