New Balance 550 Oreo Sale

The obvious pairing is denim: mid or dark wash straight leg jeans, a white tee, black outer layer, and the shoe ties the two ends of the outfit together. The second recipe is sharper, black tailored trousers with a clean ankle break and a white shirt, where the 550 works as a low profile alternative to a leather sneaker. This is an all day city shoe, firm underfoot but easy to wear, less suited to long distance walking. Care is simple with leather: wipe with a barely damp cloth, clean the white midsole with mild soap and a soft brush, condition twice a year, and keep it out of heavy rain.

New Balance sponsors the NBA and signed Kawhi Leonard, whose OMN1S signature shoe launched in February 2019, so the court connection is genuine. The 550's audience, though, came out of the fashion reclamation of the brand rather than out of basketball. Once normcore and then high fashion turned New Balance's plainness into a design position through the 2010s, a forgotten low top court shoe in white leather became the most useful thing in the archive. Black and white is the version with the least commentary attached, which is exactly why it became the volume seller of the model's second life.

The upper is leather led and panelled in the court manner, perforated across the toe for airflow, with a stitched block N on the side wall and black picked out against a white base so the panel breaks read as graphic lines. Underneath is a cupsole rather than a cushioned running platform, so it sits flat and firm and stable, a different proposition to the ABZORB and ENCAP midsoles New Balance uses on its runners. Leather creases across the toe box instead of fraying and keeps its shape through the midfoot. New Balance's width fittings are its oldest technical promise, and they matter here, because leather will soften but will not create volume that was not built in.