Trainers have always held a polarising place in fashion. The functional shoe first originated in sporting grounds and gym floors before crossing over into street style uniforms in the latter half of the 20th Century. Unlike other staples that are native to these environments—say leggings, crop tops and emotional support water bottles—trainers are unique in the sense that they have firmly shed this ancestry.

Now, the athletic style has become as commonplace as a pair of sturdy denim jeans or a button-down shirt. But with summer on the horizon, understanding what trainers best suit a season defined by warm weather and balmy temperatures is a different matter entirely. Though the decision to wear trainers is no longer questioned, what should be pondered is the type of trainers most appropriate for a season where bare feet and skin-baring silhouettes reign supreme. And this summer, this predicament is only compounded by the array of summer trainer trends currently proliferating the market.

It’s no longer a simple choice of pledging your allegiance to a specific brand and purchasing the style that speaks to you most. (No, the amount of underrated trainer brands that have reached cult status has made that a simply impossible proposition.) What’s more, trainers themselves have become subject to hybrid mania, meaning that anything from a mesh Mary Jane to a satin ballet flat can don a gum sole or pair of laces and be labelled as a trainer.

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More so, on the heels of quite luxury, pun intended, fashion has struck a mood of refined, luxurious and understated silhouettes that hit a nostalgic note. These styles aren’t explicitly discrete, but they’re certainly more pared-back compared to the chunky, dad-esque styles that dominated the latter half of the 2010s.