Salomon has spent the past few years feeding its trail archive into the fashion market, and almost all of that work has arrived in mesh, GORE-TEX and welded overlays. The Grolle goes somewhere else entirely. Built with the Paris concept store The Broken Arm and landing November 4, it is a mid-cut leather boot with a cracked surface finish and a lugged outsole lifted out of Salomon’s outdoor past. The upper is designed to deteriorate. That is the feature, not a defect.
Salomon is not a sneaker company that wandered into the outdoors. It started in Annecy in 1947 making saw blades and steel ski edges, moved into bindings, and became a running brand decades after that. The sportstyle line that produced the XT-6 and the XT-4 is a recent reading of that history, and it is built almost entirely on the trail-running chapter.
The Grolle reaches further back. Salomon describes the bottom unit as a heritage piece pulled from its outdoor archive, paired with contaGRIP rubber, the compound the brand reaches for when it wants purchase on wet rock rather than a cushioned road ride. The outsole in the product photography carries deep chevron lugs across the full length with contaGRIP stamped into the heel. Listed specs put the drop at 11 millimetres and the weight at 14 ounces, which is heavy for anything Salomon currently sells as a sneaker and about right for something it is calling a boot. This is the hiking half of the catalogue wearing city clothes rather than the reverse, and it is a notably different argument from the Genesis 2 GORE-TEX, where the upgrade was all in the upper textile.
The Broken Arm has stocked Salomon through most of the brand’s fashion turn, and the shop’s read on it is less sporty than most. The store opened in 2013 at 12 rue Perrée in the upper Marais, run by Guillaume Steinmetz, Anaïs Lafarge and Romain Joste, three people who arrived at retail by way of an online magazine rather than out of footwear. Their Grolle is an homage to workwear and utility, in Salomon’s own words, and it is not the first shoe the two have made together. The Savát arrived in June as a minimalist low, so the boot is the pair that tests whether the partnership holds up when it stops being quiet.
The colorway is listed as Black Olive, Peat and Pumpkin Spice, which in the product photography reads as dark olive-brown leather with rust orange running through the stitching, the eyelet surrounds and a script Salomon logo embroidered on the lateral side. A small winged motif sits on the tongue in the same orange. The heel pull tabs are the one loud element, a multicolour strip that reads almost tie-dyed against an otherwise muted shoe, and a metal buckle sits at the collar. Salomon says the leather has been left close to its natural state so that it takes on depth with wear, which is a polite way of saying it will mark in the first week.
That ageing pitch is a real argument in a category that has spent a decade selling the opposite. Most performance-derived lifestyle footwear is built to look identical on day one and day two hundred, and the materials that make that possible, synthetic mesh and TPU, are also the ones that crease badly and cannot be brought back. A boot meant to patina is a different proposition, and it is the kind of brief a boutique writes rather than a brand.
It is also a hedge. Salomon’s sportstyle growth has been carried by the XT family, which is a narrow bet on one look, and the brand has been widening it in public all year. Dropping a leather boot into the collaboration programme, alongside the MM6 Maison Margiela and BEAMS work sitting on the same launch calendar, tests whether the audience that bought a Kith XT-EVO will buy anything from Salomon that is not a trail shoe.
Retail is $210, and the launch calendar the Grolle sits on makes that number easy to read. The in-line GORE-TEX models around it run from $165 for the XT-WHISPER to $220 for the XT-4 OG. The collaborations start at $180 for the Aero Blaze 4 GRVL GTX with Pas Normal Studios, reach $240 for the XT-QUEST GTX with BEAMS and $250 for the L’Art de l’Automobile XT-QUEST, then jump to $495 and $635 for the MM6 Maison Margiela pairs. The Broken Arm’s boot is priced like a standard Salomon with a leather upgrade rather than like a designer piece, which given the materials is the restrained call. The number is worth holding against the Savát, which this site covered at $170 in June and which still had pairs at retail three months after launch. A boutique collaboration selling through is not a given here, and the Grolle is asking for forty dollars more than the pair that did not.
The Salomon x The Broken Arm Grolle releases November 4 in Black Olive / Peat / Pumpkin Spice, article reference L45536400, at $210. It is listed as unisex under Salomon’s Intersections label. Salomon.com has the pair live on a pre-launch countdown with a notify option, and The Broken Arm carries the brand directly through its own shop in Paris.
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