New Balance 1890A “Cowprint” Is a Shoe Where the Pelt Is the Only Variable

New Balance has now put four colorways on the 1890A and not one of them changes the shoe. The sole is the same, the last is the same, the moccasin upper is the same. What changes is the animal. There was a snakeskin in July and there is a cow in this one, and since nothing else moves, the pelt is the product.

Sort out the model names first, because there are three of them and they are not interchangeable. The ABZORB 1890 is the parent, and it is the only one New Balance has ever announced. Its press release went out in February and the shoe launched globally on March 12 at $180, built from the original 2002 sole unit with full-length SBS ABZORB cushioning under a no-sew wave cutout upper referencing the 890v3. Lead designer James Lee is quoted in it. The campaign was shot in Wolmido, in Incheon.

The 1890A is not that shoe. It keeps the sole and replaces almost everything above it with a moccasin build, a pronounced lip around the toe, moccasin lacing and a bound edge through the forefoot. There is also an 1890P, which swaps the forefoot overlay for a molded plastic cage. Three shoes on one platform, distinguished by single letters, and New Balance has issued no press release for either derivative. Nobody has been able to say what the A stands for in the eight months it has been out.

That gap is the interesting part. The parent got the full treatment: a named lead designer, a stated technology story, a campaign photographer, a media contact. The two shoes actually doing the experimenting got seeded instead, through Paris Fashion Week in June last year and through a Comme des Garçons Homme version aimed at Dover Street Market. New Balance is running its riskiest product through fashion channels and its safest product through the press box, which tells you which audience it thinks each one is for.

Cowprint is not the shoe’s name either. The colorway is officially Beige and Black, and Cowprint is a nickname the release sites attached, the same way the July pair is called Snakeskin when its colorway reads Morel and Black. Worth saying plainly, because it also means there is no animal pack. The other two 1890A colorways this year are a Dark Knight and a Pink, neither of which has a hide on it. What exists is a recurring material habit, not a programme, and calling it a pack would be inventing something New Balance has not done.

Step back and the letters make more sense as a business than as a design language. New Balance has spent two years building a product family around ABZORB, its compression-resistant cushioning compound from 1993, rather than around any single silhouette. The ABZORB 2010 and 2000 arrived in 2025, the 1890 this March, and each of them recombines archive tooling with a new upper. The 1890A and the 1890P are that method applied one level down, inside a model that is itself only six months old. It is a parts-bin approach running at speed, and the animal prints are what makes a fast-moving platform look like distinct shoes on a shelf.

What is actually on it is less settled than it should be for a shoe this simple. One outlet describes an off-white suede base with white rope laces and black through the midsole and outsole. Another describes white nappy suede with brown laces and brown soles, and specifies the fur as faux. Those are not two descriptions of the same shoe, and neither is New Balance, which has published nothing. If the fur matters to you, wait until somebody has a pair.

Retail is reported at $190, matching the Snakeskin and sitting ten dollars above both the 1890A Pink and the parent ABZORB 1890. For a shoe that reuses a sole unit New Balance first built for the 2002, that is a firm number, and it is the same band the brand charges for its Made in USA line. The 1890A is not made in the United States.

Style code is reported as U18906M2, carried by a single outlet and unconfirmed anywhere else. The release date is genuinely unsettled: one site gave September 16, another said Holiday 2026 with no date at all, and no follow-up has appeared either way. Distribution is newbalance.com and unnamed select retailers, which is the only phrase any source offers. Nobody has published a real stockist, so treat the whole listing as reporting rather than fact.

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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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