My Asics Gel Lyte III “Burger” Custom is far from original. It’s not hard to tell where I got the idea from if you know a little bit about sneakers. The End Clothing x Saucony Shadow 5000 is probably the most prominent Saucony collaboration, and there were a lot of them recently. I really liked the concept and the execution of the whole project but I wasn’t a huge fan of the silhouette and decided to pass.
I thought about doing a custom to pay homage to the design but I wasn’t sure which shoe to use. When I saw the Asics Gel Lyte III “Honey Mustard” from the “Outdoor Pack” I knew I had my base. I decided to wait until the shoes went into clearance so I wouldn’t have to worry as much about messing up the shoe.
Lucky for me I got a pair for free when I attended an Asics Event in London in February. The event celebrated the launch of Asics Tiger as well as the Gel Lyte III’s 25th anniversary. I also had the opportunity to interview the designer of the GLIII, Shigeyuki Mitsui (which you can read here though only in German).
I still had some Angelus leather paint over from my last custom and decided to use that on suede rather than getting suede dye. It ended up looking better than on my “Heritage” customs (you can read about them here) because I didn’t have to use as many layers of paint but the suede does lose its soft touch if you don’t dilute the paint.
I used dark red on the mid-panel for the meat, green on the heel for lettuce and pink on the Asics strings and laces for bacon. The rest of the already wheat upper acted as the burger bun.
As I mentioned before this idea wasn’t original. I used an already existing design and put it on a different shoe but it gave me a chance to work on my customising skills and try out a few things that I can use in future projects.
Max the Black does Cardiff 