Image via New Balance
Releasing a brand new lifestyle sneaker is no easy feat. Doing so with a collaborative partner that is green in the footwear space is doubly challenging. Not only are you dealing with a consumer that’s conditioned to favor familiar retro designs, but you also miss out on some of the built-in hype that accompanies teaming up with an established brand. Add in the hurdles of working through a global pandemic, relying solely on digital mock-ups and Zoom calls, and the task becomes an entirely different beast. Together, New Balance and Casablanca have not only been able to thrive in the face of all of this, but they created one of the best new sneakers of 2020, one that caught on in both the footwear and style spaces. And it looks like they’re about to do it again.
A unabashed sequel to 2020’s aforementioned 327 model, the XC-72 is the latest design from New Balance footwear designer Charlotte Lee. Having previously honed her skills working exclusively on women’s and kid’s lifestyle shoes for the brand, the UK-based Lee began in 2019 a new role with a focus on new concepts for the global market. A seven-year vet at New Balance, Lee has had a hand in numerous models from 2014 onward, but it’s the 1970s-inspired 327 that really put her in the spotlight. She’s also the designer behind the New Balance 237, a stripped-down version of the same ‘70s style concept that’s seen collaborations with stores like size? and Sneakersnstuff.
Although he first found footing in the design world as co-founder of Pigalle—a high-profile brand in its own right—Charaf Tajer’s Casablanca label started around the same time Lee took on her new role. Casablanca was founded in 2018 and quickly became something of a fashion week favorite, earning a LVMH Prize finalist spot in 2020 and gaining cred amongst sneaker enthusiasts with its New Balance collaboration. The brand’s elegant-but-leisurely aesthetic combines prints and patterns inspired by Tajer’s French-Moroccan heritage with themes from the tennis court. This attitude is conveyed on its work with New Balance, which in just a little over a year has already produced just shy of ten different sneakers.
The Casablanca x New Balance XC-72 picks up where their previous work left off, but turns things up with energetic colors and a sports car theme fit for the aggressive new design. The grass court-apropos white, green, and orange colorway returns, and there’s also a fresh red-and-yellow-based makeup to change things up.
“The orange and green colorway was a direct reference and nod to our debut 327 release,” Tajer says. “It’s become synonymous with the partnership, and we wanted to reimagine the feeling of the original pairs with this new silhouette. As for the yellow and red colorway, this was heavily inspired by luxury sports cars. When working on the shoe, we imagined it as the ‘sports car for your feet’ and that really led the execution, even down to the black rubber outsole representing car tires.”
It turns out the luxury sports car inspiration was a touchpoint for Lee’s original design too.
“I actually messaged [Casablanca art director] Steve Grimes and I was like, ‘Hey, was that intentional?’” Lee says. “Because my initial inspiration for XC-72 also came from a sports car, completely different. Completely different car, completely different references. I said, ‘Did you see my mood board at the beginning early days?’”
Lee’s automobile inspiration, coupled with reimagining heritage New Balance models from the ‘70s and ‘80s, was the Lancia Stratos HF Zero—also a product of that era. Lee says the HF Zero’s angular, aggressive design played a big role in what became the XC-72 sneaker. She was also inspired by a vintage New Balance shoe called the Gator, a running-informed turf shoe with spikes (described in press materials as multi-dimensional pyramids) said to be suitable for football, lacrosse, soccer, and softball training. This jagged traction pattern served as the basis for the XC-72’s outsole, a split design which combines tire-like teeth with a more traditional circular pattern reminiscent of the 327 and breaks it up with a chevron-covered center stripe.
“I was trying to imagine myself in a design studio for New Balance in the ‘70s and I had those sole treads around me, would I cut them and slice them and mash them together, to form one shoe?” Lee says. “I was really surprised, I thought I was going to have to take it off. I thought it was going to be too wild, but I think because they’re similar proportions, they’re the same height, they’re a similar size, it works.”
Like the 327, the XC-72 is a unisex sneaker, although Lee feels that she landed on a design that has a slightly more masculine edge than its predecessor. “The initial intention was to make it feel more progressive,” she says. “It needed to have a slightly different, not gender, I don’t want to use the gender, but slightly different feel to it. In the sense that a different type of person would lean towards this, depending on their styling and their preferences.”
Tajer says Casablanca tackled the XC-72 with a similar approach, referencing themes from the brand’s work on the 327, but emphasizing the different elements on the new model. “We really believe the recipe of combining the soft suede with the perforated leather really gives the shoe a feeling of it being the luxury sports sneaker,” Tajer says. “It has a nostalgic feeling whilst still being brand new.”
The two debut colorways of the Casablanca x New Balance XC-72, which are available starting today from casablancaparis.com for €160 and will launch globally tomorrow for $150 USD, mark the seventh and eighth releases from the collaboration since its first drop in Spring 2020. It’s not often that a footwear company will put this much faith into a relatively new brand in such a short span of time, but it’s clear that Casablanca and New Balance have a special relationship.
“New Balance have really allowed us to be free to tell our story through our collaboration, and also giving us a unique opportunity to develop and work on brand new models is an amazing design challenge,” Tajer says. “It’s quite rare for brands to debut brand new models, and it’s amazing to be a part of that shoe’s journey from the very beginning.”
Lee is similarly appreciative of what Casablanca brings to the table. “They definitely bring a completely different view to my work,” she says. “Which I find really refreshing because I think it’s really easy to get caught in the motions and keep on coming up with colorways that look quite similar or they’re all grounded in the New Balance DNA, or they’re grounded in the era or whatever.”
