Ye took Foam Runners to Astroworld seven months before they dropped

Travis Scott saved his surprise for the home crowd. At Astroworld in Houston on 9 Nov 2019 he brought Ye out for Follow God and Can’t Tell Me Nothing, Hypebeast reported. Blue hoodie, navy joggers, the glossy oversized gilet. The news was lower down: white, holed, one piece of foam, and nobody in that crowd could buy a pair.

It was the Foam Runner, and it wouldn’t be on sale for another seven months. Ye had spent that week pitching the shoe as where Yeezy was headed. At Astroworld he didn’t pitch it at all. He just performed in it.

North first, then a product launch

It wasn’t the shoe’s first outing: North West wore the first pair in June 2019. By September Hypebeast had a closer look: all white, a single piece, lattice cut-outs down the sides, and a sole that flowed into the upper like a 700 midsole.

Then came Fast Company’s Innovation Festival. Days before Houston, Ye and his design director Steven Smith held the shoe up the way, in Complex’s words, Steve Jobs would present a new iPhone. Ye said Yeezy would be “farming and going seed to sole”, with its own foam made from algae. The pairs in his hands? They’d been made in Atlanta, he said, and Hypebeast wrote it all down.

Smith later told Complex the look came out of a series of mockups he’d done a year earlier, and that a young adidas designer finished it. The Croc comparisons didn’t bother him.

“It looks nothing like anything before it.” Steven Smith, Complex

June 2020: Ararat

On 26 Jun 2020 Yeezy Supply shock-dropped the Foam Runner in its first colourway, Ararat. It’s a name with a story, and Complex explained it: Mount Ararat is the largest national symbol in Armenian culture, and the colourway was named for Kim Kardashian’s Armenian heritage. The retail foam was made with algae in the United States, Complex reported.

What didn’t change was the nickname. People had been calling it the Yeezy Croc since the first photos, and they didn’t stop when it dropped. It sold out anyway.