Nike’s Obscure Hiking Boot Wasn’t Supposed To Be Cool. Then Came Stüssy
The Nike Baltoro was never meant to be cool. But leave it to Stüssy to take the long-lost hiking boot best known for summiting mountain trails to a new kind of peak.
Once intended purely for function, the Baltoro boot is now subject to the sort of archive rescue only Stüssy could pull off.
This is Stüssy’s playbook in motion. The brand has a habit of digging through Nike’s archives, pulling out silhouettes everyone else forgot and making them feel essential again. We’ve seen it with the Spiridon Cage 2, which Stüssy turned into the beautifully textured “Fossil” sneaker, and the Air Max 2013, which it somehow gave psychic powers.
The Himalayan-named Baltoro shoe is next in line, a 1990 hiking boot that hasn’t seen daylight since a short-lived 2005 retro.
The reborn Baltoro trims down its high, ankle-gripping ancestor into a sleeker, more wearable shape in four handsome colorways — orange, black, brown, and tan — each playing with texture, like sturdy canvas and shaggy hairy suede.
And though its more than welcome of scaling the Himalayas, Stüssy keeps Nike's Baltoro boot closer to home. The accompanying campaign sets the collaborative boot in the everyday, somewhere between workwear and techwear, practical and understated.
Releasing on October 10 via Nike’s website, the boot is accompanied by Nike x Stüssy co-branded fleece, wind pants, heavyweight sweats, shorts, and winter camo jackets.
The whole capsule is less about performance than modernized proportion.
You can see it in how the limited-edition clothes all look lived-in, not over-styled. It's only further proof that Stüssy’s real skill is making what people already wear, just better.
That’s what keeps Stüssy so good after four decades, this plainly cool approach to easygoing wearables with a palpable air of coolness.
The Baltoro might be born from the mountains, but Stüssy’s version feels like it was always meant for the city.
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