GQ Stefon Diggs Test-Drives Thom Browne’s Surprise New Sneaker Collab

 

Stefon Diggs had a strict dress code at his high school: khaki pants, a light wash button-down, and the ubiquitous East Coast staple of boat shoes. He was not a fan.

“I used to get in trouble a lot,” the Patriots wide receiver tells GQ. “I was wearing my UGG boots with the furs. I had a very hard time grasping the concept of being told what to do or what to wear.”

A decade later, that defiant streak still shows up in his style. Whether he’s in the NFL tunnel or sitting courtside, Diggs shows out with fur coats, jorts, and tons of patterns. For GQ, he slipped into another uniform, this time from Thom Browne’s latest collection of shrunken schoolboy tailoring. He’s also modeling the new Thom Browne for Asics Gel-Kayano 14, which officially drops today.

What’s Diggs’s M.O. when it comes to modeling? “Just being myself, relaxing, and putting my shoulders back. I think I got experience from when I was an adolescent—we used to take pictures a lot just because. ‘Let's take pictures to post on MySpace, on Facebook,’” he says. “And you kind of figure out what your good angles are and what your bad angles are.”

Diggs is especially drawn to Thom Browne for the signature color palette and sharp tailoring. “I don't have a favorite color, and I don't consider gray a color because it's a shade,” he muses. “But it's my favorite.” He’s such a fan that he’d design his own team uniform like Thom Browne’s clean, monochromatic ensembles. “It would involve gray, 100% … the socks and helmet would be the only elements that really pop,” Diggs explains. “Everything else would stay tonal, with just a hint of color in the accessories.”

Speaking of accessories: When Thom Browne was developing his new running shoe with Asics, he started where he always does. “It needed to work perfectly with that gray suit,” Browne tells me.

The resulting trainer marks the designer’s very first sneaker collaboration. “I never really wanted to do it,” Browne says, matter-of-fact as ever. (He famously prefers a polished black wingtip.) In the 25 years since Browne, 60, recast American menswear with a radically shrunken version of the classic salaryman suit, the relevance of the luxury-sneaker collab has oscillated wildly, rising and falling along with practically every other trend under the sun. But the Thom Browne look—with its extreme yet exacting proportions—has remained singular and striking.

Browne likes to say that his gray suit never gets old—and, indeed, he’s regularly using runway shows and other public moments to remind everyone about his most influential design. “I always feel like I want to make sure that people see my collections are always evolving, but [also] that they’re always staying true to where they started,” Browne says.

He melded innovation and tradition once again when he started the year with the Thom Browne fall 2026 runway show at the second annual GQ Bowl, held in San Francisco at the stately Legion of Honor. “I’m 25 years into this, and GQ has been with me almost all of those 25 years, so I’m taking this moment to almost reintroduce Thom Browne to the world,” he says. “I just want to reemphasize the importance of what I created 25 years ago, and so the collection is based in that world and the strength and the power in that singular idea.”

GQ Bowl also marked the official debut of the Asics collab, a spiffy tricolor-tipped rendition of Asics’s techy Gel-Kayano 14, which, in its nearly-two-decade history, has been a favorite blank canvas for designers. “It’s just a really good technical, utilitarian sports shoe,” Browne says. His goal was not to reinvent the sneaker, but rather to introduce it into his rigorous aesthetic universe. “I didn’t want to overthink it. I wanted to make it as simple as possible,” he says. Like all Thom Browne footwear, the Kayanos are fit with the brand’s signature grosgrain red-white-and-blue tab at the heel. Otherwise, he left the original design alone.