For a few hours Pope Leo XIV had sneakerheads stumped.
Near the end of last week, the Vatican released a trailer for “Leone a Roma,” a breezy-looking documentary on the American-born pope’s years in Rome. It’s not something that would normally grab the attention of those who don’t closely track the goings on at the Holy See.
Yet, at about 50 seconds, we get a glimpse of the pope in an off-white robe with a pair of white sneakers on his feet. A black swoosh peeks out from under his vestments. The pope, folks, was wearing Nikes. (The pope hails from the land where Michael Jordan reigned. If he was going to wear any sneaker, it was going to be a Nike.)
Lay websites, more used to covering the latest colorway of Crocs, gave a spotlight to the swooshed pope. “The devil wears Prada, the Pope wears Nike,” reads a top comment on a Complex Sneakers Instagram post of the Nike-wearing pope. That post has more than 44,000 likes.
It is not clear when the pope purchased the sneakers. The image in the trailer is undated, and it appears to predate his tenure as pope.
The shoes, which do look like something a younger Robert Prevost might have worn to mow the lawn, were curiously hard to identify.
JustFreshKicks has an amusing article, complete with red-lined diagrams that detail how it concluded that the shoes were Nike’s Franchise Low, a discontinued tennis sneaker out of circulation for nearly two decades. (The pope is an avowed tennis fan. Last year around this time, he met with Jannik Sinner, the Italian-born world’s top player.)
A similar pair of Franchise Low sneakers with a white swoosh is available on eBay for $28, plus shipping.
Swooshes are not the norm for this pope, who has taken a vow of poverty. It is unexpected, even amusing, that this particular religious leader has found himself at the center of the sneaker-spending discourse. Like his predecessor, Pope Francis, he tends to wear inconspicuous black shoes. Pope Francis was buried in such a pair.
Adriano Stefanelli, the shoemaker who made the red slip-ons for Pope Benedict XVI, said in an interview on his Instagram page that when he originally presented Pope Leo with white shoes with yellow trim, they were rejected. According to the cobbler, the pope requested his shoes be remade in all black.
Humble though the sneakers were by Nike standards, dissenting voices online expressed disappointment that even the Holy Father had, at some point, succumbed to conspicuous, logo-based materialism. Fair criticism or not, I don’t recall seeing any pope in a recognizable brand. Unless it’s A.I. And that seems notable.
