Camo for People Who’ve Never Seen a Forest

The NMD was one of those sneakers that made 2016 feel like something was actually happening in shoe design—even if what was happening was mostly Adidas figuring out that Boost, the foam they’d developed for running shoes, felt extraordinary when dropped under a lifestyle silhouette. The XR1 sits at the stranger end of the NMD family, with a plastic cage over the midfoot that reads somewhere between protective equipment and deliberate design choice. It looks built for conditions that don’t exist, which is exactly the aesthetic the streetwear market has been chasing for years.

The Camo Pack put five colorways—black, white, pink, blue, olive—through a camouflage treatment that does what camo always does when it migrates from military use into fashion: it makes the pattern completely visible. Real camouflage disappears into its environment. Camouflage on a sneaker is a graphic, a texture, a signal that implies something about the person wearing it without committing to what that something is. On the NMD XR1 it reads well, mostly because the shoe already has that off-grid quality—the waxed suede heel cap and the EVA midsole inserts referencing archive running shoes that nobody born after 1985 has ever actually worn for running.

These dropped on Black Friday 2016, which was itself a statement about what Black Friday had become: not a day for discounts but a day for releases, where scarcity was the marketing and the queue outside the store was the product. I don’t think I owned a pair. I remember wanting one.