Celine and Reebok remake the 1982 Freestyle Lo in eight colorways

Celine and Reebok have collaborated on a reworked version of the Freestyle Lo, the sportswear brand's 1982 sneaker, marking the first major partnership under Michael Rider's tenure as the house's creative director. The shoe launches September 12 at select stores worldwide, following a launch event during New York Fashion Week.

The sneaker debuted publicly in June, when Rider staged his first standalone menswear show for Celine at the Tennis Club de Paris. It appeared alongside colorful cummerbunds, patterned ties and wooden beads, part of an accessories lineup built around a wardrobe theme he described as combining American preppiness with Parisian flair.

Rider, who is from Washington, D.C., described enjoying what the studio does and wanting to wear all of it themselves, both the clothes and the characters they suggest. That sentiment framed the collaboration as an extension of his own taste rather than a marketing exercise handed down from above.

Rider describes the sneaker as heritage two ways: Paris street, American movement. Celine and Reebok are both about the tension between heritage and forward motion, he said, framing the collaboration as a dialogue between the past and the here and now rather than a straightforward reissue.

What the sneaker looks like

The Freestyle Lo is built in soft, pliable leather designed to feel gently worn in from the start. It comes in eight colorways: Peanut, Oxblood, Dark Brown, Fluo Red and Butter, alongside more classic white, black and beige options for buyers who prefer restraint.

Celine sums the range up plainly: one style, eight colors, infinite possibilities. That framing matters because the original 1982 Freestyle Lo was designed by Angel Martinez to appeal to women during the rise of aerobics classes, a niche audience for what became one of Reebok's best-known unisex styles.

The Freestyle line did not stop there. Reebok later evolved the silhouette into the Freestyle Hi, adding two Velcro straps, and has kept variations of the shoe in circulation ever since, making the Celine version a revival of a design with more than four decades of continuous history.

Where it will be sold

The collaboration launches at a tightly curated list of Celine stores rather than a broad rollout. Locations include New York Soho, Tokyo Omotesando, Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive, Miami Design District, Paris Montaigne and Milan Montenapoleone, alongside Dubai Mall, London New Bond Street, Shanghai IFC, Seoul, Hong Kong Harbour City and Singapore Marina Bay Sands.

That spread of cities points to a global luxury customer rather than a single regional launch, consistent with Celine's positioning within the quiet luxury tier.

We have written before about that category in our guide to the best quiet luxury brands, where Celine is alongside The Row, Loro Piana, Bottega Veneta and Toteme on the strength of restrained shapes and serious materials rather than visible branding.

That restraint is also what runs through Celine's handbag line, the part of the house's output we have covered most closely. Our roundup of the best Celine bags treats pieces like the Triomphe and the Luggage tote as quiet-luxury insider signals, the kind of design language now being carried over into a sneaker collaboration rather than a leather good.

A sneaker built from a heritage running or fitness shoe is now a familiar move across the category we follow in our coverage of style, and Reebok is not the only brand fielding requests from fashion houses.

Paul Smith has taken a similar route with Barbour, and Birkenstock has done the same with Etro, both collaborations pairing a workwear or outdoor name with a fashion label's colors.

Those comparisons matter because collaborations of this type live or die on how faithfully the original silhouette is treated. Our piece on the anatomy of a sneaker breaks down exactly which components a house typically changes in a project like this, from upper material to sole unit, and which it tends to leave untouched to protect the shoe's recognizability.

Reebok, for its part, brings a design already tested by decades of reissues rather than a blank canvas. The brand has continued the Freestyle style in various iterations since 1982, giving Celine a proven base rather than an experimental one, and giving buyers a shoe with a documented history behind the new colors.

No price has been disclosed for the Celine x Reebok Freestyle Lo, and neither company has said how many pairs will be produced across the eight colorways. Those two figures, price and quantity, are the detail a shopper most wants ahead of a September 12 launch and the one the initial announcement left out.

What is confirmed is the date and the channel: September 12, at the named flagship stores, after the New York Fashion Week launch event. Whether Celine restocks the colorways beyond that opening run, or treats the eight as a fixed and finite set, is not yet stated by either company.