Sauce after Sambas

Low-profile slapper sneakers for tha ladies. Plus, a mellow new unisex L.A. line & more

Welcome to Concorde, a bimonthly edition of the sletter where Erin takes the lead. You could call it a women’s vertical, but the insights, intel and “cute swag information” transcend gender.

The full Concorde archive lives here…

What sneakers should cool ladies wear these days? For the past few months, friends and readers have been asking me to tackle this question. Inquiring minds want to know, e.g., whether Sambas are totally torched and, if so, what’s next??

My short answer has been that there are no cool “women’s” sneakers !! For the past few years the pairs I’ve worn most are men’s — New Balance 991s, secondhand Mizuno Wave Rider 12s, old tabi-toe Nike Air Rifts… This is largely because shoe companies still take a played-out “shrink it and pink it” approach to women’s designs, which results in insipidly “feminized” color choices and other weird embellishments and modifications that are… not up my alley.

When I interviewed Sandy Liang for the sletter, she told me that this wack dynamic played a big role in motivating her to start designing in the first place: “I looked at the women’s fleeces on the market and they all sucked. They were, like, mauve and ‘shapely.’ I was like, What’s up with that? Why do I need to be ‘sexy’ when I’m hiking?” I feel the same way about sneakers.

With all that in mind, today I’m dropping some very dope post-Samba sneakers that the Concorde Hot Lady Army should have on their radars right now (with a couple unisex joints for the fellas), and I’ll analyze how SHAPES are SHIFTING.

ALSO we’ve got:

• a new unisex clothing line out of L.A. making easy, breezy mix-n-match sets

• a Personal Spyplane Q about plus-size slappers… answered

LET’S GET TO IT —