Fila has been at least four completely different brands, and somehow they are all the same brand. It started as an Italian company that made underwear. It became the height of tennis elegance on Bjorn Borg. It became a basketball powerhouse on Grant Hill. It became the defining ugly sneaker of the 2010s with the Disruptor. Today it lives two separate lives at once, soft in the West and booming in China, under two different owners. Few brands have been reinvented this many times and survived all of them.

From Italian knitwear to Borg

Fila was founded in 1911 in Biella, in the Italian Alps, a town famous for wool. For its first sixty years it made knitwear and underwear, not sportswear. The turn came in the early 1970s, when Fila pivoted to athletic clothing and broke tennis’s strict all-white tradition with red and navy. Then it signed Bjorn Borg in 1975, and Borg won Wimbledon after Wimbledon in Fila, and a knitwear company from Biella became the most stylish name in tennis.

The Grant Hill years

The American chapter is the one a lot of people remember. In 1994 Fila signed a rookie named Grant Hill, and the Grant Hill 1 reportedly sold around a million and a half pairs in his first season. For a few years in the mid-1990s Fila was the second biggest basketball brand in America behind only Nike, on the feet of a generation of kids and in the artwork of hip-hop records. Then it overspent, the basketball moment passed, and by the early 2000s Fila was in financial trouble and drifting out of Italian hands.

Bought by Korea, revived by an ugly shoe

Here is the twist almost nobody outside the industry knows. Fila is not Italian anymore. In 2007 a Korean executive named Gene Yoon, who ran Fila’s Korean business, bought the entire global brand and moved its center of gravity to Seoul. Under Korean ownership Fila did something improbable. In 2011 it bought the golf giant Acushnet, the maker of Titleist, and then around 2017 it pulled an old chunky 1990s shoe called the Disruptor out of the archive, and the Disruptor 2 became one of the biggest shoes of the entire ugly sneaker wave, a dad shoe that sold for around sixty dollars and was suddenly everywhere.

Two Filas at once

The present is genuinely split. The global brand is owned by the Korean parent, which in 2025 renamed itself Misto Holdings, and the Fila sneaker business in the West has cooled since the Disruptor faded, with the parent leaning on its golf earnings. Meanwhile, in China, Fila is run separately by Anta, which bought the China rights back in 2009, and there it is a premium powerhouse, at points the most profitable brand in Anta’s entire empire. The same name, two owners, two opposite stories.

What holds all of it together is that Fila has never really had one identity, and that turned out to be the strength, not the weakness. It was never locked into being a tennis brand or a basketball brand or a streetwear brand, so it could keep becoming the next thing. A knitwear maker that dressed Borg, shod Grant Hill, gave the internet its favorite ugly shoe, and got reborn in Korea and China is not a brand with an identity crisis. It is a brand that learned, a century ago in a wool town in the Alps, that the trick to surviving is being willing to become something else.