The Snoafer, Explained: GANNI x New Balance 1906L
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If you wanted a single picture of how fashion and sport are courting each other in 2025, you’d start here.
The loafer finally slipped out of the office, and came back wearing running shoes.
Not the polished boardroom shoe you remember, but a sly splice of salon and sidewalk: the upper still groomed and proper, the base unmistakably born to run.
From Runway to Release
New Balance’s 1906L first surfaced on Junya Watanabe’s AW24 runway, a sneaker-loafer hybrid that set off equal parts curiosity and ridicule. Its latest chapter, co-authored by GANNI, is louder, glossier, and harder to ignore.
Chris Davis, New Balance CMO and President shared, “Why this shoe, with this brand? Both are a statement - a bridge between sport, sophistication, tradition and fun irreverence. The co-authored 1906L represents the fun-loving nature of the New Balance brand, where sport, style, and craft collide to create unapologetic originality. The loafer has moved beyond the boardroom, now being redefined in streetwear culture.”
The design features snakeskin-like gloss, a coin strap stamped with metal logos in place of a penny, all set on New Balance’s running sole. The initial release last year was dubbed by The Wall Street Journal as “identity-crisis-stricken”. GQ wondered if it might be “actually good”, British Vogue’s road test found it “incredibly comfortable from the get-go”. And, The Cut deemed the whole category “popular yet polarising”. Which is to say: alive.
On Reddit, one commenter called the design “horrific” before asking where to buy it. Another judged it “ugly in a really cool way.” The discussion turned quickly to wardrobe purpose: how to style it, how it fits, and where it belongs.There’s also the arithmetic of desire that scarcity brings.
Scarcity as Strategy
On the secondary market the hybrid holds its nerve: Hoka’s take changes hands above the RRP, Nike’s strapped Air Max does likewise, and New Balance’s 1906L trades steadily rather than spiking and collapsing.
The early sales suggest proof of life. Buyers appear to be paying as much for the idea as for the logo. Scarcity functions less as mystery than as management, shaped by when and where the shoe is released and how clearly the story lands in the first two weeks.
The Drop Economy Reframed
An intimate fashion-partner drop followed by a wider brand release creates time pressure; tight channeling through specific doors creates geographic focus; clear design codes create symbolic weight. It gives the sense that this version says something the general release won’t. That’s the drop economy’s old lesson, reframed: choreograph the reveal and let the network do the lift. And because timing alone only buys a headline, the market does its truthing a week later.
It helps that the field around the snoafer is busy.
Ballet flats have laced themselves to sneaker soles and sprinted into the mainstream; Puma’s Speedcat Ballet isn’t a loafer at all, and that’s exactly the point — adjacent silhouettes are learning the same trick. Converse has taken its own heritage and slipped it into a penny strap, the All-Star Coinloafer arriving with the sort of laceless ease that makes sense in city life. Nike has edged the formal line. Hoka, whose language is comfort writ large, put a loafer on its cushioning and let the internet argue. The category isn’t a one-off prank.
Luxury’s Practical Logic
For luxury houses, the appeal is almost boringly practical. A performance partner brings the science; the last, the midsole, the hours of step-count know-how that make a shoe viable beyond a lookbook. The fashion house supplies legibility. Together they arrive at something you can wear to a meeting without sacrificing the easy gait you acquired during the sweats years. Distribution has learnt its choreography too: an intimate drop with the fashion partner, then a wider release through the global engine. Two chapters, one story, pricing intact.There is also a memory at work.
Learning from the Past
Remember, about a decade ago, when dress shoes flirted with air bubbles and Lunarlon, the result was clever but rarely handsome; the office hadn’t relaxed, the street hadn’t sharpened, and the joke wore off quickly.
Now the climate has changed. Preppy codes, ’90s staples have returned with better posture. A loafer that glides like a trainer, or a trainer that behaves like a loafer, doesn’t read as subversion so much as sense. It leans into a time I told a senior exec at Adidas they need to introduce a line of formal clothes made with fabric meant for sport - that next?
Product Truth Over Gimmick
What should brands take from this, beyond a temptation to bolt a penny strap to anything with potential? Start with product truth. The hybrid works because it creates conversation, fire, and there’s form and function in the design. It also works because both authors are visible in the finished object; the collaboration reads without needing a press release to explain itself. And it works because the launch respects attention spans: it arrives where fashion looks first, then where the rest of the market shops, without flooding either.
The final discipline is to anticipate friction and write to it.
Comfort as the New Baseline
Hybrid shoes are saying what trend decks can’t: comfort and code-switching have become baseline, not bonus. The snoafer won’t replace the loafer, and that isn’t the ambition. Classics return because they are classics.
Look at what Clarks are doing with Originals.
