There is barely a franchise left that hasn’t had a sneaker collab. This week the turn goes to Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated series, dressing up the Reebok Instapump Fury 94. The question I keep coming back to at these drops: does the shoe actually get better, or is the cartoon simply the sales pitch?
This one is themed around Aang and the Air Nomads, which lands as rust-orange and tan-beige tones, a textile with a faint denim-like weave, an orange Pump button on the tongue and a gum-orange sole. No loud cosplay colours, no characters printed across the panels. For an IP collab that is surprisingly restrained, and it counts in the designers’ favour.
Why the Fury survives the gimmick
Credit where it’s due: the Instapump Fury is one of the few silhouettes that can carry this kind of project. That strange laceless pump system and the cut-out cage are already so outspoken that a theme on top doesn’t immediately turn gimmicky. The Air Nomad palette happens to sit right in the orange-brown corner the Fury often shows up in anyway, so it isn’t a forced match. Pick the version you’d wear without the logo, and with this Instapump Fury you still can.
The market tells the other half of the story
It has been in stores since 7 October, but look at where it actually sits on Solezilla.com and the picture shifts. There is no regular retail listing here. The euro side is all consignment and luxury resale: Stadium Goods at 381.95 euros, Farfetch between 498 and 500 euros. The one cheaper route is a US listing, Stadium Goods US at 279 dollars, with nothing in pounds at all. For a shoe that only came out this month, that is a steep ask, and it says more about collab scarcity than about the sneaker itself. Compare before you commit on the Avatar Fury page.
So I’ll stay on the fence, for once. A restrained IP collab that genuinely works, or just another cartoon carrying a sneaker? If anything is a Grail or Bail, it’s this one — you call it below, or go leaf through the rest of Reebok first.