Saucony released its Daikanyama capsule on September 18, four shoes pulled out of the archive and pointed at one Tokyo neighborhood. The Kinvara in that set will take most of the attention, because the Kinvara has a story people already know how to tell. The ProGrid Omni 9 is the one worth stopping on. It is a support trainer from 2010, a shoe that spent its working life on the wall at run specialty shops and almost no time at all in anybody’s collection, and it has just been handed a colorway called Owl and Multi.
The Omni was Saucony’s answer to the runner who needed the shoe to do some of the work. By the time the line reached its ninth numbered version it was a fixture, and that ninth ran on the two pieces of Saucony hardware every salesperson in a running shop could recite. GRID was the lattice sitting in the heel, Saucony’s alternative to an air bladder or a gel pod, and ProGrid was the tuning wrapped around it. The build on top was busy in the way 2010 was busy. Open mesh kept the weight down, suede and leather overlays were stitched across it for structure, and a TPU cage ran through the midfoot to hold the foot over the platform. Saucony’s own product copy still leads with that cage and that structured upper. None of it was styling at the time. It was the reason somebody put the box in your hands.
Daikanyama is the reference and the colorway does the work you would expect from it. Owl and Multi reads as a warm grey body with seafoam green through the midsole and heel, a dusty blue panel across the side, black at the collar and toe, and wheat tones low on the foxing. The midsole is finished with a speckled, marbled treatment rather than left flat, and that is the detail separating this from a general release. Saucony credits the design to Josh Fraser, a former Tokyo resident, and chief product officer Brian Moore described the neighborhood as “brutalist, softened by ivy-covered concrete and weathered steel.” That is a fair description of the shoes themselves. The capsule reads as concrete and moss rather than as a color story, and the Omni 9 carries it better than the Endorphin Speed 5 in the same set, because a crowded 2010 upper simply has more panels to put the tones on.
The retro tech wave has been running for a few years now and it has mostly recycled shoes people were already sentimental about. The Omni 9 tests what happens when that wave reaches the back of the catalog. Nobody was campaigning for this shoe. It carries no collaboration history, no athlete, no moment. What it has is a shape, and the shape is close to what the market wants right now: low slung, heavily paneled, silver and grey, faintly clinical. Saucony appears to have worked out that the demand is for a silhouette rather than for a memory, and it is one of the few brands with a 2010 catalog deep enough to keep supplying it. That is a more durable position than owning a single hyped model, and it explains why the Omni 9 keeps reappearing in new finishes while the rest of the archive waits its turn.
Saucony lists the Daikanyama Omni 9 at $175. A general release ProGrid Omni 9 sits at $155 on the same site, so the capsule adds twenty dollars for the speckled midsole, the designer credit and the packaging. Inside the set the Kinvara 1 is $150 against $140 for the standard lifestyle Kinvara 1, and the ProGrid Guide 7 is $145. Saucony’s own press release put the Omni 9 at $174, a dollar under what the product page charges, so the site number is the one to trust. Resale history on this model is thin to nonexistent, which is part of what makes it an honest buy.
The Saucony ProGrid Omni 9 Daikanyama released September 18 in the Owl and Multi colorway, style code S101208-1001, in unisex sizing from 3.5 to 12 plus 13 and 14, at $175. It is available at saucony.com and through select retailers, and Saucony currently lists it in stock. The other three Daikanyama shoes, the Kinvara 1, the ProGrid Guide 7 and the Endorphin Speed 5, released the same day.
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