‘An unseriously serious concept’: New Balance come clean on loafergate

We are currently experiencing an image overload. We as humans were never meant to see this many images. Over 3.2 billion of them are shared daily on social media, and the sheer glut of them often means they go in one eye and out the other. Every so often, however, an image will stick. In the month of April 2024, that image was of a pair of shoes. You’ve definitely seen said shoes on your timeline by now: a silver and white sneaker loafer hybrid, with the sporting feel of a trainer but the shape of a formal slip-on. The mesh upper is complemented by silver go-faster stripes and a small ‘N’ logo plate, while the slot and whale’s tail detailing you might find on a loafer are also present. This is the New Balance 1906L, the main character in a war we’ve christened ‘loafergate’.

While the online reaction continues to brew, two people who’ve remained relatively calm in the fray are Charlotte Free and Lani Perry. As New Balance’s senior designer and senior product manager respectively, Free and Perry have been instrumental in the shoe’s development and design. Though the 1906L’s viral infamy might seem like an overnight occurrence, the snoafer has been in development for a while. “We presented the initial concept and had conversations around the model in June 2022,” says Free, before actual development of the shoe began in 2023. “There has been a shift towards formal wear but simultaneously a demand for comfort,” Perry adds, speaking of the 1906L’s unique form, “and this shoe combines those worlds perfectly.”

Though both Free and Perry now acknowledge the “widespread polarising reaction” that has taken place over the last couple of weeks, expectations from within the New Balance design team never accounted for this level of hysteria. “We anticipated it would cause a conversation externally, but we couldn’t have predicted the scale of the reaction,” says Free, before adding that, “the memes have been the ultimate compliment.”

Though it may mean a lot to see your own design work reproduced across the internet in this way, the reaction makes you wonder if the design team have always been in on the joke. “We knew from the offset that this would be an unseriously serious concept,” says Free on the matter. “New Balance has always had a sense of humour and isn’t scared to poke fun at itself.” What makes the sneakers so polarising is that their design intention is so shrouded in layers of irony that you can’t actually tell if they’re “serious” or not, which makes sense why the design team would label them “unseriously serious”. New Balance is the ultimate dad sneaker brand, so of course the label would take that moniker seriously and create a shoe that could be worn by that target market, while at the same time creating something that works for the irony-pilled internet age.

Though the images only dropped online this month, eagle-eyed fashion people immediately noticed that the same silhouette debuted in January at Paris Fashion Week Men’s, during the Junya Watanabe men’s show. “Junya has been a great partner for several years and the shoe felt right for his aesthetic,” said Perry of the link-up. “When the team was shown the shoe, they loved it and we knew instantly it was the right fit.” At the AW24 shoe, the loafers appeared on the catwalk in separate black and white iterations, and though there was some press coverage then, it paled in comparison to the reaction we’re seeing now.

That reaction to the snoafers has primarily come from a community of millennial sneaker bros. Though the silver and white version is obviously a lot more conspicuous than the ones seen at the Junya show, the difference in reactions speaks to how comfortable fashion people are with “ugly” trainers, versus the average sneaker bro. In capital-f “Fashion”, the Overton Window for ugliness of trainers has expanded exponentially – just look at Chopova Lowena’s Marta Mary Janes, Kiko Kostadinov’s multiple Asics collabs, or Noir Kei Ninomiya’s take on the Reebok Instapump Fury. In comparison to these trainers, the New Balance 1906L’s aren’t that crazy looking – maybe even tame, when laid side by side. My advice to the sneaker bros frothing at the mouth at loafergate? Try ‘em on for size! Who knows – you might end up loving their ugliness after all.