To No One's Surprise, Function Is Fashion
Merrell is known for useful hiking shoes. Snow Peak is admittedly quite aesthetic but its focus is ostensibly on all-purpose camp gear. And yet, these two utilitarian makers just keep turning out supremely stylish sneakers.
Snow Peak's Moab Speed 2 shoe, which released in April, and MTL Long Sky 2 Matryx, which release in August, are singularly indicative of this strain of good taste.
It's just that you don't come to these companies for stylishness, necessarily; you instead expect them to turn out reliable performance.
Certainly, stylishness is hardly outside of either company's wheelhouse. Merrell, especially its 1TRL sublabel, consistently dishes nifty footwear that culture comes around on only years later — it's about time that the Jungle Moc got its due. And Snow Peak is Snow Peak. No one makes cooler cups or carryalls.
But it bears repeating that when these two imprints tackle a trail shoe, you'd expect the result to be quite quotidian.
Not all Merrell collaborations are made equal, after all, and it'd hardly be all that surprising if Snow Peak opted for something more useful than slick.
And yet it managed to walk that line not once but twice.
The Moab Speed 2 shoe was a smart grey chunkster that makes the most of its tonal colorway to highlight a modestly chunky form. And the MTL Long Sky 2 Matryx is a tastefully streamlined trail shoe too good to be relegated solely to exercise. Not bad for a shoe emblazoned with giant all-caps branding on both sides (Agility Peak 5 next?).
"Function as fashion" is one of the industry's great cliches, a bemused acknowledgment of the fact that, actually, practical stuff can also look kinda cool. So it's about time we simply point out that Salomon and Merrell's anti-hype sneaker collaborations, available on Merrell's website, are just straight-up good stuff.
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