Karina’s First Move as Converse’s Global Visage Is a Shoe

The K-pop leader’s first global campaign updates the Chuck 70 and reimagines it as the platform-heavy Run Star Crush.

Karina spent Sunday night leading aespa through an hour-long Lollapalooza set in Chicago. By Thursday morning she was the new global face of Converse, fronting a campaign built around two shoes pulled from opposite ends of the same family tree. The announcement arrived with a media statement from Karina herself, framing the deal in the same lang she has used to describe her own approach to performance. “Both on stage and off, I love breaking the mold and exploring my individuality through style and Converse is a natural canvas for that,” she said. “I’m excited to join the Converse family and inspire others to celebrate their creativity and express themselves boldly.”

 

Converse is pitching the partnership as a fusion of “heritage with experimentation,” and the two shoes in Karina’s debut campaign were chosen to make that argument view rather than just in a press release. One reworks the brand’s most recognizable design without changing its silhouette. The other takes the same starting point and pushes it somewhere the original was never built to go. Both showed up first in campaign photography credited to Converse and its parent company Nike, shot for what is being treated as Karina’s introduction to the brand on a global stage rather than a regional market activation. The framing matters for a company whose entire identity rests on a shoe design that has barely changed in over a century; Converse has spent the past decade leaning on connections and ambassador partnerships specifically to keep that century old silhouette feeling current without redesigning it out of recognition, and Karina’s campaign is the latest test of how far that strategy can stretch.

Blue Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars paired with relaxed denim for a timeless casual look.

stir

The Chuck 70 X keeps the retro proportions of the Chuck 70, the elevated version of the original Chuck Taylor All Star that Converse has spent years positioning as its premium heritage tier, largely intact. What changes sits in the details: dual star markings added to the rubber bumper and the topmost eyelets, a revised leather patch logo, and a toe cap and overall finish designed to look gently aged rather than fresh off the factory line. A tongue stabilizer has also been built in, a small functional update aimed at keeping the shoe from sliding around during actual wear rather than just sitting well in a product photo. Converse has described the X in the name as standing for infinite possibility, positioning the shoe as a considered update for a generation that grew up wearing Chucks rather than a full reinvention of the silhouette. It is currently on sale in China and Korea, with a global rollout, including United States availability through Converse’s own site and select retailers, scheduled for August 27.

 

The Run Star Crush takes a different route. It keeps the familiar Chuck upper but grafts it onto a molded foam midsole, producing a chunky, deliberately warped proportion that sits closer to fashion sneaker territory than anything in the classic Chuck lineup. Converse has cited modern running silhouettes as a reference point for the shape, and the design leans into that with an exaggerated curve through the arch, held in place by a small clip, that gives the profile a sculptural, almost architectural line when viewed from the side. Where the Chuck 70 X is restrained, the Run Star Crush is the version built to be photographed from unusual angles. It is available globally now, with no staggered regional rollout attached to it.

flow

Framing this as Karina’s introduction to Converse undersells the relationship slightly. She first partnered with Converse Korea in 2024, a regional deal that ran through the brand’s “Create Next” campaign and expanded into a fall 2024 push built around the Run Star Trainer, Chuck 70 Sketch, and Chuck 70 Plus X Hi. That regional partnership continued into January of 2025 with the Chuck 70 De Luxe Wedge, a heeled reinterpretation of the classic silhouette, and by March 2025 Karina was photographed in Converse for her digital cover of GQ Korea. What is new this week is not the relationship itself but its scope. She moves from being the face of Converse’s Korean market to representing the brand globally, a promotion that tracks with how her profile has expanded well outside K-pop’s traditional fashion circuit. She has become a regular front row presence at Milan and Paris Fashion Week over the past two years, and Converse’s decision to elevate her comes as she is already juggling ambassador roles with luxury houses alongside an American heritage sneaker label, two categories that do not typically share a face without one partnership reading as a compromise. That neither currently does is part of what makes her a useful signing for a brand trying to speak to both directions at once.

why

Karina, born Yu Jimin, debuted as the leader of aespa in November 2020 under SM Entertainment, the Seoul agency behind some of K-pop’s longest running acts. The group’s concept, built around each member performing alongside a digital avatar counterpart, made aespa an early and unusually literal example of K-pop’s metaverse experiments, a framing Karina in particular leaned into during the group’s first few years as she became closely associated with the concept in interviews and press. Nearly six years into the group’s run, that novelty has mostly given way to a more conventional measure of success: chart position, ambassador deals, and touring scale, all of which have been trending upward for aespa through 2026.

Within the group, Karina has functioned less as a rotating spokesperson and more as a fixed point brands can build a campaign around independently of her three groupmates, a distinction that matters in an industry where idol group members frequently share endorsement duties or appear together in brand activations. Her solo campaign history, stretching from Korean beauty brands through a Yves Saint Laurent beauty ambassadorship and now into Converse’s global marketing, reflects that positioning. Where some of her peers have built reputations around a single aesthetic lane, glamour, sport, or streetwear, Karina’s ambassador slate reads as intentionally broad, and Converse’s decision to hand her its most recognizable design rather than a smaller capsule collaboration suggests the brand sees that breadth as the asset worth paying for.

Classic Converse Chuck Taylor All Star lineup showcasing timeless canvas silhouettes in iconic colorways.

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The campaign lands in the middle of the busiest stretch of aespa’s career to date. The group made its Lollapalooza debut on August 2, playing a career spanning set in Chicago’s Grant Park that opened with “Black Mamba” and included the first live performance of “Switchblade,” their collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign, who joined the group on stage for the song. A music video for the track followed within days of the performance.

That momentum is backed by numbers. Aespa’s most recent album, LEMONADE, debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200, the group’s highest chart entry and its first Top 10 placement in three years, and has sold more than a million copies worldwide since release. The group is also mid rollout on its Japanese material, having released its first Japanese language EP, Kiss n Tell, last month, with the title track reaching the top 40 of the Billboard Japan Hot 100. None of that activity is slowing down. Aespa’s SYNK: COMPLæXITY World Tour moves through Mexico, Canada, and the United States in September and October before continuing into the United Kingdom and Europe early next year, meaning the Converse campaign is arriving directly ahead of the group’s most extensive run of North American shows to date rather than during a quiet stretch between releases.

look

Converse is not signing an athlete or an actor with a narrow, easily defined audience. It is signing one member of a four person idol group whose collective ambassador roles already stretch across haute fashion, Korean beauty and skincare, sportswear, watches, footwear, fragrance, contact lenses, and general lifestyle categories, and whose individual profile as Karina layers on top of that with campaigns for luxury beauty, tourism, alcohol, food and beverage, coffee, professional sports, jewelry, technology, automobiles, eyewear, and even toy collaborations. Converse sneakers are simply the newest addition to a list that was already unusually long before this deal was announced.

What that buys a heritage shoe brand is less about any single endorsement and more about proof of range. A performer who can front a luxury fashion house’s campaign one month and a mass market American sneaker label’s global relaunch the next, without either read as a mismatch, is a genuinely useful asset for a company trying to hold onto both its fashion credible and its everyday wearability at the same time. Converse’s bet with Karina is that her audience does not see those two things as being in tension, and given how her career has been built so far, that bet looks reasonably well informed.

It also fits a broader pattern in how Converse, and its parent company Nike, have been approaching K-pop over the past several years, treating the region’s biggest acts less as a novelty marketing category and more as a direct pipeline into a young, globally connected audience that spends heavily on both music and fashion. Where an earlier generation of sneaker marketing leaned on athletes almost exclusively, brands like Converse have increasingly found that a performer with Karina’s kind of cross border reach can move a heritage silhouette into new territory faster than a traditional celebrity endorsement, simply because her audience already follows her across borders as a matter of course. Whether the Chuck 70 X moves units the way Converse clearly hopes it will will not be clear until the shoe’s full global rollout completes on August 27, but the early signal, an hour long festival set on Saturday and a campaign face reveal by Thursday, suggests Converse is trying to catch her audience while it is at its widest.