Birkenstock’s Boston Rounds Out Its Fiftieth Year in Two JOURNAL STANDARD relume Exclusives

Dark Tea or Stone Blue, narrow fit, ¥24,200: BAYCREW’S autumn Boston arrives just as Birkenstock’s first clog closes out its fiftieth year.

Two shade and four sizes make up the entire run. JOURNAL STANDARD relume has put a bespoke Birkenstock Boston on sale for autumn/winter 2026, offering the clog in a soft brown called DARK TEA and a muted, faintly grey blue called STONE BLUE. Both tint are billed as exclusive to JOURNAL STANDARD and relume, both cost ¥24,200 including tax, and both land in the year the Boston turns fifty.

Signal. What happened: BAYCREW’S labels JOURNAL STANDARD and JOURNAL STANDARD relume released a bespoke Birkenstock Boston for autumn/winter 2026. Exact object: the Birkenstock Boston in narrow width, in DARK TEA and STONE BLUE, Birkenstock article number 1032795/27, ¥24,200 including tax, EU sizes 36 to 39. When and where: listicle as available in Japan as of October 11, 2026, through Rakuten Fashion and the Marui web channel, under both the JOURNAL STANDARD and relume shop names. Source: BAYCREW’S own product listings on Rakuten Fashion, buttressed by a Japan market release notice dated October 11. Why it matters: it extends a four-year run of JOURNAL STANDARD bespoke Birkenstocks into the Boston’s anniversary year, in which BEAMS has also issued its own edition of the clog.

BAYCREW’S retail copy fills in the rest. The upper and the footbed lining are natural leather over an EVA outsole, the pair is made in Germany, and the sole stands 1.5 centimeters tall. Sizing runs EU 36 to 39, roughly 23 to 25 centimeters in Japanese sizing, on Birkenstock’s narrow width only, and the listing files the shoe under women’s footwear. Listed weights climb from 418 grams at size 36 to 500 grams at size 39. Internally, DARK TEA is coded as brown and STONE BLUE as a second blue, labeled Blue A.

One line in the relume listing explains the double billing. It states that the pair is the same product, in the same sizes, as the version sold under the JOURNAL STANDARD name, with each shop assigning its own item number. In practice this is one shoe with two storefronts. DARK TEA is not new to the partnership either: the same shade was one of three colors, alongside Charcoal and Oyster, on the suede Solana slip-on that JOURNAL STANDARD carried as an exclusive in June.

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Karl Birkenstock introduced the Boston in 1976. In Germany it went out as the Kork-Clog, and in the United States it was sold as the Soft Clog, a name that pointed to how much quieter a cork-latex footbed was than the hard wooden soles most clogs rode on at the time. Medical staff were among its earliest adopters, drawn to a closed toe that held up through long shifts on hospital floors.

Fifty years on, the shape is close to unchanged. When Birkenstock CEO Oliver Reichert spoke to Esquire Australia about the anniversary this year, he called the 1976 launch “radical” for a unisex clog that left its natural materials on show. The company now lists the Boston as its first clog, and Birkenstock still builds it around the same cork, latex and jute footbed. The Boston also became a template inside the company, informing later clogs such as the Super Birki, Tokio, Naples, Amsterdam and Lutry, and feeding into the London, Birkenstock’s first fully closed shoe.

The milestone has sent the brand back into its archive. Birkenstock’s 2026 anniversary program, which also marks fifty years of the Milano sandal and forty of the London shoe, revived Boston colors first used briefly in 1977, among them an archive yellow, an archive denim blue and an archive mid green. Collaborators have moved in alongside. BEAMS put the fourth installment of its Bone Pattern series on a black smooth-leather Boston in March, launching the pair at BEAMS Harajuku on March 20 before a wider release two days later.

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The Boston is the newest entry in a partnership only four years old. JOURNAL STANDARD first worked with Birkenstock in 2022, choosing the Kyoto, a model that had launched just two years earlier, in a natural taupe over a grey sole. The Kyoto’s crossover upper borrows from the overlapping collar of a kimono and adjusts at two hook-and-loop points, an unusual pick for a first collaboration. That pair cost ¥22,000, ran in sizes 35 to 44 and reached stores nationwide in mid-June after an online preorder that opened on April 22.

The cadence has since quickened. Spring/summer 2026 brought a Zurich in a shade called Concrete Gray, carried by both JOURNAL STANDARD and relume at ¥22,000, with relume stocking a narrow-width cut. The Solana followed in June at the same price. Both were open sandals cut for warm weather. The Boston shifts the pairing into the colder half of the year: a closed-toe clog that Birkenstock itself pitches as a shoe for every season.

relume sits one step removed from its parent label. BAYCREW’S, the Tokyo retail group founded in 1977, spun the line out of JOURNAL STANDARD in 2009, according to the company’s own recruitment listings, and its stores now range from city centers to suburban shopping districts. In a May post on the BAYCREW’S store blog, relume’s own staff described the label’s bespoke program as clothing adults can adopt without effort, unusual without being difficult. A narrow-fit clog in two quiet colors sits squarely inside that description.

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Distribution, for now, runs online. The Japan market release notice points to two channels, Rakuten Fashion and the Marui web channel, and the relume listing on Rakuten showed every size from 36 through 39 in stock on October 11, with dispatch quoted at three to six days. The JOURNAL STANDARD listing carried both colors at the same price.

No dedicated press release from BAYCREW’S or Birkenstock had surfaced by October 11, and the listicle give no specific launch date beyond the season tag. No in-store date, overseas rel or price outside Japan has been announced.