Diemme and Très Bien Burn Through Their Last Yard of Silver Mesh

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• A Sixth Chapter Between Two Worlds
• Anatomy of the Bardolino Sport
• The Last of the Silver Mesh
• Where to Cop

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Diemme and Très Bien have been talking to each other for the better part of a decade now, and the Bardolino Sport is what that conversation sounds like in its sixth round. The new low-top, built for Diemme’s SS26 collection, marks the sixth formal collision between the family-run Italian hiking-boot maker and the Malmö menswear retailer that helped define what “Scandinavian taste” even means to a global sneaker audience.

The pairing makes sense on paper in a way a lot of brand collides don’t. Diemme builds everything — boots, hikers, low-tops — at one family factory in Onè di Fonte, a small town in Italy’s Dolomite foothills that’s been the spiritual home of handmade outdoor footwear for centuries. Très Bien, founded in 2006 by brothers Simon and Hannes Hogeman alongside childhood friends Björn Lindén and Jakob Törnberg, built its reputation doing the opposite kind of work: curating other people’s output with enough precision that an unassuming shop in southern Sweden became one of the most influential menswear retailers in Europe, eventually launching its own in-house line and a steady run of collaborations with brands like Tricker’s and Mark McNairy. Where Diemme supplies the craft, Très Bien supplies the editing — and six collaborations in, that division of labor has produced a genuine running line rather than a one-off marketing moment.

That history runs deeper than most collaborative footwear partnerships get to claim. Diemme’s own collaboration archive lists multiple prior Très Bien projects, including a previous holiday-edition release, alongside the brand’s other long-running design partners like White Mountaineering and JJJJOUND. Each entry in that archive tends to reinterpret an existing Diemme silhouette through a different lens rather than inventing something from scratch, and the Bardolino Sport follows that same pattern: take a shoe already in the lineup, strip it down to a single idea, and execute that idea with more material discipline than a standard seasonal colorway would call for.

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The Bardolino itself is already a fixture of Diemme’s lineup: a low-top shoe built around a relaxed, sporty silhouette that trades the brand’s mountaineering bulk for something closer to an day trainer. Diemme has described the standard Bardolino as rooted in everyday movement, designed to offer a softer, more flexible feel while still carrying the understated technical detailing that separates the brand from a generic fashion sneaker. The Sport version sharpens that idea further, pitched explicitly as a shoe meant to move between city sidewalks and more active settings without asking the wearer to change anything about how they dress.

For this release, that translates into a tightly controlled grey-on-grey palette. The upper combines premium grey nappa leather with soft grey suede, with silver mesh panels, reflective piping, and matching silver laces doing the work of breaking up the monochrome without introducing an actual second color. A breathable mesh tongue and a Cordura heel panel round out the upper, leaning the shoe’s detailing toward performance footwear even as the silhouette stays firmly in lifestyle territory.

Underfoot, Diemme paired the upper with a Vibram Roots 826K sole running an XS TREK compound, the kind of grippy, durable unit you’d expect from a brand whose entire reputation was built on boots meant to survive mountain terrain. A cushioned midsole engineered to absorb roughly 15% more shock than standard EVA backs that up with everyday comfort, and the shoe ships with two lace options — a tonal polyester pair and the reflective silver laces shown on the retail samples — for anyone who wants to dial the shine up or down. Notably, the construction skips metal hardware entirely, which Diemme says contributes to a softer, more flexible feel than the standard Bardolino offers.

huh

The detail that actually makes this release worth a second look isn’t the silhouette or the sole unit — it’s the material story buried in the product copy. Diemme has confirmed that this drop marks the final use of this specific silver mesh, a material that has since gone out of production entirely. Once this run sells through, the exact fabric on this shoe simply won’t exist for either brand to use again.

That’s a meaningfully different proposition than the usual collaboration math of limited sizing and short runs. Plenty of capsule releases are scarce by design — restricted production numbers, retailer exclusivity, a deliberately small drop. This one is scarce by circumstance: the input itself is gone, which means the Bardolino Sport isn’t just this season’s version of a recurring collab, it’s a hard stop on one specific material era of the Diemme-Très Bien relationship. For a partnership six collaborations deep, ending a chapter on a now-unobtainable fabric gives the release a tidier sense of closure than most seasonal drops bother with.

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The Diemme x Très Bien Bardolino Sport is exclusive to Très Bien, priced at €399 and available in men’s EU sizing from 40 to 47. It’s listed under Diemme’s own site as well, filed alongside the rest of the Bardolino family and the brand’s other current collaborations, including its recent JJJJOUND and Sunflower projects.

Given the silver mesh’s confirmed retirement, this is one of the rarer cases where “cop it before it’s gone” isn’t just a marketing line — once Très Bien and Diemme sell through this specific colorway, the material conversation between the two brands moves on to whatever comes next in collaboration number seven. For a release built almost entirely around restraint — one silhouette, one palette, one now-extinct fabric — that’s a fitting way for this particular chapter to close.