crooked tongues magazine News Features

Great. Ghosts in the machine meant we couldn't put up the News feature we wanted to, but as a plan-b we thought we'd take a look at a shoe we meant to up over Christmas, until the wave of Best Of '09 interviews took precedence. Between that and Air flight-related typos, this week has been enough to give our New Year optimism a kick in the teeth, but we can't be stopped, so here's the bizarre Japan-only mita and EXPANSION 820 makeup. It garnered our interest because the minds behind it are friends of CT and just because it uses the 820 as a base, capping off a year when some 800 numbers got collaborative outings - not something we thought we'd ever see. You might remember the 820's brief outing in the UK a few years back when it went wood, but it's still a shoe we've got a lot of affection for.

mita are true collaboration veterans who need little introduction, but the EXPANSION Inc. line might need a spot of background - it's an NYC-Tokyo lifestyle brand, with the kind of output levels that catch you offguard during a Far East visit, and they've applied their own eye-bleeding camo-style pattern to the canvas on the upper here with some nubuck, durabuck, 3M and a touch of teal highlighting, just in case your attention wasn't sufficiently seized on sprial patterning alone. Paired with a ring inspired by those ultra-efficient Tokyo subway trains, while it most certainly isn't to more reserved tastes, we still get a kick out of madcap Far Eastern creations like this that spit in the eye of the current all-black-everything movement. Mad meaning good.