KITH'S SALOMON XT EVO SWAPS MESH FOR A TPU SHELL

Kith is not putting a new colorway on an old Salomon shoe this Friday. The XT EVO keeps the XT 6's sole unit and throws out everything above it, replacing the familiar trail mesh with a molded TPU shell built specifically for this collaboration. Two colorways drop August 7 at 11am EST, CET, GMT and JST through Kith shops, Kith.com and the Kith App, and the construction is the actual story, not the release calendar.

The Upper Is Liquid Rubber, Not Just Trail Mesh

Salomon and Kith built the XT EVO's upper from liquid rubber over breathable mesh, then wrapped a sizable TPU shell around the lower half of the shoe. The shell's molded lines give way to diamond pattern detailing underneath, a construction choice that adds real armor to a silhouette Salomon has otherwise kept soft sided since the XT 6 launched. Salomon's pull lacing system carries over, though the tongue and laces sit slightly toward the inside of the foot rather than dead center, a small adjustment that changes how the shoe locks down.

None of that upper exists on the standard XT 6. Kith and Salomon kept the tooling underneath because it already works and spent the redesign budget entirely on the part of the shoe you can see and feel.

Ronnie Fieg Has Now Reworked Three Salomon Soles This Year

The XT EVO is not Kith's first Salomon project of 2026. Ronnie Fieg's team released the Kith Salomon XT 4K and a new XT VYGR 2 on February 6 at 200 dollars each, building on a 1994 Adventure 7 Boot reference. Six months later, the XT EVO takes the opposite approach, starting from the XT 6's sole and building an entirely new upper rather than reviving an archive silhouette.

That is a real pattern across a single year of output. Kith is not defaulting to easy archive reissues with Salomon. Half of its 2026 output revives a specific 1994 boot, and the other half designs a shoe that did not exist on Salomon's own line sheet before this collaboration.

Fieg's team is running that same obsessive construction standard outside footwear too. The same year Kith engineered a TPU shell for a trail sneaker, it also opened a London burger bar sourcing Wagyu from a single Suffolk farm and put its ice cream program through an actual Japanese tea ceremony framing for a matcha collaboration. Material sourcing is the constant across Kith's categories, whether the material is TPU, beef, or tea.

The XT ICONS reissue Salomon runs on its own, four Sportstyle reissues including the XT 6 and XT 4 OG, keeps its lead colorway at 185 dollars with no molded shell and no collaboration premium attached. That is the baseline the XT EVO's price has to beat.

$225 Puts the XT EVO Above Solo Salomon Sportstyle

The XT EVO carries a 225 dollar price tag, the same number a non Kith colorway of the shoe has already surfaced at overseas, which tells you the collaboration premium here is closer to zero than the usual Kith markup against that 185 dollar solo baseline.

Kith already confirmed the &Kin Fall 2026 launch details for New York, Paris, London and Tokyo, so the open questions were never about where or when. They were about whether a molded TPU shell on a trail silhouette actually changes how the shoe performs off the sole unit alone, and the diamond pattern reinforcement underneath the shell suggests Salomon treated this as a genuine structural update, not a cosmetic one.

Two Colorways, Zero Overlap With Each Other

One XT EVO colorway runs black with yellow, red and blue accents across the TPU shell, a racing palette that reads closer to motorsport than trail running. The second stays grey and purple, a quieter build that puts the molded shell's shape ahead of its color. Kith rarely ships two colorways at true opposite ends of a palette on the same release date, and doing it here forces buyers to pick a lane rather than default to whichever pair looks safest.

The XT EVO is worth the 225 dollars if the TPU shell holds up the way a trail shoe's upper needs to, because Kith and Salomon spent this collaboration's entire budget on that shell instead of a new sole or a marketing campaign. Two colorways, one new upper, and a price that matches the shoe's own solo market value rather than inflating it, that is the actual verdict on a Friday release everyone already knew was coming.