New Balance Put Real Meteorites In Sneakers, And They’re Super Expensive”

For sneakerheads who want a piece of a space artifact, Netflix teamed up with New Balance to create a custom pair of Dibiasky 550 shoes that are adorned with meteorite crystals. The market for items from the space is huge, and people are willing to fork hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their hands on them. From decades-old spaceship processors to moon dust, there is a huge variety of items that space enthusiasts can spend a fortune on.

For example, luxury gadget-modder Caviar recently launched a custom iPhone 13 Pro under its “Parade Of The Planes Titanium” series that came embellished with meteorite fragments. Of course, it cost north of $13,000 to own, thanks to its exquisite design that used blackened titanium and even had a one-minute tourbillon mechanical watch at the back. But space articles are often used for charitable efforts, too. A plush puppy toy called Jude recently journey into space with the Inspiration4 mission, while the sale proceeds from its replicas supported cancer research efforts. The next in line is a pair of sneakers.

To mark the release of its latest space apocalypse film called Don’t Look Up, Netflix roped in Manchester-based sneaker designer MattB Customs to create a custom New Balance 550 adorned with meteorite fragments. The ‘cosmic sneakers’ have a cosmic price, too, as they are expected to fetch north of $13,000. The name of the kicks is quite a mouthful too: Don’t Look Up Dibiasky New Balance 550 featuring Pallasite Meteorite. For the unaware, Pallasite meteorites are quite rare and their composition is predominantly an iron-nickel metal with a translucent gem-like texture of olivine crystal that looks quite stunning. Pallasites meteorites are said to have come into existence when the universe was in its early stages of formation.

Fly Sneakers Made From Flying Space Objects

As for the pricey Netflix-commissioned New Balance sneakers, the fragments of pallasite meteorite it comes adorned with are 4.5 billion years old. The meteorite is said to have been discovered sitting on the river bed in Russia’s Magadan river. Interestingly, the 12-megaton Tunguska explosion event of 1908 that flattened a nearly 2,000 square kilometers area in the Eastern Siberian Taiga of Russia is also generally attributed to a meteor airburst. NASA is also preparing defense strategies to avert such cataclysmic impact events in the future. The agency recently launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft last month to check if colliding a man-made object with an asteroid could be a successful defense strategy.

Circling back to the sneakers, the Seymchan meteorite fragments used to decorate them were cut using a high-pressure water jet within millimeter accuracy to blend seamlessly with the design. A total of 34 meteorite fragments went into making the New Balance sneakers. However, there’s another huge catch here. Only a single pair of these meteorite-styled New Balance Dibiasky 550s exists, which means buyers need a whole lot of luck and a wad of cash to buy them. The shoes go under the Sotheby’s auction hammer on December 17. Proceeds from the sale will go to the World Wildlife Fund towards negating the human impact on Earth’s environment.

Source: Sotheby’s

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