Dua Lipa ASICS Sneakers: The Gel-Kayano 20 That Thinks It’s a Necklace

There’s a version of celebrity street style that’s just a stylist emptying a PR closet. And then there’s whatever Dua Lipa did this week. Fresh from the celebrations marking her marriage to actor Callum Turner, she made the walk from home to the recording studio and turned it into a full editorial moment. The detail everyone zoomed in on wasn’t the bag or the sunglasses. It was the shoes.

Dua Lipa’s ASICS sneakers are the Completed works Gel-Kayano 20 — a two-decade-old running shoe that a London jewellery label covered in pearls, gems and beaded flowers. It costs $300. It benefits a mental-health arts programme. And it is, without much competition, the most interesting thing anyone has put on their feet this summer.

Let’s get into it.

What Dua Lipa’s ASICS Sneakers Actually Are

Short version: a collaboration between ASICS SportStyle and Completedworks, a London jewellery and accessories house.

The pair takes the Gel-Kayano 20, a performance running shoe from ASICS‘ early-2000s archive, and hands it to Completedworks founder and artistic director Anna Jewsbury for reinterpretation. The shoes are handcrafted in the label’s London studio and come in black and white, decorated with mismatched gems, pearlescent bows and floral elements.

Four variations exist across the run — bow, gem and flower treatments, split between the two base colourways. The pair Grazia identified in Dua’s studio walk is the Black Flower, the one with the beaded blooms sitting where a normal runner would just have mesh.

Here’s the spec sheet.

The Outfit: Acid Green, Palace, and a Birkin Doing Cardio

The shoes didn’t arrive alone. Per Grazia, the full look was an acid-green tee with matching Palace joggers and hoodie, round Gucci sunglasses, and a Hermès Birkin 30 finished with a silk Twilly scarf.

Read that list again. A skate brand, an Italian luxury house, a Birkin, and a jewelled Japanese runner. On paper it should be a car crash.

It isn’t, and the reason is the shoe. The Gel-Kayano’s chunky retro-tech shape holds the sporty half of the outfit together, while the pearls and gems quietly shake hands with the Birkin. It’s the pivot point. Take the sneaker out and the whole thing collapses into “pop star doing errands.”

That’s the trick with a genuinely well-chosen sneaker, and it’s the same logic we unpacked in our look at how luxury sneakers conquered high fashion. The shoe isn’t the accessory. It’s the argument.

Completedworks: The Jewellery House That Wandered Into Sportswear

If the name isn’t familiar, that’s fine — Completedworks lives in a different aisle of the shop.

Founded by Anna Jewsbury, the London label built its reputation on sculptural, deliberately off-balance pieces: asymmetric earrings, crumpled-looking vessels, pearl necklaces that look like they melted slightly on the way to the shoot. Fashion editors love it. Sneaker media, until this year, had no reason to mention it.

Jewsbury has talked about the studio’s ongoing interest in “the juxtaposition of femininity and a certain sense of ornateness” against everyday practicality — and trainers, she’s noted, sit right in the middle of that tension.

That’s not marketing fluff. It’s a design brief, and you can see it executed on the shoe. The embellishment isn’t slapped on top of the Gel-Kayano. It follows the panel lines. The bows sit where the overlays already create tension. The gems cluster where the eye already goes.

This is Completedworks’ first footwear project, and its first with ASICS.

The fashion-designer-meets-sportswear pipeline is well-trodden by now but a jewellery studio is a genuinely new entrant. Different training, different instincts, different result.

Why the Gel-Kayano 20 and Not Something Newer

Picking a 2000s runner over a current model wasn’t nostalgia for its own sake.

The Gel-Kayano 20 is already a busy shoe. Layered overlays, visible gel windows, contrast panelling, that slightly overbuilt early-2000s stability-shoe geometry. It has structure to work with.

By choosing a silhouette that already carries layered complexity, Completedworks amplified what was there instead of painting over it. Put pearls on a minimal, clean-lined sneaker and they read as stickers. Put them on a Kayano and they read as intentional.

There’s a practical angle too. ASICS SportStyle has spent years mining its own archive for exactly this kind of project, and the retro-tech running silhouette is having a long, comfortable moment — something we flagged in our Fall 2026 sneaker trends breakdown. The Kayano was already in the conversation. This just gave it a reason to be on the front page.

And unlike a lot of “wearable art” footwear, the base shoe is a proper runner. The gel is still in there. It’s the same reason a genuinely well-cushioned trainer keeps turning up in our best sneakers for nurses guide — the underlying engineering does real work, whatever’s glued to the outside.

Crafts for Mind: The Charity Bit That Isn’t Just PR

Here’s where the shoe earns some goodwill.

The collaboration sits under ASICS SportStyle’s “Crafts for Mind” programme, a non-profit initiative built around supporting mental wellbeing through creativity and craftsmanship. It’s not a one-off — the platform has previously run projects with Florence Tétier, Nanushka and Fidan Novruzova.

A portion of profits from the Completedworks release goes to Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Community Programme, which delivers artist-led activities in partnership with Appletree Community Garden.

Is a $300 sneaker a meaningful vehicle for social good? Reasonable people will disagree, loudly. But the structure here is more specific than the usual vague “supporting communities” boilerplate — a named park, a named partner garden, a named type of activity. That’s a low bar, admittedly. Plenty of brands don’t clear it.

Worth knowing: ASICS’ whole corporate philosophy descends from the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano — sound mind in a sound body. Crafts for Mind is that idea with a 2026 wrapper on it. Consistent, at least.

Price, Release Date and Where to Actually Buy Them

The collaboration retails at $300 and launched exclusively through Completedworks’ own site and Dover Street Market London, following the label’s London Fashion Week show on 21 February. A wider release at Dover Street Market Paris and Ginza followed in March.

A realistic note on availability. This is a small handcrafted run that dropped five months ago and just got a global celebrity bump. Some styles were still listed on Completedworks’ site in late July 2026, but treat stock as a moving target rather than a promise — sizes go first, colourways go second.

If the official channels are empty, resale is the fallback, with the usual warnings. Prices on a shoe like this move on hype rather than logic, and the embellishment makes condition grading much harder than usual. If you’re going that route, stick to platforms with real authentication — the kind of infrastructure we covered when GOAT opened up reseller drop-offs via Flight Club.

For anyone who happens to be in Tokyo, DSM Ginza is worth the trip regardless. It’s on our list of Asia’s most essential sneaker stores.

Should You Buy Them? Pros and Cons

Let’s be honest about what this shoe is and isn’t.

Who should buy: collectors who want a piece with a story, people who already own the basics and want one loud pair, anyone who likes a shoe that starts conversations.

Who should skip: anyone buying their one good sneaker of the year, daily commuters, people who hate being looked at.

Alternatives worth a look: a standard Gel-Kayano 14 or Gel-1130 gets you the ASICS retro-tech shape at a fraction of the price. If you want statement without the embellishment, our red sneakers guide covers louder pairs that cost a lot less.

How to Style Them Without Trying Too Hard

Three routes that work.

1. The Dua method — soft and sporty. Matching sweats, an oversized tee, one good bag. The shoe does all the talking. This is the easiest version and the hardest to get wrong.

2. Sharp trousers. Wide-leg tailoring, cropped just above the shoe so the embellishment peeks out. The contrast between a pressed trouser and a jewelled runner is the whole point. Best version of this shoe, honestly.

3. Slip dress or midi. Chunky runner under something fluid. It’s been a reliable formula for years and the pearls push it somewhere more interesting than a plain white trainer would.

What to avoid: anything else embellished. One sequinned item per outfit. The shoe has already handled that job.

What This Says About Sneakers in 2026

The Samba had a great run. Multiple great runs. But it got so ubiquitous that wearing one stopped saying anything at all, and that’s the point at which a trend quietly ends.

What’s replacing it isn’t one shoe. It’s a category: the archival technical runner, dressed up. ASICS has been the biggest beneficiary, but the wider pattern is that people want a sneaker with more visual information in it. More panels, more texture, more to look at.

The Completedworks Kayano is the extreme end of that. It’s a running shoe that has stopped pretending to be about running and started behaving like an object — closer in spirit to the experimental design work we covered with the Mantis biomimicry concept than to anything on a shop wall.

Whether you’d wear it or not, that shift is real. And you can watch it play out week by week in our sneaker releases drop guide.

The Verdict

Dua Lipa’s ASICS sneakers work because they’re not trying to be a sneaker flex. They’re a design object that happens to have a gel unit in the heel.

At $300 for a handcrafted, limited pair with a named charity beneficiary, the price is defensible — steep, but defensible. What you’re really buying is the idea: that a 2000s stability runner can be handed to a jewellery studio and come back as something nobody else on the street is wearing.

The Samba isn’t dead. It’s just been out-thought.

Key Takeaways

• The shoe: Completedworks for ASICS SportStyle Gel-Kayano 20, in black and white, with beaded flowers, pearl bows and mismatched gems.
• The price: $300 USD, roughly ₹26,000 before duties.
• The designer: Anna Jewsbury of London jewellery label Completedworks, in her first footwear project.
• The cause: Part of ASICS’ Crafts for Mind programme; a share of profits goes to Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Community Programme.
• The availability: Released 21 February 2026 via Completedworks and Dover Street Market. Limited and hard to find.
• The verdict: A statement pair for collectors, not a daily driver. Wear it with tailoring.

Sources & further reading: Grazia USA · WWD Footwear News · Hypebeast · Sneaker Freaker · Completedworks