Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS Gel Delva 1 'Cool Mist'
Colorway: Cool Mist/Forest Green · Style code: 1013A041-100 · Release date: January 19, 2019 · Price: $1020 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS Gel Delva 1 'Caramel' (1013A041-200) · Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS Gel Delva 1 'Forest Green' (1013A041-300) · Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS Gel Delva 1 'Murasaki' (1013A041-500) · Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS Gel Delva 1 'Tai-Chi Yellow' (1013A041-750) · ASICS Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS Ilargi FF 'Carbon' (1203A982-001)
ASICS has spent most of its collaborative history handing outside designers an archive to reinterpret. The arrangement it made with Kiko Kostadinov ran the other way. Kostadinov, a Bulgarian designer working out of London who trained at Central Saint Martins, began working with the Japanese company in 2018, and the footwear that came out of it was drawn from scratch rather than pulled from a back catalogue.
The Gel Delva 1 sits at the front of that run. Its shape reads as a running shoe taken apart and reassembled by someone more interested in how the parts look than in what a running shoe is supposed to look like: a soft textile upper, then a separate mesh cage laid over the top, so the brand's stripe motif shows through in fragments instead of being applied flat to the side.
Cool Mist keeps the whole thing in near-white and pale grey, which makes that layering far easier to read than it is on the darker pairs in the series. The build underneath is ordinary ASICS running hardware put to unusual use: a heel stabilizer, a GEL midsole, FLYTEFOAM and DUOMAX in the sole unit. It carried a $300 price, well above what those components normally command, which is roughly the point: the shoe was sold as design work with a running shoe's engineering inside it.