There are two ways to bring back an old running shoe. The first is to be bold: bright colors, chrome, exactly the kind of thing people loved in 2008. The second is this. The Zoom Skylon 11 from that year returns this fall in five colorways, and one of them is entirely black. Black mesh, black overlays, black sole, black Swoosh on black.
Don’t get me wrong, it looks perfectly fine. The fan-shaped lines running from the laces across the side are still the best detail on this model, and in a single color, you can see the shoe’s shape more clearly than on the red version. The honeycomb mesh adds just enough texture to keep it from becoming a black block. The sole, with its deep transverse grooves borrowed from the Free philosophy, still stands out because you can see right through it.
But this is also the easy choice. Every retro that relies on nostalgia eventually gets a triple black, because it always sells — even to people who never saw the original. That’s not a crime. It’s just a little less interesting than the story surrounding it suggests, and it’s exactly the version that will still be sitting in the sale section two seasons from now, while the University Red will already be gone.
The numbers. The US retail price is $135, which is reasonable for a returning runner with Zoom Air and well below the $150-plus price tags you see on comparable hype models. The Skylon 11 is already being touted as the next shoe to capture the attention the Vomero received, and comparisons like that usually say more about the previous hype than about the shoe itself. Let’s first see whether the rollout gathers momentum.
You can keep track of that, by the way: on the Zoom Skylon 11 “Triple Black” sneaker page, you can see what each shop receives and what it costs. With a fresh drop, the selection is often still limited; that says nothing about the shoe and everything about the calendar.