The Stan Smith Returns

The Superstar took 2015. Everyone wanted it, myself included. But it overshadowed something that had owned the year before—the Stan Smith in clean white with green accents. One moment it was everywhere, people obsessed over it, the next everyone wanted something else. The Stan Smith just vanished.

The Stan Smith is such a simple thing. Leather, two stripes, a line of perforations on the sides. Nothing fancy. It’s the kind of shoe that makes sense whether you’re into fashion or not. White with green on the heel—it’s almost austere. That’s exactly why it works. It doesn’t try to convince you with complexity.

White Mountaineering still believes in that kind of minimalism. Their answer to all the color and chaos is to bring back the Stan Smith—pure white, clean, plain. There’s something almost religious about how they present it. Like it’s offering an answer to the noise.

Mid-May it should be back in stores. And maybe somewhere in all that Superstar madness—the colors, the variations, the endless hype—some people will remember that summer when the Stan Smith was it. Maybe they’ll skip all that and go back to something quieter, something that doesn’t try so hard.