Daniëlle Cathari’s second PUMA collection lands September 26, and the piece worth arguing about is a Speedcat that PUMA is calling laceless. The Dutch designer reworked the motorsport silhouette in smooth burgundy leather and pulled the working closure off it, borrowing a construction PUMA already had sitting in its archive. On a shoe originally built so a driver could cinch it down before a race, that is not a small edit.
The Speedcat is a 1999 shoe and it was not designed to be a sneaker. PUMA board member Martin Gänsler worked with designer Rudi Hieblinger and the agency Création & Focus Design on a new motorsport shoe, and the first pairs went to the Jordan Formula 1 team as driver footwear. Those early Speedcat boots used premium calfskin or kangaroo leather with a fireproof lining, because the brief was a cockpit, not a sidewalk. The low profile and the thin sole that made the shoe famous were function first, a way to keep a driver’s foot close to the pedal.
Everything after that is drift. The Speedcat left the paddock, picked up Michael Schumacher as its most visible wearer, and spent two decades as a motorsport object that people bought because it looked fast. The 2024 revival is what turned it into a fashion staple, and PUMA has spent the time since handing its icons to outside designers. Cathari is one of them, and she is now on her second pass.
The burgundy pair is smooth leather rather than the suede and washed finishes the silhouette usually gets in collaboration, and the color reads closer to oxblood than to the reds PUMA runs on its own Speedcat OG. The laceless construction is the real change. PUMA describes it as a modernized take on a design already in its archive, which puts this closer to a reissue of an idea than to a novelty, It is also worth being precise about what laceless means here, because the product photography and the press copy do not quite line up. There is no eyelet ladder and no functional lacing on the burgundy pair, but a slim tonal cord still sits at the throat and ties in a bow, hanging loose over a closed leather vamp. It reads as a detail rather than a closure, which is a different shoe from the one that word suggests on its own.
Cathari’s signature lands on the heel, where debossed shapes sit in the leather and read as a pair of peering spider eyes. It doubles as her logo, and it is the only graphic on an otherwise bare shoe. That restraint is consistent across her work with PUMA, which has leaned on material and construction rather than print, and it is what separates her Speedcats from the ones that arrive covered in someone else’s artwork.
The Speedcat has been the most worked silhouette in PUMA’s line for two years, and saturation is the real risk. Noir Kei Ninomiya sculpted it, A$AP Rocky’s Straycat pushed it sideways onto a different last, and PUMA has kept its own icons cycling through new colorways the whole time. When a shoe gets that much attention, the versions that survive are the ones that change something structural rather than something visual.
Taking the closure off qualifies. It also quietly admits what the Speedcat now is. Nobody buying this pair is driving in it, and a closure built for someone who needs the shoe locked to the foot at racing speed is dead weight on a shoe that gets worn to dinner. Cathari removed the part that was doing a job it no longer has. Whether that reads as honest or as the last step before the silhouette stops being a driving shoe at all is the argument.
PUMA has not announced retail for the burgundy Speedcat. The standard Speedcat OG sits at $100 on PUMA’s own site, and Cathari’s first collection was listed at $110 for her Speedcat and $120 for the Suede, which puts the collaboration premium at ten to twenty dollars over the in-line shoe rather than the double that some PUMA partnerships carry. A laceless leather build costs more to make than a suede lace-up, so the ceiling here is probably the $120 the Suede took, and anything above that would be PUMA testing what the Speedcat name now supports.
The PUMA x Daniëlle Cathari collection is available starting September 26 at selected PUMA stockists, alongside a soft blue Suede with a wrapped Formstrip. PUMA has not published a style code for the burgundy Speedcat, so a search is the reliable way in: PUMA, END. and Nordstrom. The last two carried her first collection and are not confirmed for this one. Retail is unannounced as of publication.
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