Montreal’s Shh Studio Puts a Different Lace on Puma’s Scream

JJJJound and Puma bring the suede Laced Mostro to Japan, giving the 1999 hybrid another subtle pass.

 

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Puma’s Mostro has spent the better part of two years being handed to almost everyone with a fashion following, from A$AP Rocky’s 3D printed slip on to Louis Gabriel Nouchi’s ballet flat rework. JJJJound, the Montreal studio run by Justin Saunders, took its own pass at the silhouette in the summer of 2025, a project now getting a formal push into the Japan market with an August 1 release window. The shoe is the version JJJJound calls the Laced Mostro, a suede reworking of the 1999 original that swaps the model’s signature forefoot strap for a conventional eyelet and lace setup.

Puma built the Mostro by grafting a 1960s sprint spike onto an 1980s surf shoe, and the result has never looked like it belongs to a single decade. JJJJound’s read on it strips that oddity down rather than amplify it, which tracks with a studio that started as a design blog cataloguing minimal object.

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The Laced Mostro keeps the model’s spiked black outsole and low slung sil intact, but almost everything above the midsole has been rebuilt. Both colorways, Dark Chocolate and Deep Navy, use a premium suede upper paired with a leather tongue and a butter yellow leather sockliner, a detail tying the two pairs together despite their different base tones. Puma’s Formstrip, usually a raised rubber or plastic marking, gets reduced to plain tonal stitch across the side panel so it barely registers at a glance. JJJJound’s own branding shows up only on the heel counter and insole, printed rather than embossed.

The forefoot strap that has defined nearly every Mostro since 1999 is gone here, replaced by round, off white poly laces run through webbing eyelets. It is a small mechanical change that reads as a large stylistic one, since the strap has always been the detail that made the Mostro look like a spec ops surf boot rather than a sneaker. Lace it up instead and the shoe settles into a slouchy suede lifestyle runner, still spiked underfoot but calmer everywhere else.

This was also the pair’s first meeting on the Mostro specifically. JJJJound and Puma had previously worked together twice on the brand’s Suede Classic, both times as China exclusive drops in late 2022. The Mostro project marked their first collaboration in roughly three years and their first crack at a more architecturally unusual silhouette than the Suede.

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None of this arrived in a vacuum. JJJJound spent the first half of 2025 moving through a run of footwear partners that included New Balance, adidas, Vans, and Asics, landing on the Puma Mostro only after reworking the Asics Gel Quantum 360 1 AMP and a Gel Kayano 14. That pace has become the studio’s signature almost as much as its aesthetic, a steady rotation of established silhouettes handed back with the loudest branding sanded off. The Puma Mostro project stood out within that run precisely because the Mostro itself resists sanding down. Where the Suede or the Gel Kayano are already understated shapes, the Mostro is built to be seen from across a room, which made JJJJound’s restraint on this one read as a more deliberate contrast than usual.

At Western retail, the Laced Mostro landed through a mix of JJJJound’s own site and a short list of stockists that included Kith, Sneakersnstuff, BSTN, and Maxfield, alongside Puma’s own flagship stores. That distribution pattern, a hybrid of direct-to-consumer drop and boutique wholesale, has become fairly standard for JJJJound’s footwear work and gives some indication of how the Japan market rollout is likely to be structured, even without confirmed local retail partners named yet.

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Puma has treated the Mostro less like a single shoe and more like a design prompt since bringing it back for a 25th anniversary relaunch in 2024. That relaunch produced everything from A$AP Rocky’s Disccord lacing system to a caged Gabbia build to a mary jane leaning Mostro Fey, and JJJJound’s version sits at the restrained end of that spectrum by design. Alongside the two public Laced Mostro colorways, JJJJound and Puma also produced a third pairing in a two tone dark green and cream finish with the original strap closure intact, kept as a friends and family piece with no planned public release.

A separate JJJJound and Puma Mostro pairing surfaced not long after, tied to Puma’s Spring/Summer 2026 Collectors Edition and built in a deep green suede. That version reintroduces velcro straps with silver hardware rather than laces, which makes it a useful contrast piece: two studios, one shape, and two entirely different conclusions about whether the strap was ever the problem in the first place. The Laced Mostro argues it was. The Collectors Edition suggests the strap just needed better hardware.

A Japan market release notice points to an August 1 rollout for the original Laced Mostro pack through regional Puma retail, arriving well after the shoe’s mid 2025 debut through JJJJound’s own site and select Western stockists. Pricing at that original release sat at 160 dollars USD per pair, and Japan pricing has not been independently confirmed at the time of writing.