Comparison: French Feiyue and Chinese Feiyue

By 阿杜.Steward
Shanghai

One of our reader Valentina from Italy just sent me an email to show her confusion about 2 kinds of Feiyue shoes that are available in the market.
Clearly she's not the only one puzzled by this myth, so I decide to quote this email and clarify the issue to all of you :)
With Valentina's permission, I quote her email as below (I also bold out the areas that specially focus on her concern) :

From: Valentina
Sent: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:34 PM
To: Steward.du[at]gmail.com
Subject: Confusion about Feiyue and Feivue

Hello, Steward
I'm Valentina from Italy and I read your post on Feiyue page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Feiyue/11976959363
I don't have any stories to tell but i'd like to ask you a question.
I was searching info about Feiyue shoes becouse i was used to wear them during my wushu training.
Me, my friends, my master and even my chinese monk master wear the same shoes, but i noticed that they are not original Feiyue.
They are Feivue (V not Y). I also noticed that many martial artists wear Feivue and not Feiyue, just becouse they are much cheaper (15€ for Feivue against 50€ for Feiyue).
Many people sell these shoes on ebay calling them FeiYue at low prices but they are actually FeiVue!
I was asking myself: is this imitation also popular in China? Do you know something about that?
This is just simple curiosity :)
You can see the differences here:
FEIYUE: http://grandthestore.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/feiyue.jpg
FEIVUE: http://www.themmazone.net/images/Feiyue-shoes-white-large1.jpg

See you soon,
Valentina

Here's my answer

From: Steward
Sent: Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:34 PM
To:
Subject: Re:Confusion about Feiyue vs Feivue

Hi, Vale
For your concern,
First, there're 2 kinds of Feiyue shoes that are most widely seen in the market a) the French redesigned version of Feiyue b) the original Chinese Feiyue.
(For history of these shoes, I also suggest you see a previous post by me, please click here )

a) the Feiyue you mentioned in the email is the French Feiyue,
b) while the Feivue (as you put it) is actually the original Chinese Feiyue (in fact it's also spelt Feiyue, only because the poor printing caused your misunderstanding :P )

Q:Is this imitation popular in China ?
A: The French version is not available in China, we only have the original one :)

Plus, through the enclosed slide, I intend to give you a really easy illustration to identify these 2 types of Feiyue. (please click on the photo to see extra large zoom-in )

Download attached powerpoint file
(F-French, C-Chinese)

#1Shoe Tongue
The C version of Feiyue has on the tougue, TOPONE(大博文)'s wording and a star incon as trademark logo. When we compare it with the F version, Topone
s trademark is replaced with Feiyue and two parallel arrows.

#2Sole of the Shoe
Besides the outlook you can see from the photo, I'd like to add a few words for this part. The sole of C version Feiyue, I would not advise them for running, as the sole does not have much padding (They have richer padding in F version ). They are excellent for any martial arts requiring a wide range of foot motion or very low stances (like karate/Northern style kung fu/wushu) because they leave the ankles uncovered, allowing a large range of ankle flexibility.The inside of the shoe, you see the size of it.(I wear a #43 lol)They're also good because the flat sole keeps you from pronating while doing kicks or being in low stances, which can sprain or strain an ankle

#3 Side logo
As I said earlier, they're actually both spelt Feiyue :)

Hope this helps
Steward