Decades after their deaths, designers Charles and Ray Eames—widely considered the godparents of midcentury-modern furniture—find themselves in a position more common to basketball titans like Michael Jordan: A sneaker now bears their name. The shoe is a nothing-to-it version of Reebok’s low top Club C sneaker with “Eames” embossed on the side in poppy colors recalling their Los Angeles home’s exterior. It’s the first product of a year-and-a-half-long collaboration between Reebok and Eames Office, the foundation that handles the pair’s work and legacy. 

Eames...

Decades after their deaths, designers Charles and Ray Eames—widely considered the godparents of midcentury-modern furniture—find themselves in a position more common to basketball titans like Michael Jordan: A sneaker now bears their name. The shoe is a nothing-to-it version of Reebok’s low top Club C sneaker with “Eames” embossed on the side in poppy colors recalling their Los Angeles home’s exterior. It’s the first product of a year-and-a-half-long collaboration between Reebok and Eames Office, the foundation that handles the pair’s work and legacy. 

Eames fans will be frustrated to discover they can’t buy this shoe. It’s a limited “friends and family” giveaway (though based on how frequently this sneaker is showing up on my Instagram feed, Reebok sure has a lot of friends). Leo Gamboa, the project manager at Reebok who led the collaboration, said other models will follow, channeling some of the Eames’ best-known furniture designs from “the colors to the stitching.” 

Reebok’s Eames Club C sneaker is the first piece of a year and a half collaboration between the sportswear brand and Eames Office.

Photo: Leo Gamboa

The Eames Reeboks are the latest in a curious, and at times polarizing, trend: furniture-inspired fashions. Until now, these clothes have mostly taken the most literal form possible: T-shirts printed with images of chairs. A 2018 Supreme tee bore the image of Marcel Breuer’s tubular Wassily chair. A year later, the New York art-tee designers Boot Boyz Biz released the “Chair Tee” featuring images of 11 legendary perches from Pedro Friedeberg’s welcoming “Hand Chair” to Frank Gehry’s wavy “Wiggle Side Chair.” In 2020, Parisian label Casablanca sold “The Art of Sitting” tee with Pierre Jeanneret’s highly-coveted Chandigarh chair on the front. While you’d need $6,680 to buy one of Jeanneret’s ballyhooed brown-wood chairs at 1stdibs.com, furniture fanboys only needed to shell out $140 for that homage tee.

Tatiana Seikaly, 27, an interior designer in Miami Beach, Fla., has long fostered a passion for furniture. “I look at furniture all day for fun, for work or whatever. I love furniture and chairs, I think chairs are just the most important piece in any household.” In 2018, she channeled her obsession into an Instagram account, @chairsonchairs, in which she posts, appropriately enough, her favorite chairs. The account is a satisfying scroll, spotlighting Franz West’s stumpy “Haini Chair” and Kaspar Hamacher’s swoopy side chair, among many others. The problem for her and most other design junkies in her generation? In real life, artful chairs are too darn expensive. “Classic chairs are so unattainable and, like, really 1% of people own those chairs,” she said. 

So, instead of buying chairs, she wears them. She owns shirts screenprinted with famous chairs by Supreme, Hidden and Casablanca. They’re a way to reflect her seating interest without plunging her into debt.

Braeden Long, 24, a marketing coordinator in Austin, likewise sees similar shirts as a cotton-based substitute for real room-filling furniture. One of his favorite recent purchases is a hoodie by New York streetwear label Hidden, on which the word “Hidden” is spelled out by seven iconic designs like Verner Panton’s curvilinear side chair from 1967 and Eero Saarinen’s spartan “Tulip” stool. “It’s not like I am trying to buy” the actual furniture, Mr. Long said, noting the prohibitive prices authentic examples demand. He’s just fascinated by them. 

Braeden Long wearing a Hidden hoodie that shows seven well-known pieces of midcentury furniture.

Photo: Braeden Long

Other fashion labels place esteemed furniture next to—if not printed on—their clothes to give their brand images a cross-cultural gloss. Last year, when the ripped-jean peddlers Amiri opened a store on Rodeo Drive, the press release touted the  Jeanneret chairs and Poul Jensen daybed that elevated its interior. In 2019, the destination Los Angeles retailer Maxfield hosted “Chairs in Prouvé,” an exhibition featuring 45 chairs by Eames, Breuer, Le Corbusier and others. (Designers like Rick Owens and Rei Kawakubo have also pursued occasional side-gigs as furniture designers.)

Chairs designed by renowned names like Jean Prouvé, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Jeanneret (or knock-offs of their pieces) often sit alongside models in the pages of fashion magazines. Placing a much-replicated Chandigarh chair in an ad campaign shows “that you have taste,” said Patrick Parrish, a gallerist in downtown New York. Mr. Parrish doesn’t loan Jeanneret chairs out for photoshoots, fearing damage to their delicate cane seating, but he has loaned out spartan steel chairs by the now-defunct Minneapolis-based design firm Ro/Lu to more fashion brands than he can remember. The day before we spoke, the mega-retailer Zara had just picked one up for a shoot. When used in a glossy photoshoot, the clunky cubicle chair “is interesting enough to give [the brand] a cool factor,” he said.

Mr. Parrish credited—or, as he is no fan of the rapper, blamed—Kanye West for kickstarting fashion’s recent obsession with design. “It started with Kanye, in a way paying attention to design,” he said. Around the mid-2010s Mr. West was palling around with Belgian interior designer Axel Vervoordt and showing off his home’s curvaceous Jean Royère “Polar Bear” sofas in photoshoots. Other celebrities like Kris Jenner, and Jason Statham were soon arranging to have their own Charlotte Perriand- and Jeanneret-filled homes featured in the pages of “Architectural Digest.” 

Now cool-hunter kids lust after Jordan sneakers and Jean Prouvé No. 305 chairs. Mr. Gamboa, the project manager at Reebok, watched this happen firsthand, as sneakerhounds went from posting their precious shoes against pristine white backgrounds on Instagram to posting them perched on chairs. “Putting a sneaker on top of a chair, it just added validation of your taste,” he said. 

Some design diehards scorn furniture-inspired clothes as shallow, often unsanctioned stunts that trade on a great (often deceased) designer’s good name. Even in the rare instance in which the designs are authorized, as is the case with the Eames sneaker, fans can cry foul at the commercialization of a designer’s work. The gallerist Mr. Parrish summed up these feelings when he said the Eames Reebok was “just stamping a multi-colored Eames trademark on the side….I don’t see any connection [to the Eames oeuvre].” Mr. Gamboa of Reebok, implored critics to withhold judgment until they see the rest of the collection. 

Nethaneal Zechariah sold his “MCM” tees to buyers all around the world.

Photo: Nethaneal Zechariah

Certain shirtmakers have worked to more thoroughly and thoughtfully pay homage to design titans. Earlier this year, Nethaneal Zechariah, 26, a printmaker and graphic designer in Brawley, Calif., released an “MCM” collection of tees spotlighting archetypical modernist designs. His shirts didn’t just show a photo of the Wassily chair but featured a written explanation of the chair’s history. Shirts extolling Isamu Noguchi ‘s interlocking coffee table and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s sling chair included schematics of these designs. He also included one thing almost all other shirts lacked: the designer’s actual names in big font across the front. Said Mr. Zechariah, “I wanted to give people context and put the designer in a place where they’re highlighted because their stories are very important.”