Wood x Salomon XT-Slate Advanced 'Black Coffee'
Colorway: Black Coffee/Biking Red/Quiet · Style code: L47256300 · Release date: February 6, 2023 · Price: $353 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Wood x Salomon XT-Slate Advanced 'Black Kelp' (L47256400)
François Salomon began making ski edges in a small Annecy workshop in 1947, working alongside his wife and his son Georges. It was Georges who turned it into an outdoor company with a range beyond skiing: snowboarding, hiking, climbing, and eventually trail running, which is where the shoes in question come from.
Ownership has moved twice. adidas bought the business in 1997, briefly making the parent company adidas-Salomon AG, and sold it to the Finnish group Amer Sports in 2005, where it sits alongside Arc'teryx and Wilson.
The fashion turn is recent and was not engineered. Trail models designed for mountain terrain (technical mesh, external cages, quicklace pulls, deep lugged outsoles) became desirable to people with no intention of running on a mountain, and by 2023 the brand was being worn in cities on the strength of exactly the features that make it useful outside them.
This collaborative XT-Slate leans into that by removing colour from the equation: the whole shoe is a flat dark brown, so the construction is all that is left to look at. It listed at $201.