New Balance 204l Pastel Pack - Pink

Part of the 204L line. This release has a suede upper. The 204L is New Balance building a lifestyle shoe from scratch rather than pulling one out of the archive, which is rarer for this brand than people assume. Most of its famous silhouettes are running shoes that got adopted for other reasons. The 204L starts from the adoption, a low, soft, everyday shape designed for walking and standing and being seen, with the block N side wall doing the work of identification. The Pastel Pack pushes it somewhere the brand's grey reputation rarely goes. Pink here is chalky and muted rather than bright, the same faded register the 99x archive lives in, applied to a shoe with no archive of its own to be faithful to.