Nahmias Crocheted the PUMA Suede’s Formstrip, Which Is the One Part Nobody Touches

PUMA has the second Nahmias Suede up for pre-order, and the Los Angeles label has gone after the one piece of the shoe that usually survives a collaboration untouched. The Formstrip is no longer suede. It is a thick crocheted cord, stitched flat against the panel and standing proud of it, in gold on a Bluemazing pair and in sand on an Espresso Bean one. PUMA has not announced a release date, which makes the pre-order the only confirmed way in so far.

The Suede matters to PUMA the way the Stan Smith matters to adidas, which is to say the shape is ordinary and the mark on it is everything. It arrived in 1968 as a basketball shoe, and almost nothing about the construction was remarkable even then. A flat suede upper, a gum outsole, a thin foam collar. What made it legible from across a room is the Formstrip, the curved band running from the midsole up toward the laces, which started life as a structural overlay holding the quarter panel together and ended up as the brand’s signature. The shoe found its real audience on New York sidewalks in the seventies and eighties, where B-boys wore it with fat laces and no socks, and the Formstrip became the thing you recognized before you were close enough to read any logo. PUMA has spent the last two years testing how far that mark can be pushed, and this is the furthest it has gone. Changing the Formstrip is not like changing a colorway, because the Formstrip is the only reason a Suede is identifiable at a glance.

What the photography shows is more specific than PUMA’s copy, which describes a crochet upper. The upper is suede. The crochet is the Formstrip, and it reads clearly as handwork, a chunky looped stitch with visible rows, raised well above the nap around it. On the Bluemazing pair that cord is a saturated gold set against royal blue, with a lighter blue toe overlay and a lighter blue collar breaking the panel into three tones. The Espresso Bean pair runs almost entirely dark brown with a sand cord, and it swaps the cream midsole for a tonal brown one, so the contrast lives only in the Formstrip and the laces. Both pairs ship with thick braided rope laces rather than flat cotton. NAHMIAS SUEDE sits on the lateral quarter, printed in red on the blue pair and debossed tonally on the brown. The footbed carries a PUMA cat beside a co-branded NAHMIAS lockup, and the gum outsole is standard Suede tooling underneath.

The interesting part is how narrow the edit is. PUMA’s Suede program this year has worked by changing exactly one element at a time and leaving the rest alone. Daniëlle Cathari wrapped the Formstrip all the way around the shoe. The Suede Bloom threaded beads through the laces and left everything else stock. Nahmias is the first to take both at once, changing the Formstrip and the lacing in the same pair, and it is still a restrained shoe. Nothing moved on the last, the outsole or the collar height. That is a meaningful discipline for a luxury menswear label, which is the category most likely to add a platform sole and call it a reinterpretation. It also tells you PUMA is confident the Suede can carry texture work without being redrawn.

Pre-order sits at $160, which is a real step above a standard Suede and well under where most designer collaborations on a heritage silhouette land. For a hand-finished cord and custom laces on an otherwise stock shoe, that figure is defensible rather than generous. The first Nahmias wave opened in February on a separate article run, which makes this the second time the two have put a Suede out together, so the partnership now reads as a program rather than a one-off capsule. That matters more than it sounds. A label that gets a second wave has usually sold through the first one, and PUMA has not been shy about quietly retiring collaborations that did not. What is harder to call is how this one behaves after release, because a crocheted Formstrip is difficult to photograph well and shoes that need to be seen in person tend to sit online before they disappear. Anyone deciding from a product grid is going to undersell what the cord actually looks like.

The PUMA x Nahmias Suede Crochet arrives in Bluemazing and Yellow Sizzle and in Espresso Bean and Burnt Sand under article number 411522, priced at $160. PUMA has not confirmed a release date, and the shoe is listed as pre-order on PUMA’s own product page, which is the only confirmed stockist at the time of writing. Both colorways also appear on PUMA’s launch calendar.

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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