New Balance sees copying of their classic running shoe in Golden Goose’s kicks

The subject of New Balance’s allegations against Golden Goose: the 990. File photo: Zhao Xiangji for SOTD

Old-school, positively normcore New Balance 990 running shoe simply can’t escape the spotlight. Not long after New Balance Malaysia recalled their stocks of the said sneaker due to “inaccurate information” transmitted to customers, the 990 range is back in the news. This time, at the US District Court, where the Boston-based shoe maker has filed a complaint against Italy’s Golden Goose (GG) for designs that apparently “foster a perceived association between its products and New Balance (NB) in the minds of consumers”. The Golden Goose sneaker identified is the Dad-Star, which first appeared in 2020. Even the naming of the shoe, New Balance asserted, tries to associate the Golden Goose model with the 990 range, which the American brand claims is popularly known as the original “dad shoe”. In court papers, New Balance called Golden Goose a “serial copyist”,

To illustrate the similarities between NB’s 990 range and the GG Dad-Star, the former presented a diagram comparing six versions to the single shoe of the latter. While the Dad-Star is not an amalgamation of the half dozen looks, it is not hard to see the resemblance(s) or discern the aesthetical comparability. NB stated in their filing that “although the versions have some design differences, all of them… use a common design language to incorporate a particular 990 ‘look’ that consumers exclusively associate with New Balance as source.” It also shared that through the years, they were “careful not to change the design too much from one version to the next” so as to maintain a “distinctive ‘look.’” One NB fan told us, “I have all the styles identified here; I like them because they have an unmistakable look about them—not trendy-looking yet otaku-cool.”

Six New Balance 990 variations versus the Golden Goose Dad-Star. Photo: US district court

The New Balance 990 first appeared in 1982, the same year that Nike launched the Air Force 1. Two of them, however, can’t be any more different, in both looks and the sport which they were designed for. The 990 is for running while Nike’s is for basketball. At the time of its sale, the NB990 was considered expensive. The first model was priced at a grand US$100 (Nike’s popular running shoe Pegasus, launched a year later, was selling for merely US$50!). Despite the high price, the 990 took off and was popular on the track, as well as off. Many runners still swear by it. While the silhouette has, through the decades, been tweaked to reflect consumer tastes, as well as new shoe-making technologies, the 990 has remained appealing without being too self-conscious about it.

In their filing with the US district court, New Balance insisted that Golden Goose not only puts an end to the sale and the marketing of the Dad-Star, but also to surrender all the profits gained from the sale of the contentious sneaker. This is—even without resorting to a calculator—going to be a more-than-substantial figure for New Balance since the Dad-Star, as shown on the high-end Golden Goose website, is priced from US$690 up, or at least triple what it would cost to buy a ‘Made in US’ version of the 990. (We are not including other series developed in collaboration with brands such as Miu Miu and Junya Watanabe.) While the 990 largely appeals to a very specific type of sneakerhead, the attention it has generated this past weeks may arouse genuine curiosity the shoes, and hence interest. This might be New Balance’s best move yet.