New Balance 9060 Light Grey White

Pale grey is the easiest colour in this shoe's range to place. Recipe one is tonal: grey sweatpants, a white tee, a light grey zip through, giving a soft top-to-toe read where the shoe's shape is the only detail. Recipe two adds contrast: black wide leg trousers with a navy overshirt, where the pale shoe lifts the bottom of the outfit. Give it width in the trouser, since the 9060 looks wrong under a slim taper. Good for city walking, travel and long days on your feet. Pale grey attracts dust and scuffs, so brush it regularly, clean with mild soap on a soft cloth and never let a mark sit until it sets.

Grey New Balance is a whole genre. The 990 family became the American dad shoe, the plain comfortable choice with no status attached, favoured by Steve Jobs and documented on Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner and Hilary Duff, and normcore then high fashion reclaimed that plainness as a design argument in the 2010s. The 9060 is the next step, an archive shape distorted for a generation that already accepted grey as fashion. New Balance made the archive-as-fashion approach official when it appointed Aime Leon Dore founder Teddy Santis creative director of Made in USA in April 2021. A light grey and white pair is the most legible version of that story you can put on your feet.

Pale grey on white is a tonal build, which puts all the emphasis on shape. The panels separate by half a shade, so the 9060's sculpted side wall, its exaggerated midsole shaping and the block N set into that shaping have to carry the design without contrast doing the work. Expect a substantial, high volume shoe, which is the inheritance of the 99x lineage and of New Balance's ENCAP philosophy, where a moulded polyurethane rim encapsulates a soft EVA core to give stability without killing shock absorption or letting the midsole compress flat. The width fittings are the brand's oldest technical promise, carried over from its arch support beginnings, and they solve most fit problems here.