A Decade Into Their Dialogue, The Broken Arm and Salomon Trade the Trail for the Job Site

The Broken Arm and Salomon dress a mid-cut trail boot in cracked work-leather for a September 1 overseas release.

A pair of work boots that trace back to a chairlift, not a job site, is arriving on shelves outside Japan on September 1. The GROLLE is the newest handoff between Salomon and Paris concept store THE BROKEN ARM, tagged L45536400 and finished in a colorway the two are calling Black Olive, Peat, and Pumpkin Spice.

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Salomon spent seventy years building ski edges and trail runners before it ever thought about a runway. That changed in the Haut Marais district of Paris, where THE BROKEN ARM, a concept store and café opened in 2013 by Anaïs Lafarge, Romain Joste, and Guillaume Steinmetz, had already built a following for stocking labels like Jacquemus and Comme des Garçons alongside a café serving pastries to a Marais crowd. In 2015, a customer walked in asking for a pair of Salomon Snowcross boots, the neon trail model built for race-day view rather than city sidewalks. That single request became the seed of a formal proposal from the store to Salomon: treat the mountain shoes as fashion objects, not just gear. Salomon agreed, and the result project became the brand’s first real evidence that its footwear held value off the trail. The following year, Salomon stood up its dedicated Sportstyle division to build on that discovery, a unit that has since spun off connection with Palace Skateboards, MM6 Maison Margiela, and Boris Bidjan Saberi, but The Broken Arm remains the relationship credited with starting all of it.

A decade on, the two sides have kept refine the same idea rather than replace it. Each rel tends to take a mountain outline, tincture it for daily rotation, and leave its underlying hardware alone. That approach has produced a long line of collective footwear stretch from the original Snowcross rework through the Coverboot, a laceless clog built off a cross-country ski overshoe once favored by vineyard workers, to the Pastoral, a fur-trimmed hiking boot styled after the wardrobe of a nomadic shepherd. Each of those rel picked a specific, often unglamorous line of work or outdoor tradition and translated it into footwear without losing Salomon’s underlying trail hardware in the process. GROLLE continues that pattern, except this time the reference point is a work boot rather than a piece of ski or shepherding equipment.

 

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GROLLE borrows its shape from protective mid-cut work footwear: a raised toe box, a mudguard climb up the side, and a lacing system built to cinch tight the way an outdoor boot would. Underneath that shape sits trail-running architecture. The outsole runs Salomon’s Mud Contagrip compound, cut with deep, aggressive lugs meant to dig into soft ground and uneven surfaces rather than pavement. A single boot weighs 389 grams with an 11mm heel-to-toe drop, numbers that sit closer to a trail shoe’s spec sheet than a traditional leather boot’s. That contrast, a work boot’s profile  run on a trail shoe’s chassis, is the whole premise: neither side gets diluted to make room for the other.

The materials list backs that hybrid reading up. The upper mixes leather and rubber, the lining runs synthetic, and the insole is built from textile, a combination chosen for durable at the ankle and toe without adding the bulk of a true outdoor boot. That balance of protective shaping and lightweight internals is the same formula Salomon has leaned on across its Sportstyle line more broadly, whether on a trail runner recut for city pavement or, here, on a boot recut for a job site that neither brand actually expects the wearer to be standing on.

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The Black Olive leather upper arrives pre-cracked, a finishing technique meant to read as leather that has already logged years of wear rather than leaving that character to develop naturally. A Peat-colored rubber mudguard wraps from the toe across the side of the shoe, adding visible thickness and a second, contrasting material plane against the leather. Orange and pale pink stitching cuts across both, and a red Salomon wordmark sits on the lateral side as the loudest branding cue on the shoe.

The Broken Arm’s contributions show up in the smaller details rather than the base construction. A multi-tint pull tab sits at the boot’s opening for easier entry, and the tongue carries an embroidered rendering of the store’s broken-arm mark, the same reference to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculpture “In Advance of the Broken Arm” that gives the store its name. Regular fabric laces run through metal eyelet hooks rather than Salomon’s usual Quicklace speed-lacing system, a swap that pushes GROLLE further toward the tightening ritual of an actual outdoor boot and further from the brand’s sneaker-adjacent lifestyle models. It is a small structure choice, but a consistent one across the partnership: whenever The Broken Arm reaches for a heritage silhouette, the store tends to bring period-appropriate hardware along with it rather than default to whatever lacing system happens to be standard on a given Salomon platform that season.

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What keeps GROLLE from read as costume, a fashion store’s idea of a work boot wear shoe tech underneath, is that Salomon hasn’t swapped out any of its own fx lang to get there. The Mud Contagrip outsole is the same family of rubber the brand runs on shoes built for actual trail races, not a decorative reissue. That refusal to trade fx for surface decoration is the through-line The Broken Arm and Salomon have follow since the Snowcross convo a decade ago, and GROLLE readas the latest, most literal version of it: two category of footwear, mountain and manual labor, meeting in one boot without either one being asked to compromise.