New Balance puts the 1890A back on the calendar for October 22, in a colorway it calls Truffle Salt with Silver Metallic, and for the first time in a while the shoe arrives without something printed on it. The last run of 1890A releases handed the same mold a different animal. This one hands it a finish instead, a warm taupe mesh under silver overlays that throw light the way a hide never did. Buried in the product copy is a word New Balance has never used about this shoe before.
Start with the family, because there are three shoes here and they are not interchangeable. The ABZORB 1890 is the parent and the only one New Balance has ever properly announced. It launched globally on March 12 this year, built from the original 2002 sole unit with full length SBS ABZORB cushioning under a no sew wave cutout upper referencing the 890v3, with lead designer James Lee quoted throughout. That shoe got the full press treatment, a named designer, a stated technology story, a campaign and a media contact.
The 1890A is the derivative. It keeps the sole unit and replaces almost everything above it with a moccasin style build, a pronounced lip around the toe, moccasin lacing and a bound edge running through the forefoot. There is also an 1890P, which trades the forefoot overlay for a molded plastic cage. Three shoes on one platform, separated by single letters, and New Balance has never issued a release for either derivative. Nobody outside the brand has been able to say what the A stands for.
Which is what makes the Truffle Salt listing worth reading closely. New Balance’s product page describes the shoe as featuring “an apron upper for an elevated look.” That is the first time the brand has named the construction at all. The site has been calling it a moccasin upper, as has most of the industry, and those are not quite the same thing. An apron is the raised panel stitched over the vamp. A moccasin is a construction method where the upper wraps under the foot. The photographs show the apron clearly, a separate panel laid over the toe and stitched down its perimeter, and they do not show a wrapped sole. New Balance has quietly corrected everybody, the better part of a year late, in a product description.
The colorway itself is the least complicated thing about the release. The mesh base reads warm grey with a brown cast, the overlays are a true silver metallic that goes almost white under direct light, and the ABZORB wordmark sits on the lateral midsole in the usual place. The sockliner is stamped 1890. The outsole is black with grey pods set into it, and the heel keeps the stacked structure that the parent shoe carried over from the 2002. Against the printed hides that preceded it the pair reads as restraint, though nothing structural underneath has moved.
That is the pattern worth watching. New Balance has built an entire product family around ABZORB, a compression resistant compound that dates to 1993, and it has been expanding that family sideways rather than forward. Colorways change. Finishes change. The last, the sole and the upper pattern do not. Whether that is a problem depends on whether a shoe like this is meant to be a platform the brand iterates on or a product it finishes. Right now the 1890A is behaving like the first one, and the silver is the most interesting answer it has given yet.
Price is where the release gets awkward. New Balance lists the 1890A at $199.99, which is exactly what the brand is charging for the Made in USA 992 on its own site the same week. One of those is assembled domestically on a number with real lineage behind it. The other is a derivative of a shoe that launched in March, with no press release, no stated design story and a letter nobody outside the brand can explain. The parent ABZORB 1890 launched at $180, so the derivative now costs twenty dollars more than the shoe it came from. That inversion is becoming normal across New Balance lifestyle, where the experimental builds get seeded through fashion channels and carry the higher ticket, while the shoes with an actual archive behind them go through the press box at a lower one.
The 1890A in Truffle Salt with Silver Metallic releases October 22 at 10:00 am Eastern through New Balance, in unisex sizing, at $199.99. The style code is U18909VF. It lands one day after the Kawhi V and in the same week as a Made in UK Allerdale, which is a busy stretch for a brand that is asking two hundred dollars for a shoe it has still never described in a release of its own.
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