Made In The USA: New Balance And The Horween Ascendancy

Last week, I gave you all a heads-up about a deal on the New Balance 993. I think of the 993 as sort of the Alden Longwing of the casual-shoe world; its upper-middle-class credentials are impeccable and it tends to be the choice of people whose fathers owned a dinner jacket.

I almost made it out of the New Balance (virtual) store without buying anything extra, but at the last minute I relented and bought a set of 2040v2 sneakers. They're also made in the USA, but they're unapologetically luxurious. One could argue that they serve as the GMC Yukon XL to the 993's Suburban LTZ, which is to say that they drive the "these-cost-a-lot" point home a bit more emphatically than would be necessary.

Part of this shoe's upscale marketing is sourcing. The 2040v2, and its successor shoe, the 2040v3, use leather from a source that used to be completely obscure but which is now experiencing a renaissance of the reputation, as it were.

In the pre-Internet era, I don't think too many people knew much about the Horween Leather Company in Chicago. Although it was the sole source of shell cordovan leather in the United States, supplying both Alden and Allen-Edmonds with the "color 8" horsehide they used for their highest-end shoes, surely nobody was at pains to advertise this fact. Particularly not the fine folks at Alden, who no doubt find it galling that they have to source their shell from the uncouth Midwest. From time to time, you'll find some fellow on a clothing forum claiming that Alden gets "a higher grade" of leather than Allen-Edmonds does. I give that claim all the respect I gave to the assertion, made by a fellow bagboy at Big Bear Grocery Store in 1989, that General Motors gave all the S-10 pickups a "secret quality test" and put S-15 badges on the ones that scored highest.

And that's the second GMC reference I've made in this post. Easily one too many.

Maybe Horween was never a "secret" as such, but if it was the horse is well and truly out of the barn now. Horween products are openly sourced by everybody from Hodinkee, for watch straps, to New Balance, for their most expensive sneakers. There's even a in-house site for certain finished goods.

Danner, Frye, Rancourt, and many, many others use the name as a selling point. This is fascinating in and of itself because it shows us a way in which prestige-by-association works. Nobody ever thought that Alden shoes were good because they used Horween leather; it's assumed that Alden sources the very best leather possible and that being affiliated with Alden is a guarantee of quality. So when you buy a pair of Danners or Fryes or Wolverines that are made with Horween Leather, what you're really doing is hoping to get that same Alden quality in a more affordable, comfortable, or accessible fashion.

Of course, the inevitable result of this Horween-mania is that eventually someone will make an absolutely worthless shoe out of the finest Horween #8 Shell or Chromexcel. Another inevitable result: I finally have a set of sneakers too nice to wear in any situation requiring a sneaker. Too bad I'm not going to the Trump rally in Columbus tomorrow; I hear that Trump's appeal is exclusively to white racists, and I'm also told that New Balances are a white-person thang!