MOVING UP: If shoes you spot in the real world look like something of an AI-powered fever dream, chances are they’re from Japanese footwear label Grounds.

Futuristic kicks that question the relationship between humans and gravity are what put the 6-year-old Japanese label on the map at home and abroad.

Now cofounder and designer Mikio Sakabe wants eyes to travel upward — to take in the whole look.

The brand will be staging its second runway show in Paris on Thursday, after putting on a Betsey Johnson-style affair last season.

For Sakabe, a graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Arts who had his eponymous clothing brand for a decade before launching a 2018 line of 3D-printed sneakers rebranded as Grounds in 2019, clothes have always been in the frame.

“I want to describe a human in its entirety, not only the shoes,” he told WWD from his studio in Tokyo.

Until last season’s inaugural runway styled by Betsey Johnson, that’s what Grounds did through its collaborations with designers such as Walter von Beirendonck and Bernhard Wilhelm, and more recently, Chinese designer Yueqi Qi, 2025 ANDAM Prize winner Meryll Rogge and London-based Sinéad O’Dwyer.

But now, Sakabe and cofounder Yusuke Hotchi, who cut his teeth at Haider Ackermann before joining his fellow Antwerp academy graduate to launch Grounds, are ready to take the next step.

For its second Paris show, Grounds is offering a wild ride through uncanny valley as inspired by Japanese horror lore.

Silhouettes aim to be unsettling, with classic tailoring and kimono shapes given strange sizes to feel unfit for standard human proportions, stained materials and accessories like giant insectoid eyewear. Grounds-typical transparent soles and bat-winged platforms will be par for the course.

“But I was also thinking about new luxury,” Sakabe said. “I think luxury was already broken after 2010 [when] street fashion became the mainstream and luxury [became] very difficult to describe.”

In his opinion, the key is “some humor and intelligence,” he added.

One thing’s for sure, “you cannot easily forget that person, because [they’re] a little bit strange,” Sakabe said.

Don’t expect to snap up what you’ll see on the spring runway in stores quite yet. The brand has recently introduced a line of T-shirts in its Tokyo flagship stores — it has two, plus a store in Osaka — but the silhouettes from Paris are more likely to become art pieces.