New Balance 550 La Rams

Released on 6 April 2023 and part of New Balance's 550 line. This release has a leather upper in White/Honeycomb/Heritage Blue. This is a city colourway before it is anything else, a 550 dressed in the blue and gold register that Los Angeles football has made recognisable, and the code BB550NCG puts it squarely in the brand's basketball line where the BB prefix lives. The 550 is the flat, court derived silhouette in this catalogue, the shape that gives New Balance a foothold in a language it does not usually speak, since its own history is orthopaedic and athletic rather than courtside: an arch support company founded outside Boston in 1906, then the Trackster in 1960, then decades of running. A team coded makeup on that shape is the brand borrowing a civic palette rather than claiming a hometown, and it works because the silhouette is plain enough to carry it.