Tyler, The Creator Turns a 1970s Basketball Vent Into His Next Converse Statement

The 1908 Pro Leather and Jogger drop July 16, giving Tyler’s archive-digging Converse partnership its most recognizable resound yet.

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• A Deep Cut Program Grabs a Household Name
• What Actually Changed on the Shoe
• The Jogger Rides Along, Shh
• Where This Sits in a Complicated Year for Converse

For the past few seasons, Tyler, The Creator’s archival work with Converse has favored the obscure. The Naut-1 deck shoe. The Coach Jogger. A Bronco Boot most casual shoe buyers had never heard of before he pulled it out of storage. His “1908” program, named for the year Converse was founded, has functioned less like a typical bind calendar and more like a personal dig through the brand’s back catalog, surfacing shapes that never got much attention the first time around.

The new release breaks that pattern in one obvious way: everybody knows the Pro Leather. Worn by Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird when it was Converse’s flagship basketball shoe through the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Pro Leather is about as recognizable a silhouette as the brand has in its archive, a rare case of Tyler reaching for something iconic rather than obscure. Under his GOLF le FLEUR* label, it becomes the fourth model in the 1908 series and, so far, the one built to travel furthest outside the sneaker collecting crowd that has followed the earlier drops closely.

 

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Early looks surfaced the way most of Tyler’s reveals do lately, through his own social feed and a scattering of retailer sightings overseas, before Converse confirmed the collection outright on July 13. The shoe carries a July 16 release date, sold through Converse’s own channels and GOLF le FLEUR*, with wider retail distribution expected to follow.

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The Pro Leather’s basic shape survives the redesign, but almost every detail around it has been pushed further than the original. Tyler widens the toe box and adds oversized eyelet rows paired with noticeably thick laces, moves that shift the shoe’s proportions away from its basketball roots and toward the wider, skate-influenced silhouettes that have defined his design language since his earliest Converse work. The most visible change lands at the toe: rather than the clean rubber cap the Pro Leather has always worn, this version stamps in an oversized embossed star, exaggerating a design element that used to sit quietly on the shoe’s side panel.

Two colorways have been officially confirmed for release. A “White” pair pairs a white leather upper with green suede overlays, while an “Amazon” version flips that formula, wrapping the upper in green suede with white leather accents and finishing it off with purple laces. Both retail at $95 and carry gold foil GOLF le FLEUR* branding across the tongue and side panels, a detail that ties the shoe back to Tyler’s label even where the silhouette itself is doing most of the visual work. A third colorway in red has also surfaced in early coverage of the project, though Converse has not attached a style code, price, or confirmed release plan to it as of publication.

Underfoot, the sole keeps a tan gum finish across all versions, a detail meant to nod toward the shoe’s original 1970s construction even as everything above it gets reworked for a very different customer than the one Converse had in mind fifty years ago.

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The Pro Leather isn’t traveling alone. Alongside it, Converse is dropping two new colorways of the 1908 Jogger, the retro running silhouette Tyler first brought back earlier this year with a leather rebuild of what had originally been a nylon design. Both new pairs continue that leather treatment: a white version finished with baby blue branding on the side panel and off-white laces, and a black version that keeps things more restrained, with white logo hits on the tongue and side panel standing in as the only real contrast. Both retail at $115 and share the July 16 release date with the Pro Leather.

Where the Pro Leather is built to make a statement with its star toe and bold color pairings, the Jogger plays a shh role in the drop, offering a more straightforward, everyday option for anyone drawn to the merge’s archive story without wanting the loudest version of it on their feet.

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The timing carries a bit of extra weight given what else has been happening around Converse this year. The brand’s most prominent basketball ambassador, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, moved his footwear deal to Nike in 2026, a departure that left a visible gap in Converse’s roster of athlete and celebrity partners. Tyler’s continued output, arriving on a steady cadence through both the 1908 program and his broader GOLF le FLEUR* work, has effectively kept the brand’s play pipeline full in the meantime.

There was also reason to wonder, going into this year, whether Tyler’s shoe work with Converse might slow down at all. Back in December, he used his own social feed to announce that GOLF le FLEUR*’s seasonal apparel collections were wrapping up, with what he called Season 4 serving as the label’s final full collection. The label itself isn’t closing, and accessories and select collaborations were always expected to continue, but the announcement left some uncertainty about what would happen to the footwear side of the partnership specifically. The Pro Leather and Jogger drop answers that question directly. Whatever shape le FLEUR* takes going forward on the apparel side, its shoe partnership with Converse is still very much active, and reaching for one of the brand’s most recognizable archive pieces suggests Tyler isn’t done treating Converse’s history as raw material for whatever comes next.