Puma made a shoe celebrating BMW’s bizarre fabric-covered concept car

Puma has collaborated with Designworks — BMW’s for-hire design agency — to make a new shoe that pays homage to one of the stranger concept cars of the last decade.

The X-CAT DISC takes styling cues from BMW’s GINA Light Visionary Model that debuted in 2008, a roadster with a seamless, silvery fabric pulled taut over a substructure where you’d normally expect metal panels. The car was ridiculous in all the ways you want a true concept car to be: when the swing doors opened, the cloth simply bunched up; when the headlights weren’t needed, they disappeared behind cloth “eyelids.” Whether you liked the design, you had to give credit to BMW for doing something radically different.

(BMW)

The shoe might not be quite that revolutionary, but I kind of see what they were going for — the bulk of the exterior is a solid, uninterrupted silvery material with ridges evoking the lines of the GINA. The “DISC” in the shoe’s name comes from the fact that it uses Puma’s DISC system, which uses a rotating disc in place of shoelaces. That sounds unnecessary, but then again, so are the Nike Air Mags, and those exist.

Puma’s collaboration with BMW isn’t unusual: the brand has long worked with both BMW and Ferrari to slap badges on shoes. At least this one actually tries to look a little bit like a car — if, in fact, you want shoes that look like cars. I’d probably still take the actual GINA instead.