From The Muddy Banks Of The Great Gray-Green Greasy Limpopo River

All set about with fever trees

I would like to begin this week by welcoming back one of my favorite shoe color schemes of years past, the gray/white/black/dark green combo that I personally trace back to the first run of the original Kalis model on DC, released in 2000 or so.* (Try as I may, Google turns up nothing helpful and unlike certain Canadian blogs I don’t have vast expanses of frozen tundra on which to stack boxes of old sneakers into fun igloo shapes.) Basically, the upper (?) was gray, with dark green detailing; the midsole (??) was white and the bottom of the sole was black. In a time of kaleidoscopic D3 color-feasts I remember marveling at the relative subtlety of the whole deal and, upon purchase and wear, even earned a personal thumbs up from the best skateboarder in town at the time. These were charmed days to be sure.

Anyhow, I got a very bizarre but also disturbingly welcome sense of skateboard shoe deja-vu when I spied this new color of Lakai Telfords on deck for release sometime this year (below), and only a month or so later saw a pair of Adio shoes (above) in Thrasher that tapped pretty much the same palette.

Now, I thought I saw a similar color of Etnies Raps somewhere recently, which would make this color a certified trend and also certify me as a footwear trendspotter, all but assuring my escape from WordPress skid row and onto one of those street fashion websites that Lupe Fiasco or the Cool Kids name-check in their conscious-but-not-really-conscious hip-hop songs. (I assume I also would get rich at a certain point.)

*Probably the idea predates this, but I haven’t any clue at all.

Tags: Adio, DC, Etnies, Josh Kalis, Lakai, Lupe Fiasco, Rap, Telford, the blogosphere, vegetables