SHOP $190, matchesfashion.com and salomon.com
Welcome to The Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
Take a look at your sneakers. What do you see? Probably some easy, everyday white sneakers, classic runners, and high-top Chucks. Maybe some basketball shoes, dad shoes, and honest-to-god running shoes for pounding the pavement. Perhaps even some Jordans and a fancy designer number that you bust out on special occasions. I'm guessing here; I can't actually see your sneaker collection. (But wouldn't it be existentially terrifying if I could? Fun stuff!) Still, it's an educated guess.
Over the last few years, a few categories of sneakers have carved out a position at the top of the proverbial food chain, and we, the sneaker-wearing public, have stocked our rotations accordingly. That's great and all, but it also means that even the most overstocked sneakerheads out there might be feeling a creeping sense of overfamiliarity with the options on hand. Put another way: we're getting dangerously close to falling into a style rut. One solution? Start from the ground up and break out of your routine with a high-tech trail runner that's achieved smash-hit status over the past couple of years. The sneaker in question is the Salomon XT-6 Advanced. Here's why it deserves a spot in your lineup.
It's the real deal.
Salomon got its start back in 1947 as a workshop specializing in ski edges in Annecy, France, a relatively small city nicknamed "The Pearl of the French Alps." Since then, the brand has evolved into an outdoor juggernaut, branching first into ski gear and alpine boots before launching its first hiking shoes in 1992. The first iteration of the XT-6 arrived well after that, in 2013, but the performance-focused attitude that's been a foundational element of Salomon's success in the early days is built right in. Far from just looking the part, the XT-6 was designed for runners tackling tough terrain over long (long) distances. So that masochistic friend of yours who thinks ultramarathons are actually fun and doesn't blink at the idea of a 10-mile, early-morning trail run has probably known about these shoes for nearly a decade. The cool-kid fashion crowd, on the other hand, got hip to them more recently.
SHOP $190, matchesfashion.com and salomon.com
Its style rise has been meteoric.
Speaking of those cool kids, they started stocking up on Salomons just about three years ago, when the XT-6 landed in more fashion-focused stores in a deliberate attempt to find a crossover market. The play worked. It's hard to articulate what exactly makes a sneaker feel like the perfect thing at the perfect time, but the combination of the XT-6's sleek, technical aesthetic with its sometimes-wild colorways and a general hunger for the new and novel created a sort of alchemical reaction. People suddenly freaking loved it. The shoe landed on the feet of celebrities and influencers and everyone else with a burning desire to catch the next wave of sneaker culture. Sometimes, that sort of thing leads to a flame-out. In the XT-6's case, though, it's still going strong.
SHOP $190, matchesfashion.com and salomon.com
It's exactly the thing to liven up your sneaker rotation.
So, back to that potential style rut we were talking about earlier. The XT-6 is built for performance, sure, but it also happens to be built to downright electrify your vibe. Taken out of the context of trail running, it becomes a piece that can work with any fit, whether your personal style leans more low-key (try it with washed-out jeans, a boxy tee, and a light jacket for an advanced riff on normcore) or more fashion-forward (cropped black trousers, a crisp white shirt, and an oversized black blazer sounds just right). By being just different enough, it manages to feel at-home just about everywhere. That's not an easy thing to do, but the XT-6 manages it with ease. Isn't that something you want at your disposal? Plus, you know, you could go running in it.
SHOP $190, matchesfashion.com and salomon.com
