On the latest Post Malone record, “Guy for That,” Luke Combs sings, “I know a VIP up at MIT, but he still won’t let me fly the time machine.” Turns out he shouldn’t have gone to that fancy school, but instead just hit the campus at Nike, where the brand has seemingly found the keys to Marty McFly’s DeLorean. Nike is going back to yesteryear and in the midst of bringing every grail shoe back, or so people are saying.
We’ve heard rumors of the Undefeated x Air Jordan 4, Wu Tang Dunk Highs, Galaxy Foamposites, PlayStation Air Force 1s, Scarr’s x Nike Air Force 1s, and Shattered Backboard Air Jordan 1s coming back. Some of those are happening, some of those are just internet rumors. But what we do know is that the re-release of these shoes has divided the internet. Some people say bring back everything. Let holy grail shoes from 20 years ago be made in the hundreds of thousands. Drive down their coveted status and let people have them as beaters. Others, myself included in some instances, see it differently. But what if I told you that the best way to bring these shoes back isn’t to truly bring them back at all and Concepts and New Balance may have just proved that.
Some shoes are best to keep as moments in the past. Let them serve as museum pieces of sneaker culture’s yesteryear. Re-releasing them might hurt their legacy and might not hit the same two decades later.
That’s why what Concepts is doing right now is interesting. The retailer is flipping its “SEAL” colorway of the New Balance 999 from 2012 into a new 1906 and calling it the “Hours and Days.” It’s not the first time someone has done this. We’ve seen repurposed colorways for a long time. Ronnie Fieg’s taken some of his best ASICS and put them on different shoes. Nike does it all the time—SB in particular has revised shoes like the De La Soul and Tiffany Dunks.
Concepts has even re-released its own projects. We saw the “Kennedy” 999 get a Made in USA upgrade and last year the “C-Note” 998 came back. Those were more or less straight retros of the originals, save for minor tweaks. But I think this new project is even better. Here’s why.
New Balance is on one heck of a run over the past five years. The brand has been able to shift from the buzz around the 990 series to Y2K runners like the 2002R, 1906, and 860v2, almost seamlessly. But even with the increased popularity of New Balance affecting everything from its inline models to limited collaborations, it doesn’t mean that there’s also an increased interest in the brand’s niche shoes from 10 to 20 years ago. Some of those don’t quite translate to the brand’s new audience. And that’s OK. I don’t expect someone who got into New Balance through the 9060 or 550 to be into Solebox 1500s or Hanon 576s. And once again, that’s OK. Those shoes, while fundamental in creating this whole limited-edition footwear landscape that we’re in now, were so limited, geographically exclusive, and overall hard to get back then.
I also don’t expect everyone to understand the significance of a suede retro runner that the general sneaker population didn’t go googoo gaga over. Back then, if you were into these sorts of shoes, you were definitely in the sneaker-collecting minority. So a one-to-one retro of the SEAL 999 just wouldn’t hit.
First, because there are only a few people who truly want that shoe to come back. But also because the 999 silhouette just isn’t en vogue at the moment. And, for what it’s worth, it is one of the brand’s weaker 990-series shoes. There’s been a few OK collaborations on it, including the “Kennedy” from Concepts and Ronnie Fieg’s “Steel Blue,” but I just can’t see it taking off now.
But the 1906, on the other hand, is one of the best silhouettes, across all brands, on the market right now. Mesh runners from the 2000s are all the rage, and the New Balance 1906 is just a good shoe. It has a lot of panels on it, so it works well for colorways. It’s also a good switch up from the ASICS Kayanos and Gel-1130s that you see everywhere, not that either of those are bad shoes at all.
But Concepts was able to take the military-inspired theme of the “SEAL” New Balance and transfer it perfectly from silhouette to silhouette. If you’re asking me, I’d take the 1906s over the 999s any day of the week, even if I'm supposed to be an “old head” of the brand.
I’d just rather wear the 1906 more. They look fresh and perfect for summer and fall. It opens up Concepts and its archive to a whole new audience. I imagine a lot of people will have these that didn’t even know the 999s existed. And that’s fine with me. It creates a new moment while tastefully nodding to the past. New generations deserve new shoes sometimes.
Of course we want to see true classics like original Air Jordan 4s, Air Jordan 1s, and Air Maxes come back. But we don't always need every grail-level shoe to be made by the boatload two decades later. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we just want something new. Imagine if they did a “Linen” colorway of Vomero? I’d be into it.
Now I'm not saying every old colorway should be flipped into a new shoe, but if it works, it works. And this is the case for Concepts and the “Hours and Days” 1906. I guess it all depends on the, wait for it, concept.