White Mountaineering's footwear collaborations are far too difficult to collate in a brief list: the Japanese label has teamed with at a quarter-dozen different shoe brands over the past several years and that's not even including its many, many other apparel and accessory partnerships. Of all those, however, White Mountaineering's Fall/Winter 2022 UGGs collab might be its best yet.
Not to speak ill of the other White Mountaineering shoe designs, though. The brand has created special sneakers with adidas, Mizuno, and Saucony that are all pretty nifty on their own, and even its previous UGG team-ups were solid enough.
There've been floral-printed espadrilles (!) and zippered iterations of UGGs' signature fleece slip-on boot, to name but a few, merging the WM x UGG love across seasons and temperatures.
FW22's White Mountaineering UGGs, dropping September 24 on UGG Japan's website and the White Mountaineering web store, are easily the most transformative link-up to date and, in my humble opinion, are thus the pair's finest meeting of the minds to date, despite comprising only two different silhouettes.
Still, compared to the UGG boots and sandals we're more familiar with, they're borderline unrecognizable as UGGs, and I mean that in a good way.
The first is a tall leather boot with front-zip closure, a style akin to those issued for previous White Mountaineering x UGG endeavors.
Unlike previous editions, however, these boots are finished with a minimalist grain leather exterior free from extraneous paneling and slimmed down to create a sleek profile, making these arguably the duo's most stylish boots to date.
Then, there's a pair of chunky sneakers that borrow some of the cues from previous beefy shoes devised by White Mountaineering and UGG but elevate them with a more stylish platform sole, again minimizing the color palette down to monochrome shades.
Both shoes are quite handsome, demonstrative of White Mountaineering's solid grasp of design fundamentals.
One you know what you're doing, you can apply it to nearly anything, as White Mountaineering has demonstrated with Briefing bags, Gramicci pants, GORE-TEX coats, and, obviously, UGG shoes.
