On and LOEWE have bolted a lugged outsole onto a midsole built almost entirely out of holes, and the result goes on sale October 15. The Cloudsolo Hiker is the clearest move this partnership has made toward ground rougher than a sidewalk, and it keeps the one feature a trail shoe would normally engineer out. The cavities stay open. Everything LOEWE added sits above them, in metal, and that is where the shoe makes its case.
On has been selling the same idea since it started in the Swiss Alps in 2010. CloudTec puts a row of hollow rubber pods under the foot, they collapse on impact, and the brand has never buried them behind a foam wall the way most of its competitors would. That geometry was solved for roads. Open voids turn into a liability the moment the ground stops being flat, because anything smaller than the cavity goes straight in and stays there. It is the single least likely starting point for a hiking shoe in the industry, which is what makes the attempt worth reading about.
The Cloudsolo is On’s softer lifestyle shape rather than a racing tool, and the LOEWE partnership has spent its life on road-shaped platforms, with the Cloudtilt as the silhouette the capsules keep returning to. The Hiker steps out of that. It is not a new sole unit wearing a luxury badge, it is an existing On shape handed the vocabulary of a hiking boot, and every part LOEWE added is borrowed from one. Boots are a well-defined object. Any rework has to answer which of those parts were load-bearing and which were only ever decoration.
The upper is a tight twill nylon with a rubber toe cap wrapping the front, LOEWE debossed into the side of it, and On’s logo on the heel panel above the words Swiss Engineering. The lacing is the part that was actually redesigned. Four pairs of metal D-rings stand in for eyelets, the laces are rounded and run two tones, and a metal clip rides at the midfoot to lock them off, which On describes as a co-branded metallic buckle. A pull loop stands up off the heel. None of that is unusual on a boot, and all of it is unusual on an On.
Underneath, the cloud heel keeps its cavities open and the lugs are deep and squared off, far closer to a trail outsole than to anything On puts on a road shoe. The detail the press copy leaves out is that the lug color shifts with the upper and never matches it. The sand pair runs mint green through the lugs. The dark khaki pair runs blue. Both uppers are tonal and deliberately quiet, so on each shoe the only loud color in the build is the part aimed at the ground.
Luxury houses have been buying performance silhouettes for years, and the standard move is to leave the engineering alone and upgrade the leather. This does close to the opposite. The sole unit and its cavities are untouched, and the intervention lands entirely in hardware, which is the cheapest region of a shoe to change and the part a wearer actually handles. Whether that reads as restraint or as a missed opportunity depends on what the shoe is for, and the campaign answers that plainly. Neither brand photographed this on a mountain. They put it on artists in their own studios, with Joan Jonas, Martine Syms and Tarek Atoui shot by Rosie Marks moving between their workshops and the landscapes that feed them. The hiking codes are codes. This is a shoe for a city that happens to have weather, and the lugs are there to say so.
On has published no retail figure. The number that has followed the shoe since it first surfaced in early October is $890, and it is worth separating the two things that buys. The platform underneath is the same CloudTec construction On sells in its own stores for a small fraction of it, and the Cloudsurfer 3 and the FKA twigs Cloudmonster 3 Mule both sit in a different pricing universe. What the premium covers is LOEWE’s hardware, a heavily finished upper, and the house’s own distribution. Anyone weighing this against an in-line On is not comparing like with like, and anyone weighing it against LOEWE’s existing sneakers will find the gap a good deal smaller.
The LOEWE and On Cloudsolo Hiker arrives October 15 at LOEWE and On stores and online at on.com and loewe.com. On’s release names four colorways, sand, dark khaki, black and fox red, carrying style codes 3WG30820554, 3WG30826875, 3WG30826876 and 3MG30910553. The shoe has been listed at $890, a figure On itself has not confirmed. The same launch brings the Cloudtilt Cosmic, a slimmer Cloudtilt on a new CloudTec Phase unit, in six colors alongside the Zendaya capsule On has been building out this year.
Where To Buy
Affiliate links open each retailer’s live search, so they always resolve. We may earn a commission.
Find This Pair
- eBaySizes Available
Live retailer stock, refreshed hourly. Stock and prices change fast. Some links are affiliate links and we may earn a commission.
