Sneaker-Loafers Are Great — And There's Nothing You Can Do About It

What was the last truly great idea in sneaker design? Maybe it was one of the newfangled doodads that rendered laces irrelevant. Or perhaps it was the decision to abruptly slice ordinary kicks into weirdo mules. But when was the last time that a new footwear concept recontextualized the way that we look at shoes?

The sneaker-loafer did that.

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Little wonder New Balance was greeted with a mix of mortification and excitement when it quietly debuted the 1906L (“L” for “Loafer”) sneaker-loafer in a 2024 Junya Watanabe runway show. We fear what we don’t understand, after all. Some are still struggling to understand, even as New Balance’s 1906L keeps selling out, drop after limited drop.

No need to overthink it! Done right, the sneaker-loafer is an aesthetic car crash that actually works, rebirthing potentially staid silhouettes as something fresh but also quite grounded, quite wearable. Even if you find them repulsive (how?), the sneaker-loafer must be appreciated for being the good kind of different. This is not weird for the sake of weird but though it is thankfully, blessedly weird. And New Balance’s sneaker-loafer, a much-needed burst of newness in an industry long plagued by leaders being followed, is the beautiful poster child of these weird shoes. 

But, please, don’t call it a “snoafer”: The sneaker-loafer exists in an uncanny valley between the formal and the sporty. It’s a proposition that admittedly sounds perfectly hideous: The term “sporty loafer” conjures up mental images of those foul Cole Haan things that were more loafer-sneaker than sneaker-loafer. However, New Balance’s loafer is an elegant piece of work. Strip away the “saddle” — cobbler-ese for the loafer’s forefoot strap — and you have a slip-on hardly out of place in a world desensitized to fashionable toe shoes and hyped trail clogs. And yet, the New Balance sneaker-loafer still shook the world.

I’d argue that’s partially because New Balance’s 1906L almost too neatly combines disparate halves that’ve long been church and state. The sneaker-ization of formal shoes has been taboo as long as sneakers have been cool, which is why formal-street footwear mash-ups like G-Dragon’s Nike Kwondo, Hender Scheme’s benchmade “homage” shoes, and the aftermarket cobblers who stitch Vibram soles to retro shoes all briefly fascinated the culture. But New Balance’s sneaker-loafer is too clean to die. It’s actually wearable, for one, despite having essentially lopped the top off of a 1906 shoe and only barely put anything in its place. It works because it’s simple, because it’s unexpected, because it’s impressively cohesive. And, in the bigger picture, loafers with sneaker soles mean something more.

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The flat shoe boom is getting so big that it’s beginning to affect demand for retro-techy dad shoes, shoes like the original 1906. Simultaneously, extant interest in downtown-cool loafers that brand themselves as such is booming, especially among the Aimé Leon Dore set. Hence the recent demand for upstart makers of laceless footwear like Blackstock & Weber and Vinny’s, which basically just sell personalized versions of a shoe once called a “Weejun.” But sneakers evolve when shoemakers react and rephrase what’s happening in footwear right now. It’s rarer than you think: We don’t actually get a Miu Miu New Balance every year, nor a New Balance sneaker-loafer. More than a few fashion pundits perpetually posit that it’s the consumer who’s growing up. The sneaker-loafer isn’t just a nifty new shape. It’s a Darwinian shift, a survival of the fittest crossbreed. The New Balance sneaker-loafer, specifically, is the lovechild of resilient footwear interests that’ve carried over through recent years. As such, it is the future.

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The reason why the New Balance sneaker-loafer made such a tremendous splash, whereas its forebears did not, is twofold. The prescient Prada Levitate, which fused a classic brogue to a decidedly contemporary air bubble sole all the way back in 2012, was a one-off bit of quintessentially Prada genius. And Nike’s meaty Vagabond sneaker-loafer, an early ‘80s experiment, is long forgotten. But why did the impressively clever sneaker-loafers created by Cottweiler x Reebok in 2019 and GmbH x ASICS a year later fail to hit with similar potency?

It’s easy to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that they were merely a year or two ahead of the curve (which they were). Lucky for New Balance. But the sheer perfection of its design can’t be discounted. Those early, limited-run sneaker-loafers failed to cross over because they whiffed that equilibrium between sneaker and loafer. They’re still pretty great sneakers in their own right but they’re very much sneakers. The New Balance sneaker-loafer is a true sneaker-loafer. Only it could have crossed over as it did.

And perhaps that’s why the sneaker-loafer is as reviled as it is beloved. Yes, at first blush, it seems profane — hence the split reaction. But over time, I suspect that anyone who hasn’t caught on already will shortly recognize that the New Balance loafer is as slick as dress sneakers (like those Cole Haan joints) are vulgar.

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In the same way that not every evolutionary offshoot is a winner, though, the flood of imitators that raced to follow New Balance’s sneaker-loafer lead aren’t all quite as successful. While the sneaker-loafers from Vans and Converse are slickly wearable shoes that build on the innate appeal of the original skate-flavored slip-ons that they’re based on, others, like those devised by Crocs and PUMA — not so much. These are awkward hybrids that’re gawkily heavyweight, too thick for their own good. They lack the suave sleekness that makes the best sneaker-loafersso good.

Growing pains these less vital sneaker-loafers may be, their presence nevertheless cements the concept’s vitality. Like, it’s still propagating into early 2025, with sportswear brand HOKA breaking its loyal runners’ brains with the Speed Loafer and UGG quietly issuing a surprisingly excellent slipper-sneaker-loafer. Evolution.

In a sunny sense, that’s what this deluge of sneaker-loafers represents. The willingness for footwear makers to venture boldly into fresh turf is incredibly welcome in an ocean of reissues and retreads. And in the big picture, the sneaker-loafer is the next step in the greater evolution of footwear, like ‘em or not. Can’t hang? Wallow in the past with your laces. I’d prefer to slip on into the future.

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