Rosalia, Josh Allen, Cooper Flagg, and IU Are the New Faces of New Balance's 990v7

New Balance confirmed its global campaign for the Made in USA 990v7 on October 22, and the casting is the story: Rosalia, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, Dallas Mavericks rookie Cooper Flagg, and K-pop star IU all front the launch under the banner "Dad's Back." Rosalia's piece of it is a studio shoot set inside a ballet studio, surrounded by dancers under soft lighting, styled in wide-leg denim and a pale pink top with the grey 990v7 doing the only heavy lifting the outfit allows. The shoe goes on sale globally November 6 on NewBalance.com and at select retailers for $200.

The 990v7 is the seventh generation of a line New Balance first launched in 1982, built this time around pigskin suede, mesh, and leather accents over an updated FuelCell midsole, ENCAP support, and a new TPU midfoot shank, all carrying the Made in USA designation that requires at least 70% domestic value, a small and shrinking category of the brand's US sales. None of that engineering is really what is for sale here. What is for sale is the idea that a $200 grey sneaker New Balance itself once joked was for dads can sit comfortably on an avant-garde Spanish pop star, an NFL MVP, a Duke-to-NBA rookie, and one of K-pop's biggest solo stars without any of them looking like they wandered into the wrong campaign.

That is the actual strategy, and it is a deliberately incongruous one: instead of picking a single face who already embodies the "dad shoe" cliche and leaning into the joke, New Balance scattered the casting across four audiences that rarely overlap and let the shoe be the only thing they have in common. A ballet studio, an NFL sideline, an NBA locker room, and a K-pop stage are not natural neighbors, which is exactly the point. When the product is the connective tissue instead of any one ambassador owning the message, the brand gets four separate cultural conversations running at once instead of one big campaign hoping to land everywhere, and "dad shoe" stops being an insult and starts being the whole joke New Balance is in on.

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Source: Footwear Magazine

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →