Converse and Palmes are releasing the Jack Purcell PDM on September 14 in two colorways, “Mountain View” in faded green canvas and “Parisian Night” in navy suede, at $100 a pair. The interesting part is not the collaboration, which reads exactly as you would expect a Copenhagen tennis label and a 1930s court shoe to read together. It is that Converse rebuilt the shoe against its own archive rather than printing a logo on the existing one, and then priced the result like a general release.
The Jack Purcell has been in production since the 1930s, and it has spent the decades since drifting between actual sport and everyday wear without ever fully committing to either. That ambiguity is the whole appeal. It is a court shoe with a blunt rubber toe bumper, the “smile,” and a shape flat enough to disappear under a suit trouser or a cuffed jean. Converse has been feeding the model back through its First String program, which is where the brand does its archive work, and this project sits in that lane rather than in the novelty lane. The Chuck Taylor gets the big-swing collaborations and the color-drop calendar. The Jack Purcell gets the quieter ones, and it tends to get the better ones, because the shoe does not need much done to it. This is reported as the first shoe Palmes has made with Converse, and starting with the Purcell rather than the Chuck is a choice that tells you what the label thinks it is.
What Converse calls the PDM is a rebuild rather than a reissue. The upper pattern and collar line have been remastered, the toe cap reshaped against early references, and the smile returns with an updated rubber inlay. The friction tape around the toe is thickened to 2.5mm. The laces are vintage-weave cotton at 8mm, run through new domed eyelets and finished with a heat-seal aglet. Underfoot is an archive slab rubber outsole carrying the 1970s Script and Wedge plug logo, over a comfort-pack sockliner with molded arch support printed with a 1970s-inspired graphic, on an updated last. Parisian Night is built in suede chosen to soften and show wear rather than stay pristine, with white contrast stitching, a blue smile, a leather collar edge, off-white canvas heel webbing pulled from a 1930s pair in the Converse archive, and a light blue and red outsole left exactly as it was on that archival model. Mountain View uses canvas dyed to look pre-worn in a green Palmes founder Nikolaj Hansson treats as central to the label. Both carry Palmes’ abstract tennis-ball mark chain-stitched at the heel and the Palmes name printed on the license plate wedge.
Palmes launched in Copenhagen in 2021, named for jeu de paume, the French handball game that predates the racquet. Hansson has said the Jack Purcell earned the slot because it moves between prep and punk without belonging to either, which is the same argument the shoe has been making on its own since the 1930s. The useful read here is what Converse chose to spend the money on. Everything on the list above is invisible from three feet away. Nobody is buying a shoe because the friction tape went from whatever it was to 2.5mm, and a heat-seal aglet does not photograph. Converse spent its budget on construction and materials instead of on graphics, which is the opposite of how most archive projects get built, and it is why this pair will still look right in three years when the collaboration itself is forgotten.
The price makes the same point. A general-release Chuck Taylor All Star Canvas is $65 on converse.com today, so the Palmes Purcell asks a $35 premium over the cheapest thing Converse sells, and returns a rebuilt last, an archive outsole, suede or dyed canvas, period-correct hardware, and two sets of custom branding for it. Plenty of collaborations ask more than that for a printed panel and a hangtag. Against the rest of Converse’s collaborative shelf, including the Tyler, the Creator Pro Leather and the long-running Comme des Garçons PLAY Chuck 70, that is a restrained number for the amount of work done.
The Converse Jack Purcell PDM x Palmes releases September 14 in “Mountain View” and “Parisian Night” at $100 each, through Converse, Palmes, and select retail partners. Style codes have been reported as A24756C for Mountain View and A24786C for Parisian Night, though Converse has not published them and neither pair is live on converse.com yet.
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