Junya Watanabe MAN x New Balance 574 Legacy 'Forest Green Varsity Yellow'
Colorway: Light Grey/Forest Green/Varsity Yellow · Style code: U574LGM1 · Release date: April 22, 2022 · Price: $322 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: 574 (U5747FE) · 574 (U5748DF) · 574 (U5748SB) · New Balance New Balance 57/40 'Lunar New Year - Black Poppy' (U5740CNB) · New Balance 57/40 'Lunar New Year - Eclipse' (U5740CNN)
The collaboration is the story here. Junya Watanabe MAN, the Japanese designer's menswear line, worked with New Balance on the 574 Legacy and treated the shoe's panel structure as somewhere to put colour rather than as something to unify. Light grey suede forms the base, forest green takes a share of the overlays, and varsity yellow, the loudest element by a distance, cuts in against both. The three tones do not blend, which is the intention: each piece keeps its own colour and the seams between them become the design.
It released on April 22, 2022 at $260, well over double what New Balance charges for its own Legacy versions, and the gap is the usual one on designer collaborations. What did not change is the build underneath, with the ENCAP heel the model has used from the start, a soft EVA core inside a firmer polyurethane rim, sitting on the outline Steven Smith produced by fitting a 576 upper to a 577 sole. The method is reworking an existing silhouette rather than drawing a new one, and the 574 suits it, because a shoe with this many separate pieces gives a designer somewhere to intervene without redrawing anything.