New Balance 574 'Black'
Colorway: Black/White/Blue · Style code: MS574SCS · Price: $399 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: New Balance 574 Sport 'Outdoor Pack' (MS574AAB) · New Balance 574 Sport 'Flight Path - White' (MS574AGC) · New Balance 547 Sport 'Black Dark Blue' (MS574APB) · New Balance 574 Sport 'Tier 1' (MS574AW) · New Balance 574 Sport (MS574AWL)
Three tones with a clear hierarchy. Black takes most of the upper, white does the structural work of separating it from the ground, and blue exists in small amounts, enough to keep the shoe from reading as a plain black sneaker without pushing it into colourway territory. It is a conservative scheme and a durable one, the kind that dates slowly because none of the three colours belongs to a particular season.
New Balance sold the pair at $100. Whatever the trim, the geometry beneath it is stable: the 574's outline has not meaningfully changed since the model was assembled as the cheap option in the brand's off-road 500 series, and the reason it survives constant recolouring is that the shape was never fashionable to begin with. A shoe designed to be unremarkable can be dressed in almost anything. Black, white and blue is one of the less adventurous answers to that, and it is also the answer this model keeps coming back to.