Once upon a time, sportswear was just that – clothes for the track, field, pitch or court. But for some time now, tracksuit bottoms, hoodies, baseball caps and trainers have constituted the uniform of our cities – not only for youth, but also for American presidents and Tory leaders – and are now as likely to be worn in a bar or on a street corner as in a stadium.

Small wonder, then, that the fashion industry has muscled in on the action, borrowing sports styles and adopting innovative technology and materials to imply a sportif lifestyle, even if we may not be living it. In turn, brands such as Adidas and Puma have co-opted designers like Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen – the latest hook-ups in a complicated relationship that is being explored in a new show at the V&A, Fashion v Sport.

It seems that, whether we’re in McQueen’s trainers or a polo shirt from Marks & Spencer, we’re all in sportswear. But for some, the notion of sportswear goes beyond having comfortable, casual clothes to wear, and becomes something more serious, passionate, not to say “meaningful”, as Phil Tucker, one of the sportswear collectors featured below, puts it. Tucker acquired more than 400 Fila pieces from what he calls the “heyday” of the Italian brand, from 1976 to ’86. “I collected for about eight or nine years,” he recalls of what became “an obsessive addiction”. Kish Patel has acquired more than 1,000 trainers; Dan Keogh’s mates call him “the Y-3 kid”, referring to his love of the products of that quintessential fashion/sport collaboration between Yojhi Yamamoto and Adidas.

So what motivates them? While women are embedded in the cult of the handbag or the newest shoe, there seems something very male about this world – the geeky business of collecting, organising and fantasising about the “ultimate trainer”, just one step from the anorak impulses celebrated in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.

Men’s choice of sportswear might sometimes be tribal – the team he supports, the athlete or hip-hop star he worships, the group he’s part of. “It was my ticket into the inner circle,” Tucker recalls of buying his first piece of Fila when he was 13. “Rather than looking in at what everyone else had, finally I was on the inside.”

Yet each of these collectors has turned this relationship with a brand into something individual. And while these sportswear heroes are not Beckham or Michael Jordan, as Ligaya Salazar, curator of the V&A’s exhibition, puts it, “They’re modern-day aesthetic athletes. Fans and collectors keep brands alive, financially and in spirit, by preserving and displaying them in their everyday lives.”

And they sometimes show keener appreciation of the products than the people whose job it is to create and maintain a label’s image. “You become the guardian of the brand,” argues Tucker. “It means something to us, but it doesn’t always mean anything to the people in the boardroom.”

KISH PATEL, 32, co-director of Straight Up, distributor of street fashion labels, London

In a bedroom filled floor to ceiling with boxes of Nikes, Adidas, Reebok, Converse – and all manner of under-the-radar brand trainers – sits what I can only describe as the antithesis of the image of a geeky collector – a hip, laid-back guy who has not let his obsession take over his life, only his room. Yet Kish Patel owns one of the largest, most wide-ranging collections of sports footwear in the country – more than 1,000 pairs as its stands – many of which recall key moments in his life.

It all began almost by accident, “returning from a family holiday in Canada with a pair of Nike running shoes in caramel brown and white with zig-zag gum soles. Standing out like that was a pretty cool feeling for a 10-year-old.”

In his teens, his heroes were trainer-clad hip-hop stars Run DMC and the rapper Rakim. As he emulated their street style, fashion and sportswear merged as much in Patel’s life as in the industries themselves. Starting out in iconic London record shops Mr Bongo and Major Flava’s, Patel grew up with vinyl and synthetic soles. He began making a career out of music – working at music labels and also radio DJing on Zane Lowe’s old XFM show and pirate stations in Brighton.

“Style and presence are integral to the music industry, so working on my own fashion company came quite naturally after all these years of being aware of my image and what I project with my love of trainers.” He has never thrown any of them away. “But when I was younger, I gave some or sold some to friends, so there’s some regret there.” It’s essentially a private collection – although he sometimes looks at internet forums, he never shows his own collection online. “I’m not interested in one-upmanship,” he says.

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