Reebok's Most Minimal Sneaker Has Never Looked More Leathery... Or Less Reebok
Reebok's Club C sneaker is one of the all-time minimalist greats, a low-top shoe so perfectly plain that it never needed improvement. And, yet, here comes Hender Scheme to arguably improve upon flawlessness with a sumptuous all-leather remake of its own design.
Hender Scheme is a Japanese company that specializes in, if you don't mind me saying so, quirky accessories and shoes typically informed by a focus on leathercraft.
And nothing Hender Scheme does is more Hender Scheme than the Manual Industrial Products series, an ever-updating footwear collection that recontextualizes famous sneakers as bench-made, veg-tanned leather shoes.
In this case, the Reebok Club C is reimagined as an endearingly beige lump of leather, stripped of its branding and fitted with a tough outsole made of water buffalo leather. It ain't a collab, either, to be clear: this is a legally distinct Hender Scheme shoe that just so happens to look like that one sneaker.
Past entries into Hender Scheme's line include homages to New Balance's dad shoes, Clark's Wallabee, and even the LL Bean duck boots, accompanied by the occasional collaboration that retools the originals and plenty of incomparable in-line shoes, of which there are a lot, by the way.
Hender Scheme actually produces more in-line shoes than it does Manual Industrial Products. It also delivers a massive volume of bags, bits, baubles, and other ephemera each season, though it's best known in the West for its knowingly imitative shoes.
And they are indeed shoes.
Hender Scheme's take on the Reebok Club C, for instance, keeps in line with the MIP series' design cues: lasted upper, leather insole, and hard leather outsole literally nailed into place.
This allows the MIP shoes to age like any other fine leather shoe. The difference is merely that they happen to look like the world's most famous sneakers.
Allow these curios to function as your gateway to the wonderful world of Hender Scheme, where there exists leather not-Jenga sets, leather pinwheels, leather jumpropes...
