A Techy Trail Sneaker Indigo-Dyed Like Denim
3sixteen is treating Saucony’s high-tech trail sneaker, the Peregrine 15, as if it were a pair of the brand’s signature artisanal jeans.
At the Green Matters Natural Dye Company, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer using natural dyes at an industrial scale, Saucony and 3sixteen’s white trail sneaker gets dunked in GOTS-certified natural indigo.
Once hand-dyed, the plain shoe adopts a dark indigo patina normally reserved for denim. It’s not all perfectly uniformed, some fabrics take to the dye more easily and small color inconsistencies pop up, but such is the beauty of anything dyed by hand.
Denim is 3sixteen’s specialty (the brand’s jeans use custom-woven denim produced by specialist mills in Japan), so an indigo-dyed pair of sneakers speaks to its roots. However, the rest of the 3sixteen x Saucony shoes each present a different approach.
There are four sneakers in total. The collection includes a dark grey pair, the most muted of the lot, produced using a combination of cutch, iron, and chestnut, while a sunflower-dyed sneaker presents a pastel yellow hue and the “rubia” version combines shades of purple with a panel of light orange.
On July 10, the indigo and sunflower colorways will release via 3sixteen for $190. Only 400 pairs of the hand-dyed shoes have been produced in total.
A week later, on July 17, a natural, undyed 3sixteen x Saucony sneaker is released. But that shoe isn’t designed to remain as is, 3sixteen specially picked its fabrics to absorb natural dyes. It’s a blank canvas, waiting to be dipped in natural dye.
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