Two Tiempo designs, one performance boot and one street shoe, take their cues from the mountains of Honduras and Liberia, the homelands of the label's founders.
The mountains of Honduras and Liberia have just landed on a football boot. That’s the idea behind the new Nike Tiempo Kids Of Immigrants collection, which pairs a pitch-ready boot with a street shoe and traces both back to the homelands of founders Daniel Buezo and Weleh Dennis.
The two designs are the Tiempo Maestro Elite and the Tiempo Streetgato. The Maestro is the serious one: the first footwear from this partnership built for competitive football. The Streetgato is its companion for streets and neighbourhood games. Both are yellow, and both carry terrain references that tie them to where the founders’ families come from. The global release is November 19.
A boot with a landscape on it
On the Maestro Elite, yellow fades into orange across the upper. Dark midfoot panels and raised contours echo the mountainous ground behind the project, so the boot reads a little like a relief map you can lace up. A small red Swoosh sits on the side, and Kids Of Immigrants lettering appears near the forefoot. That arrangement leaves room for both names without the oversized Swoosh that football boots from Nike usually wear.
Flip it over and the palette changes. The soleplate is iridescent, shifting through blue, purple and green beneath the warmer upper. FlyTouch leather handles touch and control, which gives the boot its performance backbone. The Maestro also gives the collaboration’s design ideas a new job: the founders’ references now live in footwear meant for play at the highest level.
The street version
The Streetgato goes somewhere looser. Yellow suede covers most of the upper, while dark protective overlays wrap the toe and heel, adding a layered shape around the base of the shoe. Red lining and neon green accents break up the yellow. A reduced Swoosh makes space for Kids Of Immigrants branding beside the laces, and shared logos turn up on the tongue and insoles.
It follows an earlier experiment. The pair’s T90 Mule, released earlier this year, turned the Total 90 into a backless shoe with nods to the chancla. That project also linked to Nike’s TOMA platform through The Hill, a Los Angeles experience centred on football and local youth. The new collection continues the relationship, this time with a street shoe next to a fully equipped performance boot.
Why yellow, and why football
Yellow is the thread. Kids Of Immigrants used warm gradient tones on its “Sundial” Air Max Sunder, a colour direction familiar from its earlier Nike work, and the same palette now carries into two very different constructions. The deeper link is the game itself. The collection builds on the founders’ shared interest in football as a way for people from different countries and generations to come together. Anyone who has watched a pickup match pull in a whole block, grandfathers included, will recognise the logic.
There’s craft in how that gets said, too. Nothing here relies on a slogan. The message sits in the colour shift, the raised ridges on the Maestro’s upper and the way each brand’s mark has been scaled down so the other can sit beside it. The Streetgato does the same with its dark guards and its flashes of red and neon green: a yellow shoe that keeps a few surprises tucked inside and around the edges.
Dates to note
Both pairs, the Nike Tiempo Maestro Elite x Kids Of Immigrants and the Nike Tiempo Streetgato x Kids Of Immigrants, reach the Kids Of Immigrants flagship in Los Angeles first, on November 7. An online release at kidsofimmigrants.us follows on November 17. The global launch comes on November 19 through SNKRS, nike.com and select retailers.
For a brand pairing that started with a backless Total 90 and has now arrived at a full elite boot, that’s a tidy progression: from the neighbourhood game to the highest level, in the same yellow.
Via DSCENE
