Forget Quiet Luxury, HOKA Is Doing Quiet Tech
I feel like I’ve written this a gazillion times through 2023, but here we go again: HOKA has released yet another wonderful sneaker. Big shock!
This time it’s in the form of the Transport shoe, a super sleek silhouette that’s the latest to join the ever-growing HOKA arsenal of impressively stylish sneakers.
As expected, it has everything you’d expect of the French footwear brand: a lightly chunky midsole, layered upper, plenty of tech, and a few pleasing extras.
As well as being tidy on the eye, the HOKA Transport is good to the environment, too, at least as far as the typically overabundant footwear market can be. It has an EVA midsole made of 30-percent sugarcane, for instance, which has a lower carbon footprint than conventional rubber, a Vibram N-OIL outsole, and a Cordura upper made entirely of recycled plastic bottles.
Not so bad for a shoe that's also pretty good-looking, eh?
Though this might all sound pretty techy, aesthetically the HOKA Transport looks anything but.
Truth is, for all of HOKA’s great sneakers this year (and believe me, there’s been a few), the Transport is maybe the sleekest shoe of the bunch. If anything, it’s surprisingly un-HOKA like, what with its toned-down upper and streamlined Vibram sole.
Maybe that's why HOKA's Transport sneaker had a fairly quiet launch earlier this year. These new iterations offer a good enough entry point into the style, though.
Over the years, HOKA has become synonymous with bold branding, loud colors, and show-stopping silhouettes, part of the sportswear giant's maximalist design ethos. This has yielded some satisfyingly sturdy shoes made tremendous by their huge soles and wildly creative uppers.
The Transport, though, is none of these. In fact, it’s the antithesis of them all and its beauty lies in its simplicity.
Arriving in three subtle colorways — "Dune," black, and grey — HOKA's 2024 iteration of the Transport bears a similar resemblance to HOKA’s recent Satisfy Running Clifton sneaker collaboration, which too bore a pull-tab lacing system as opposed to traditional laces.
It's interesting that HOKA is playing around with laces so often these days, what with the Ora Primo mule's incredibly thick and utterly useless ropes — they're stitched in place, so you can't actually tie them. Just for show!
Unlike Satisfy's HOKA sneakers, though, the Transport shoe is made for more than just running: it’s an all-round piece of footwear that bridges the worlds of lifestyle and performance in a fairly subtle manner, some of the more outré elements of the colorways aside (like the giant "HOKA" logo on the upper's side).
In 2023, quiet luxury might have been the phrase on everybody’s lips but when it comes to HOKA and its new Transport sneaker, I think the term quiet tech is a little more fitting, as surprising as that feels for a shoe from the company. better known for its screamingly loud silhouettes that speak for themselves (and then some). Don't 'cha think?
