PUMA has handed the Suede to outside designers for decades, and nearly all of them changed the color. Daniëlle Cathari changed the stripe. Her second collaboration with the brand arrives September 26, and the centerpiece is a soft blue Suede whose Formstrip does not stop where a Formstrip stops. It twists and carries on around the shoe instead of lying flat along the side. That reads as a small edit until you remember which part of the shoe she was given permission to touch.
The Suede is not quite sixty years old and has already had three careers. PUMA introduced it in 1968 under the name CRACK, and the brand’s own archive calls it PUMA’s first lifestyle shoe, built for a world that had not yet agreed sneakers were something you wore when you were not playing a sport. In 1971 PUMA signed Walt Frazier, who asked for a low cut and got his nickname across the side, and the CLYDE became the version most people picture when they picture a Suede at all. Then it found breaking in 1980 and skateboarding by the end of that decade, and PUMA is unusually candid in its own telling about how little of that was designed for. The upper was soft, the midsole held up, and the color range was wide enough that a crew could dress alike without dressing identically. What survived all three careers unchanged is the outline, and the outline is mostly the Formstrip. A Suede is readable from across a street with the wordmark hidden.
Cathari’s version lands in soft blue premium suede on a classic gum sole, which is the most conventional thing about it. The Formstrip is the part that has been rethought. Instead of running from the lace panel down to the midsole and ending there, the stripe is twisted so that it wraps the shoe, turning a side graphic into something closer to a band. PUMA calls the gesture quiet but distinctive, and it is quiet, in the sense that you have to look at the shoe twice before you notice what is wrong with it. A tonal CATHARI wordmark is embossed on the tongue, and the rest of the branding is tonal as well, so nothing on the upper competes with the stripe for attention.
The collaboration carries a second shoe. The Speedcat is reworked in smooth burgundy leather with a laceless construction PUMA traces to a design in its own archive, and debossed shapes on the heel read as a pair of peering spider eyes, doubling as Cathari’s signature logo. Both pairs run the same logic. Take the part of the shoe everyone already recognizes and bend it. Her first PUMA collaboration earlier this year was a Speedcat Suede, so this is the first time she has been handed the model whose stripe she is rewriting.
Cathari built her name taking adidas tracksuits apart and sewing them back together along seams that were never there, a run of collections adidas Originals kept renewing. Arriving at PUMA and going straight for the Formstrip is the same instinct aimed at a harder target. A tracksuit is a garment. The Formstrip is a trademark, and most brands treat a trademark as something to apply rather than something to redraw. PUMA has spent this year letting collaborators get progressively more structural with its archive, from a collapsible heel on the Suede to a geodesic cage over the Cell Geo, and this belongs to that pattern rather than standing apart from it. The open question is whether PUMA reads the Formstrip as a signature it protects or as a material it can lend out. This pair answers it the second way.
PUMA has not announced a retail price, which is ordinary for a Media Hub post three days ahead of a release and less ordinary for a shoe that reaches stockists this week. The nearest reference on our own shelf is the Madhappy Suede from earlier this month, which arrived at $130 carrying a collapsible heel and a published style code. Cathari’s pair is a simpler build, premium suede over a gum sole with no mechanism in it, so that figure reads as a ceiling rather than a floor. Anything meaningfully above it would be charging for the stripe rather than for the shoe.
PUMA x Daniëlle Cathari releases September 26 at selected PUMA stockists, the Suede in soft blue and the Speedcat in burgundy leather. PUMA has published neither a style code nor a retail price for either pair, so the brand’s own release page is where the numbers will land first. Check PUMA on the day. Selected stockists is doing real work in that sentence, so the list is likely to be short.
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