Monstrosity Reborn: The Puma Mostro Heralds a Bold New Era in Footwear

Mostro is the Italian word for ‘monster’, making it a fitting name for Puma’s freshly revived it-sneaker. “[Monster] came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure,” wrote scholar Susan Stryker in her seminal essay on the monster figure, ‘My Letter to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix’. “Or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx, who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts… Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary.”

The relaunched Puma Mostro, as presented at Puma’s recent pre-launch event in Paris, was in this way a true mostro - a herald of the extraordinary, a living beast of incongruous, unexpected parts. First launched in 1999, the spikily silhouetted sneaker was designed by Peter Schmidt, an eccentric German who more or less played the role of Victor Frankenstein in its birthing process: skulking through Puma’s graveyard-like archive of retired designs, digging up the body of an ‘60s sprint sneaker, then of an ‘80s surf shoes, and patchworking them together, supercharging them back to life to make one gloriously monstrous whole.

Puma’s relaunched Mostro series very much embraces this original spirit of hybridity and fusion. Soft, traditional suede collides with futuristic, craggy rubber, all criss-crossed with limber Velcro straps. For the Puma Mostro X Fey CNCPTS, a collaboration with the Boston-based label of the same name, the shoes metamorphosise, becoming almost more ballerina pump than sneaker, complimented by the glittery baby pink of the piece’s body. With the Mostro Boot, the shoes again distort and grow skywards, becoming half-sneaker and half-knee high. But everywhere, functionality and fashionable visuality meet in harmonic symbiosis – the shoes are all comfortably lightweight and breathable, but almost challengingly avant-garde and alien, almost as if made for stylish home-life on another planet.

Another form of hybridity centred at the event was one of eras, that classic blurring of the old into the new. On top of spotlighting these new designs – posed elegantly on mirrored metal podiums, illuminated by a retro-futuristic red glow – there was a space showing archival designs preserved in glass cases, a makeshift Puma museum. The relics lovingly display were the elemental components brought together in the Mostro, the visual and technical references needed for the new design’s genesis. Herald the 2006 Puma Alexander McQueen AMQ Anatomical Low Vein, whose simultaneously ergonomic and avant-garde cues the Mostro deftly emulates. Or the 2007 Zhongi Pleat, made with Japanese craft techniques whose ingenuity the Mostro seems to invoke. The show was truly one for Puma devotees, a referentially rich exploration of the brand’s iconic, cornucopia-like archive as well as a gesture to its spiky-soled next steps.

So, if to be a monster, a mostro, as Stryker reminds us, is to also “announce impending revelation’”(monstere, the etymological root of both “monster” and “mostro”, meant in Latin “to warn” or “foresee”), then the Mostro is truly a portent of things to come, a time-travelling gatekeeper of footwear’s futures. This was especially true when the design was first launched in 1999, but remains true today in our era of archival supremacy and out-there, unconventional shoes (Seán McGirr’s Hoof Boots for McQueen FW24, DSquaded2’s Sasquatch boots from the same season, Feng Chen Wang’s Stay Puft-esque Converse collabs). The Puma Speedcat, the brand’s hitherto cult classic, may have won its status through its reliable, unoffensive classicism. But the Mostro seems posed to snag this title for the exact opposite reasons: its confrontational and extraterrestrial chic, its unexpected and unrelenting futurity; in other words, its total monstrosity.