HALFWAY THROUGH THE manufacturing process, about 90 seconds before they start looking like shoes, New Balance 990s are just two-dimensional slabs of branded fabric and leather, flat enough to be stacked, rubberbanded together, and passed from one worker to the next. As much as the two gray "N" logos stitched on each sheet of 990 material, it is the pattern of the upper that makes it recognizable, even without the familiar curves of a sneaker. Somehow, the essence of the 990 arrives ahead of those things that actually make it a shoe-sole, laces, tongue-beloved for years by normcore icons Adam Sandler and Steve Jobs, and, more recently, by style mavericks like Chris Pine, Zoë Kravitz, and Timothée Chalamet.
Understanding the evolution of the 990 is a useful way of appreciating how New Balance, America's most sensible sneaker brand, has captured the zeitgeist in these decidedly nonsensical times. When the 990 was launched in 1982, its four years of development made it the first running shoe with a $100 retail price; a decade or so later, it found new life as a casual sneaker worn by dressed-down celebrities at red-carpet events; and by the turn of the millennium, the 990 had achieved a bizarre niche ubiquity among subcultures as disparate as straight-edge hardcore kids, underground hip-hop fans, and Upper West Side dads. Puzzling out how all of this came to be, and how New Balance managed to bridge the aesthetic gap between Bernie Sanders and Emily Ratajkowski to become one of the most coveted shoes on the planet while in the process reordering the global pecking order in the $86 billion sneaker market-reveals one of the more improbable success stories in fashion right now. Getting to the bottom of it was equal parts nostalgia trip and supply-chain-management course, with a whiff of succession drama and a journey that began in Lawrence, Massachusetts, at a New Balance factory, about 30 miles northwest of Boston.
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