A Little Tokyo Ping Pong Club Just Gave a Forgotten Tennis Shoe Its Second Life

Little Tokyo Table Tennis, the weekly ping pong meetup out of Downtown Los Angeles, is back with ASICS for a second shoe, this time reviving the GEL-RESOLUTION 5.

Little Tokyo Table Tennis started in 2021 as a weekly meetup, players gathering every Tuesday evening at Terasaki Budokan in Downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood. Five years in, it has grown into something closer to a fashion label with a sport attached, and the club’s second collaboration with ASICS is proof of how far that has traveled. The pairing revives the GEL-RESOLUTION, a model originally built in 2013 as a performance tennis shoe and largely absent from streetwear conversation since. LTTT and ASICS have reworked it for a completely different racket sport, table tennis, in two colorways built around white uppers offset by lime green and red detailing depending on the source describing them.

That follow up matters because LTTT’s first shoe with the brand, the GEL-NIMBUS 10.1 “Yellow Black,” already did the harder work of proving a table tennis club could sell out a genuine shoe rel. Where that debut leaned on an existing colorway with a hand sewn net detail on the tongue, this second project pushes further into original design territory, giving ASICS a reason to hand over a model it has mostly left alone commercially.

LTTT itself is a small operation by design. What began as a group of friends gathering at Terasaki Budokan has since expanded into a physical storefront in Little Tokyo, a run of its own merchandise, and now a second sneaker line with one of the larger Japanese sportswear brands, all while keeping the weekly Tuesday meetup as its actual center of gravity. That kind of scale, a genuine sneaker collaboration built out of a community sports club rather than an existing streetwear label, is unusual enough that it explains why ASICS keeps returning to the partnership rather than treating it as a one off.

stir

The design work goes beyond a fresh colorway. ASICS’ own SportStyle team describes the GEL-RESOLUTION 5 here with its signature side stripe rendered in a gradient, translucent finish that runs across the upper, while graphic details lifted from table tennis, referencing the 2014 competitive season specifically, appear on the side panels. The brand’s usual Tiger Stripe branding is dropped entirely from the medial side, a deliberate pared back choice rather than an oversight.

Function gets equal billing with look. Each pair ships with two lacing setups: an elastic system anchored by an ASICS lock, and a separate knotless option, giving players a choice between speed of entry and a cleaner, more minimal front. It is the kind of detail that reads as small on a spec sheet but tends to be the first thing anyone who actually plays the sport notices in person.

The ASICS x Lttt connection showcases the performance-focused outsole of its lime green table tennis shoe, pairing a translucent rubber base with vivid yellow traction zones engineered for quick directional movement on indoor courts while reinforcing the collection’s technical design language.

.

huh

Rather than unveiling the shoe through a standard product drop, ASICS and LTTT chose to debut it inside a “Ping Pong Club” pop up during Paris Fashion Week, treating the shoe as much as a cultural object as a piece of footwear. The accompanying campaign, shot back home in Los Angeles, follows a group of friends leaving LTTT’s own storefront on a sports bus before stopping at OCTTA and LATTA, two spots inside Southern California’s table tennis community, a choice that keeps the imagery rooted in the same neighborhood culture the club was built from rather than staging it somewhere more generic.

That contrast, a European fashion week debut for a shoe built around a Tuesday night club in a specific LA neighborhood, is really the through of LTTT’s whole run of collaborations so far. The brand has kept its roots view intact (its physical shop still sits inside Little Tokyo, its schedule still runs on the same weekly cadence it started with) even as its collaborators and audiences have gone considerably more international.

confirm

Coverage of the release date has not lined up cleanly. Multiple outlets tracking the collide reported a July 25, 2026 release through both LTTT’s and ASICS’ own online channels alongside select stockists, while the brief behind this piece specified an August 1, 2026 release. That gap is worth flagging plainly rather than picking a side, since neither LTTT’s own product listing nor ASICS’ own campaign writeup includes a firm date beyond a general late July window. Retail pricing was also still unconfirmed as of the most recent coverage available, consistent with how the brand handled its GEL-NIMBUS release the year before.

The exact colorway naming carries a similar wrinkle. Early trade coverage described the pair as white and lime green, while LTTT’s own product listing names the same release white and red. Both descriptions could plausibly apply to a two colorway set with mismatched panel detailing, but nothing in the material reviewed for this piece resolves which name belongs to which shoe, so both are noted here rather than guessed at.

None of that uncertainty changes what the mingle is actually doing: taking a shoe ASICS had let sit dormant for over a decade and handing it to a table tennis club that has, in a fairly short stretch, become one of the more closely watched small labels working with the brand.

It also says something about how ASICS is treating its own back catalog these days. A silhouette built for competitive tennis in 2013 and largely forgotten outside of performance circles is not an obvious candidate for a fashion forward reissue, yet handing it to a niche community brand with a genuinely specific point of view has turned it into exactly that. Whether the GEL-RESOLUTION 5 becomes a recurring fixture in LTTT’s lineup or stays a one time revival is not something either brand has addressed publicly yet.