Converse Put Tyler, the Creator’s Pro Leather on Sale Before Its SNKRS Draw Opens

Converse has the GOLF le FLEUR* Pro Leather up on its own site right now, in three colorways, and sizes are already disappearing out of all of them. Nike has the same three style codes loaded into SNKRS with a launch entry that opens Friday, October 16. Every release feed that covered this shoe over the past month said the same thing, that no date and no pricing had been announced. Converse answered the question by putting the shoe in a cart and letting people buy it.

The Pro Leather is Converse’s basketball shoe. It arrived in 1976, the same year Converse signed Julius Erving, and it stayed on his feet through the stretch of his career that turned him into a household name. It was a leather answer to a canvas problem. The Chuck Taylor All Star had carried the sport for four decades on a cotton upper and a thin rubber sole, and by the middle of the seventies the players had outgrown it. The Pro Leather gave them a padded collar, a leather shell and a cupsole with real structure under it, and it gave Converse something to put on the floor against the leather shoes adidas and PUMA were already selling to NBA players. It lasted long enough to become shorthand for a particular era of the game, the one before Nike owned it. Converse has reissued it in waves ever since, almost always straight, almost always in the original proportions, and almost always without an argument attached to it.

Tyler, the Creator has spent this year arguing with those proportions. This Pro Leather takes the 1976 outline and inflates it. The toe is wide and blunt and capped in a separate banana rubber piece that climbs up over the vamp. The chevron and star runs oversized across the lateral panel, with the star dropped out from under the chevron rather than tucked into it, the way a bootleg would get the logo slightly wrong on purpose. The laces are flat and fat, bright blue on the red suede pair and cream on the white leather and the brown suede. Underneath, the cupsole is a cream basketweave slab with a star molded into the forefoot and a small red tab set into the arch. Converse’s own product copy names the references without hiding behind them, calling out b-boy style and bootleg culture, hand-picked archival design details and exaggerated proportions. That is unusually plain language for a product page, and it describes the shoe accurately. The le FLEUR* script sits small on the lateral quarter near the heel, which is the only place on the shoe where the line signs its name.

The le FLEUR* line started on the Converse One Star in August 2017, and for most of the nine years since it has been a color exercise. Tyler took silhouettes Converse already had, repainted them, added the flower and watched them sell. The Pro Leather run is a different kind of job, because the shape itself is being edited rather than the palette. That is the part worth watching. Converse has spent several years trying to make its archive matter again without a basketball roster to prove anything on, and the Palmes Jack Purcell earlier this fall was the careful version of that strategy. Handing a designer permission to change the last instead of the colorway is the loud version. Whether it reads as reverence or as a joke about reverence depends on which pair is sitting in front of you. The brown and gold suede looks like a shoe out of a catalog nobody printed. The red pair with the blue laces looks like it is daring the wearer to defend it in public. Both of those are better outcomes for Converse than another faithful reissue, because a faithful reissue competes with every other faithful reissue on the same wall.

The three fall pairs are listed at $105. The first Pro Leather of this run, a white and Amazon green pair that launched on July 30, went out at $95 and is still carried at that number, so the line moved ten dollars inside eleven weeks. Nothing in Converse’s copy explains the gap, and the fall trio mixes suede and leather rather than switching wholesale to either, so the materials do not cleanly account for it. For context, the le FLEUR* Jogger sits at $105 as well, and the Madhappy Chuck 70 Converse ran in the spring was $125. On the collaborator shelf this is the middle of the range rather than the top of it.

The three colorways are White/Molten Lava/Banana Crepe (A24028C-102), Molten Lava/Banana Crepe/Blue (A20367C-600) and Bison/Dusty Citron/Banana (A24029C-200), all at $105 in unisex sizing. They are live now at converse.com, where four sizes are gone from the white pair and twelve from the Bison, and all three are entered on SNKRS for Friday, October 16, at 7 a.m. Pacific. A fourth colorway, Black/Pristine/Banana, is listed at Converse and does not appear in Nike’s product feed next to the other three.

Written by

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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