Bet that title has gone right over your head hasn’t it? I guess you could say it didn’t get a bite.
Fishing is one of the outdoor sports that has always seemed to be on the edge of getting fashionable, if you remember a few years ago everyone and their dog wanted a Patagonia SST jacket, we even had one on the cover of our 40th magazine. Perhaps it’s the high cost to entry, or maybe it’s that no brand in recent years has ever quite got a fishing inspired line right, they probably have but we can’t remember.
Anyway, if you’re a member of the club that thinks anglers should be more appreciated in the world of fashion, you should be excited by Merrell 1TRL’s new release titled ‘Fly Fisher: The Line That’s Never Straight’
Fly fishing, one of the more skilled variants of fishing, is in our view, the coolest kind of fishing. Something to do with whipping that line in and out in a hypnotic rhythmic fashion, it doesn’t even matter if you catch anything, everyone knows you’re king of the river.
Obviously whilst you’re partaking in the coolest form of fishing, you should give utmost priority to the quality of the rig you’re wearing, especially your footwear. Having soggy feet will almost certainly hinder the number of fish you catch. It’s worth noting that no one at Propermag has ever actually been fly fishing, but we’ve all agreed if we did go, we would want to be wearing a pair of shoes from this new Merrell 1TRL collection.
Three silhouettes have been casted for the collection, each having different attributes from the other, to give you the best chance of catching fish no matter the environment, whether you find yourself in a river, lake, pond, or bathtub.
The first shoe on the roster isn’t actually a shoe, it’s a boot. The Hydro Next Gen Boot to be exact. This boot is Merrell’s most progressive Hydro product to date utilizing a water-friendly Bloom Eva foam upper, providing a lightweight, waterproof and flexible high-performance fit. The Floatmax midsole, looks to be very cushioned and has the benefit of floating, should it come off whilst you’re fishing.
The next shoe is the one we’re most excited about. The Agility Peak 5 Zero GTX Zip Off. As the name suggests it features a sort of GORE-TEX jacket for the shoe, so if you’ve got to wade deep, you can zip this on and you’ll stay dry. It’s like getting two pairs of shoes for one, and we like that. If you look underneath the shoes GORE-TEX jacket you’ll find a tasty looking trail-running silhouette, featuring a Vibram Megagrip Outsole and another one of those Floatpro Foam midsoles. As well as another removable feature – an EVA foam footbed. This shoe/boot really is like a transformer.
The final suspect of the three-piece-footwear-collection is the Hut Moc 2 Packable Zip Off. This rendition of the Hut Moc sees it come in a showerproof form, constructed largely of recycled materials, and as always with the packable version, the two shoes zip together. The Bloom performance midsole foam is made of 10% algae biomass, doesn’t get more outdoors-y than that, does it?
We’ve banged on a lot about fishing in this article, but we’re pretty sure you don’t need to hold an angling license to purchase any of these, they’ll probably be really good for just knocking about town during the wet months. The imagery for this campaign is some of the best we’ve seen in a little while, so feast your eyes on that if you haven’t already.
The shoes are available to buy from Merrell’s website and select global retailers. A global launch is to follow in the coming weeks.
