Ronnie Fieg began at thirteen as a stock boy and salesman at David Z., his cousin’s footwear chain, working the floor of an 8th Street shop in Manhattan from the mid-1990s. He climbed to junior buyer and then head buyer. By 2007, at twenty-five, he managed the chain’s special make-ups and product collaborations.

The apprenticeship was effectively conducted by David Zaken across fifteen years on the selling floor. His method took shape there in the buyer’s vocabulary. Suede uppers, crepe soles, the Clarks Wallabee, the Timberland six-inch, the Asics Gel-Lyte III, all treated as objects with histories.

The breakthrough arrived in May 2007, when Asics offered Fieg a collaboration on existing models. He produced three Gel-Lyte III colorways called the 252 Pack, each pair made in a run of 252. The shoes landed on the cover of The Wall Street Journal and sold out in twenty-four hours.

The subsequent Gel-Lyte III runs in the Salmon Toe and Mint Leaf colorways set a template for the retailer-as-designer figure that Aimé Leon Dore’s Teddy Santis and Highsnobiety’s wider New York cohort would later inhabit.

In 2010, Fieg started Kith as a shop, partnering with Sam Ben-Avraham of Atrium, with sneaker rooms in the back of the SoHo and Brooklyn stores opening the following year. An in-house apparel line launched in 2012. The first New York Fashion Week show followed in 2016, and that same year Kith expanded its US footprint, opened a space inside Bergdorf Goodman, and completed a two million dollar renovation of the Brooklyn store.

Fieg remains founder, owner, and creative director of Kith. The brand’s footprint now stretches from Williamsburg to a 700 square-foot space in Selfridges’s Designer Street Room that opened in April 2019, and on to Paris and a Regent Street flagship in London.

In August 2025, Kith held its first runway show since 2019, dubbed Institution. Fieg had stepped away from shows because the production had begun to overpower the product. The fall 2025 collection arrived alongside a Kith x adidas x Clarks Wallabee fitted with the midsole of the adidas Ultraboost, the moccasin upper sitting on adidas underfoot cushioning.

The chapter places Fieg where his career has been heading since the 252 Pack, a buyer turned designer working the seams between heritage footwear and sportswear, with the Wallabee, the Gel-Lyte III, and the New Balance 1300 as the recurring objects of his argument.