PUMA Suede

• MODEL: PUMA SUEDE
• MADE IN: TAIWAN
• ART.NO: 90681TP

What strikes me first about these is how incredibly nice they are. Second how incredibly rare they must be, I have been searching the web more or less the last five or six years and never even seen a picture of them. The materials on these are great. Soft grey suede for the uppers and a nice shade of pink for the perfectly shaped formstripe with a nice quality white leather inner lining.

Usually, but not always, on Suedes the leather in the heel window (also known as the FOT, in PUMA terminology) is the same colour as the formstripe and the leaping cat another colour, most likely the other colour of the shoes, but these, however, are not like that at all. White leather and a grey leaping cat which look almost wrong, though in a good way I might add. I’m not sure but I believe these are women’s shoes, only ’cause I think they would have been a bit challenging for guys to wear in the 80s; I know I probably wouldn’t. Nowadays on the other hand I would be all over them if only I could find a pair in my size.

If I had to guess I would claim PUMA started making these exact Suedes in 1985 and discontinued them in 1990. That makes them extremely rare with only five years or so of production. Because of that limited supply and their high quality with nice details they have become, among PUMA aficionados, almost as sought after as the earlier Yugoslavian and West German made Suedes and Clydes.

Moving production to Taiwan came with some changes of the shoes. They changed the midsole to a lower one and also the upper changed from the short toebox and long opening to a longer toebox with a shorter opening. A modernised lower profile, if you will. Another new detail was the colour coordinated tongue logo which I think is really cool. I wonder if the PUMA purists in the 80s went berserk about that then as we do today, when a working concept is being messed with.

written by measel

photography by errol

shoes contributed by Ollie Teeba