Puma Suede

The Puma Suede is a low basketball-style shoe in soft dyed suede, with the brand's sweeping Formstrip in leather along each side and a flat rubber cupsole wrapped up round the edge. It comes in almost any colour, usually with a white stripe and sole. That range of colour was the point from the beginning: suede takes dye more easily than leather, and Puma chose it for that reason.

Puma dates the shoe to 1968, when it launched a model called the Crack before the Olympic Games in Mexico City. The name was slang for the most skilful player on a team. In Puma's telling it was the company's first shoe meant as much for off-duty wear as for sport, with a new sole also suited to basketball, and the first pairs were blue and white. The company says Tommie Smith was given a black and white pair, which ties the shoe, in Puma's account, to the most famous podium of those Games.

In 1971 Puma signed Walt 'Clyde' Frazier of the New York Knicks, who wanted a low shoe he could wear in a different colour every game. In the United States it became the Clyde. When the contract ended, Puma, which did not own the name, sold the shoe internationally as the Suede, and in the early 1990s Puma UK called it the States. The names changed; the shoe, Puma says, hardly did.

It found its long second life on the street, first with New York's breakdancing crews in the 1980s and then with skateboarders, who valued the soft upper and the grip of the sole. In 2018, its fiftieth year, Puma's creative director said a wearer would barely see a difference from 1968, most changes being in construction. The Suede Classic is still sold in the old form.