crooked tongues magazine News Features

So here’s all the Crooked Tongues New Balance stuff that we couldn’t fit into a standard News post on the site. We’ve culled some old and new imagery relating to past New Balance projects that might be of interest to the New Balance heads and hurled it together to commemorate our latest release.

The two Made in England 1500s are about to launch and we thought we’d celebrate past projects and take a longer look at the factory process that brought the shoes to life. It’s no secret that our latest New Balances are based on summer 2004’s quartet of 576 colourways that Russ, C-Law, Steve Bryden and Chris Aylen created. Its been five years since the last Flimby-made Crooked shoes dropped and we just celebrated our tenth anniversary, so to continue our longstanding friendship with New Balance we thought we’d go back to the old Pantones before we drop the next wave (and we’re already scheming on what that will be). The two shoes actually started life in late 2009/early 2010 before we found a slot in production that set the date for 15/10/2011. You can’t hurry collaborations.

We wish we could regale you with wild tales of sample alterations, but its been a pretty smooth process. We’ll up the sample shots on the Forum soon, but changes were minimal — one forefoot contrast stitch on the lime colourway was exchanged for another, the black/oranges got a mesh toebox because the perforated leather toebox sample was too bulbous. A mesh collar on the limes was eliminated due to quality control fears regarding fraying, so after some sulking we made it nubuck. And the outsole colour blocking had a last-minute change so now the limes are white-on-white at the toe area. Sometimes, what worked on the 576s didn’t work so well on the 1500, but overall it’s close enough that we had to pay tribute by porting over the respective CT 03 and CT 04 numbers from the OGs. And as a British website, it has to be British made. How many other sneaker lines will let you document the construction of your shoes?

Thanks to Boris, Michael and everyone at New Balance UK, plus the patient folk at the Flimby factory who know everything about everything with regards to sneaker construction.

THE CROOKED TONGUES NEW BALANCE MADE IN ENGLAND 1500s GO ON SALE ON SATURDAY 15th OCTOBER RIGHT HERE AT WWW.CROOKEDTONGUES.COM AND ARE ON SALE FROM SELECT GLOBAL STOCKISTS BEYOND THE UK ON SATURDAY 22nd OCTOBER.

THE PAST:

The Crooked Tongues and New Balance story begins in 2003 with original crew members deciding they wanted to have a go at actually creating a shoe. After the U-Dox shirts with Recon a little earlier it seemed to make a lot of sense. Now we take the union of site and sneaker for granted, but pre-2005, it seemed like a brave new world for some European upstarts to want to get involved. And the rest is history. But with pre-2005 internet records being erased by the death of Geocities and a more genteel approach to online coverage at the time, there’s several little stories that need to be told. There were more 2004 CT NB colourways sampled, including a couple of 577s. The runs of all four 576s (with fifty pairs on sale of each) shifted in an instant.

Then there was the super-scarce (around a hundred pairs) Crooked Tongues and Solebox 1500, released for charity in early 2005 to tie-in with Bread & Butter with a sterling silver tag — there’s even a couple with names on that lucky Crooked Tongues Forum heads managed to get. As an unorthodox sequel to the 2004 project, in August 2005, a coach load of Crooked Tongues friends and family took the trip to Flimby to make over twenty different one-off pairs of 576s. In late 2006, the underrated Confederacy of Villainy pack went on sale, with an M575, 577, 991 (complete with an insanely expensive custom sole unit) and a 1500 which caused the creative team to argue about the pros and cons of a black midsole.

In a rare non-Flimby moment, Crooked Tongues was even asked to take part in a Tokyo-based New Balance competition alongside the likes of DQM, to commemorate the legendary 320 model. That led to the creation of the NBXCT 320 and 574 in summer 2007, homaging classic early ‘90s tech running NBX models like the 850. That trip was insane. We have happy, jetlagged memories of a man on stage with diamond fronts sat in a giant New Balance 320 as if it was a car as the winner was announced.

CT x NB 576s (2004)

C-Law's presentation for the CT 576s including the original sticker art.

Now New Balance’s heritage pieces seem to have cracked a market beyond a circle in the know, it made sense to bring things full circle. With that in mind, grabbed our former creative director Mr. C-Law for a quick conversation on his first proper shoe project. Funnily enough, it wasn’t his last.

CT: Who was involved in the original 576 project?

Russ, Chris Aylen, Steve Bryden and myself.

CT: Having worked in the business for a while now, do you think the collaboration process was harder back in '03/'04?

It was a lot more of an open book from an idea point of view, not so many had been done, so the slightest tweaks on the norm were considered groundbreaking. So much has been pushed since those days from see through Air Force 2s to teddy bears to right back to plain, simple and sometimes boringly predictable.

CT: This project nearly got shelved, right?

Yeah, we drove up to the factory for a visit to discuss, and I think when we were there, they let us make a few personal SMUs but then I think there was some discussion within the factory guys that making 50 pairs was a pain in the arse, It was Robert from New Balance who pushed for us as I don’t think the general factory guys didn’t really 'get it'. Robert persuaded them, so then two weeks later or so Steve Bryden (Kahma way back then) and myself took the bloody long train journey back up there. I later went back up on my own to do the Solebox burgundy/carbon fibre 1500, I remember being dropped off by the factory guys at this desolate train platform in the middle of fuck-knows-where surrounded by sheep and cows. It was like a scene out of An American Werewolf In London.

CT: What was the inspiration behind the colourways? I heard Steve and yourself designed a colour each.

We did two each actually, I had a specific idea of what I wanted to do on one (the lime) as did Steve (the black/orange) which is funny that the new 1500s are in those 'planned' colourways, we then did the other two — me with the beige/brown and Steve the navy/grey there and then in the material racks. As we were only doing 50 of each, we had to be tricky with what we could use as most of it was done with end of the roll materials. The idea for the little square CT tab was that we weren’t allowed to print on the shoes or anything, so I remembered that when I was a kid we used to nick the round PUMA zipper pulls of people's gym bags at school and wear them on our first lace at the bottom hanging off. That's where that idea came from, except I put it at the top lace.

CT: Had you done an SMU beyond iD before the NB project?

Nope. Only in my dreams. Well actually, I did do some Photoshop mockups on a Nike Blazer that if it had gone through would have been CT's first colab. Steve had been in conversations with somebody in Beaverton, but they never came to fruition. This NB pack was the first time I'd ever really done 'footwear product' design in a sense…well, colour and materials anyway.

CT: What's your take on the 1500s?

I really like them. I think it’s a cool tie in to the originals.

2004 feature in France's Lil' Tyler magazine. Lil' Tyler was an amazing publication — shouts to Mr. Thomas Giorgetti.

A rare image (note the inexplicable inclusion of a Bigfoot board game) of the unreleased CT samples that includes four colourways — two of them in 577 form.

Mr. BJ Betts's one-off version of the Crooked Tongues and Solebox M1500BB. A couple of lucky folk got some of these — a testament to New Balance UK's spectacular customer service. (2005)

Flimby factory visit in August 2005. Note how cheery the Crooked crew are to be experiencing the trip of a lifetime.

C-Law's one-off lime coloured, open mesh 576s.

The Crooked Tongues Confederacy of Villainy collection with art by BJ Betts. (2006)

The design for the one-off New Balance 574, based on the old NBX 850 colourway for New Balance Japan. The NBXCT embroidery never made the final version. (2007)

The design for the one-off New Balance 320, based on the old NBX 850 colourway for New Balance Japan. Once again, the NBXCT embroidery never made the final cut. (2007)

Original New Balance for the 1500, which we assume is from late 1988. We included it for no reason other than because we love the wild claims it makes. Apologies for the Frankenstein's Monster style fusion of pages.