Reebok‘s Avatar: The Last Airbender pack arrived on Wednesday with three shoes that each wear a character. The Instapump Fury 94 goes out as Aang, the Club C 85 grows fur for Appa, and the Engine A 26 glows in the dark. The fourth and last pair lands Thursday and it does the opposite. The Classic Nylon is the plainest shoe in the set, a tan suede and mesh runner that says almost nothing about the show until the wearer decides what it should say.
The Classic Nylon is Reebok’s other heritage runner, the one that has always lived a step behind the Classic Leather and sold steadily anyway. Reebok has never settled on one origin year for it. The brand currently sells a Classic Nylon 89 whose own product copy describes it as drawn from the 1980s archives, it has previously sold a Classic Nylon 91, and retailers have dated the first pair as early as 1987. What is not in dispute is the shape, a low nylon and suede running upper over an EVA wedge, built in an era when a nylon panel was a weight-saving measure rather than a texture.
Reebok also still sells the plain version in more than a dozen makeups across men’s, women’s, big kids, little kids and toddler sizing. So this is not a retro being brought back. It is a shoe that never left, and that changes what a collaboration on it has to do, because there is no novelty in the silhouette itself to trade on.
Reebok’s own description of the Avatar pair lists suede, leather and mesh, a soft EVA midsole, four different tongue patches, four sets of laces, and custom packaging. The colorway is given as tan, tan and brown, and the photographs bear that out. The upper is close to a single sand tone across the suede and the mesh, the Vector is tonal rather than contrasting, and the only real colour break is the brown gum outsole.
The parts are where it gets interesting. The press shot of the full package shows the shoe beside a crate-style box with four round badges and four sets of laces laid out in front of it, in blue, green, orange and pale yellow. Avatar has four nations and those are their colours, and Reebok’s copy stops short of saying so. The sockliner is where the show actually gets printed. One insole carries a tonal Avatar wordmark and the other a full-colour character panel, so the loudest graphic in the shoe is the one nobody sees once a foot is in it.
What Reebok has not said is how the patches attach. Nothing in the product copy names a hook-and-loop backing, a stud or a slot, and none of the published photographs show the reverse of a badge or a bare tongue. For a shoe whose whole pitch is that you change the parts, the mechanism is the one detail still missing.
The other three shoes in this pack are costumes and they work as costumes. A furry Club C reads as Appa from across a room. This one is a blank, and a blank is a different bet. Reebok is wagering that a licensed shoe people wear twice is worth less than a licensed shoe people wear all autumn, and that the way to get the second one is to make the licence removable.
That bet is not obviously right. Interchangeable parts have a long record of being used exactly once, on the day the box is opened, and then living in a drawer. What makes this version more plausible than most is that the shoe underneath is already a shoe somebody would buy without the licence. Strip every patch off and it is still a tan Classic Nylon. None of the other three in the pack survive that test.
Retail is $110. Reebok is selling the standard women’s Classic Nylon at $65 today and the Classic Nylon 89 at $90, so the licence and the extra parts add somewhere between twenty and forty-five dollars to the base. Inside the pack itself it is the entry point by a distance, with the Club C 85 at $120, the Engine A 26 at $140 and the Instapump Fury 94 at $220. The cheapest shoe in the collection is also the one with the most in the box, which is an unusual way round for a licensed pack.
The Reebok x Avatar Classic Nylon releases Thursday, October 8 at 10:00 AM ET on reebok.com, in tan, tan and brown, style 100266857, at $110. The product page is live now and carries the October 8 badge. Sizing is unisex and starts at a men’s 3.5, and the four tongue patches, four sets of laces and the custom box are included rather than sold separately.
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