Here, Crooked Tongues highlights the upcoming Nike Newmara.
The Nike Humara is a Crooked Tongues favourite that even managed to win over the most non-Nike characters in the building through some of the best Nike design ever (we believe that it’s another classic from the genius that is Peter Fogg) and redefined trail running in 1997 and left us completely baffled as to what was ACG and what wasn’t. if you know your shoes, you know that the distinctive nylon straps on the upper of the Air Humara are one of the most homaged elements of any contemporary (are we still allowed to count 1997 as contemporary?) shoes design, still echoing in releases from Nike, rival brands and indies alike. Examine the Humara and its Terra sibling (we’ve never treated the Terra Humara as a sequel) and you’d have to be daft to not find merit in the work Fogg put in. This season is the season of the non-ACG trail shoes remix now we’ve had the Air Max Sertig (we’re presuming that the Sertig is another of Peter’s brainchildren) which left us a little cold and the Terra Humara Air Max that seems to work in the correct colours, so it was inevitable that the OG Humara would be part of the plan.Â
Oddly, we think this model has more in common with the superb Okwahn II (based on the ACG shoe that borrowed elements of the Humara) than the previously mentioned hybrid efforts and it’s all the better for it. Best of all, someone has named this the Nike Newmara, in a similar vein to Jerry Seinfeld’s Air Structure II wearing nemesis Newman renaming the Millennium”Newmanium” around the time the Humara first dropped. Some of the synthetic fabrics implemented on shoes like this still make us pull the Michel Roux Jr. gasface, but it’s worth remembering that the original was never a particularly premium design — it was extensive with the mesh applications like this one. The forked forefoot panel of Scotchlite and equally reflective swoosh, mini branding at the front, plus the familiar straps going under the mesh to support in a similar vein to a contemporary Dynamic Fit is smart thinking and the zig zag stitch details and tongue and heel tabs are present pay tribute to the original admirably.Â
With the same sole unit as the Okwahn sequel, it’s a shame that a splatter print is applied rather than an attempt to clone the curious cloth-coloured, mini honeycomb-like pattern of the original. Does it match the original? Nope, because that’s a perfect piece of shoe design, but we’re not mad at the Newmara at all, because it’s intelligently executed, shows reverence for an iconic release and has a comedy (and explanatory) name that we approve of. These drop next month.
