Joe Freshgoods x New Balance 650 “Stuntman” sneakers: Where to get, price, and more details explored

New Balance will get another iteration in its 650 library in a recurrent collaboration with Joe Freshgoods. The new collaboration ignites the Jordan brand's Jumpman logo controversy where the Chicago-based designer, Joe Freshgoods unofficially pays homage to the legendary athlete.

In 2020, the manager of KITH, Austine Scotti spilled the beans about the Jumpman logo in his Instagram post. He shared the story behind Micheal Jordan's Jumpman photoshoot where he wore the New Balance basketball sneaker.

In addition, this story was featured in Life Magazine in 1984, and after researching the shoe and its color palette, Joe took inspiration from that pair and produced the 'Stuntman' colorway, which conveys the revered designer's story.

The 'Stuntman' seems a very personal creative project of Joe Freshgoods and his iteration of the New Balance 650 model is just the manifestation of that. This new pair is about to hit their retail stores on September 9 with a price tag of $165.

---

Joe Freshgoods hand-marked the 500 pairs of New Balance 650 Stuntman iteration

On September 6, Joe posted an Instagram post where he announced his upcoming New Balance release. In the caption, he wrote

"In my sneaker releases portfolio, this project leans more toward an art project than a usual, more commercial campaign. It's essentially me just having some fun, it’s important for me to continue to switch things up. A few years ago, while going through old magazines for reference material, I stumbled upon a photograph of someone “Special” wearing a pair of NB’s in a photoshoot. And I simply thought to myself, "What if the story was different“? Like. On some comic book shit. Switch the story up a little ya know."

The sneaker's adoption becomes obvious from his sharing of the shoe's history. Joe painted the pair in the grey and white color palette to look like the 1984 shoe.

To generate contrast while keeping the upper clean with the white silhouette, the designer incorporated the grey thin outsole. The high-top-model has a broad ankle section. The perforated pattern on the ankle counter emphasizes the part where the suede thin wraps on the heel section from the lateral side bring the NB 650 model.

The New Balance 650 is the high-top model of 550 and this sneaker came to the market to compete with the Air Jordan 1. However, this 80's model, both 550 and 650 came with a history as they got the replenishment in the hands of Terry. To share the history, NB executive Joe Grondin told Sneaker Freaker,

"He found this random picture of the 550, and he was like, 'What is this?' We did a bunch of research and found the silhouette from 1989. The only information we could find about it was from an old New Balance Japan catalog. We were lucky because the Japan catalogs are super detailed. We started researching hashtags on Instagram and found this collector who had a pair. Once we got the shoe in hand we built it from scratch with Teddy.He’s so particular about shape, so everything took us at least eight to ten revisions. We were adjusting millimeters here and there just to get it right"

Just after the NB 550 model, with comfortable leather, the brand constructed the high-top 650 model. However, the connection between the 'Stuntman' iteration and the NB 650 model is quite old.

This new iteration will hit the shoe shelves on September 9 and the suggested price for the new pair is $165.