Behold! A snowboard boot that helps you ride like a pro and look like a hipster

Behold the first-ever content series between Digital Trends and The Manual. The Bromance has begun. Since there are a plethora of brands out there melding style and technology, we thought we would take this opportunity to profile one item per week for the month of October, breaking them down and offering each of our unique takes on their tech and style components. For the whole series, click here; for snowboard boots that will make you ride like a pro and look like a Brooklyn Hipster, read on …

The Manual:

Snowboarding boots can get pretty hectic in the design area. There are frightful neon colors, busy graphics and too many buckles, nobs, belts and velcro. So when we saw these new simple and minimal Ion Leather boots from Burton we felt like our eye’s just received a massage. Better yet, the leather comes from one of our favorite boot companies, Red Wing. We are sure ole Charles Beckman, who founded Red Wing in 1905 for loggers, farmers and miners never had a clue his brand would be gliding down pristine slopes, but we guarantee this slick technology melded with leather from his factory would have him smiling.

Digital Trends:

“Gliding down pristine slopes”? The Manual appears to have mistaken the Ion’s for ice skates. These things rank near the very top of Burton’s performance boot line, which ranks near the very top of snowboarding’s most bad-ass footwear. Simply put, if you ride well enough to worry about things like rebound and response in your boot’s tongue material, or a perfect balance between low center of gravity sole design and impact dispersal, then you’ll want to check these boots out.

If you like to try tricks in the terrain park, the Ion Leather can help you add 180 degrees of rotation to your 360. If you like to bomb untracked powder, the Ion Leather will let you open the throttle without coming apart at the seams.

As for Charles Beckman, he probably never expected that Red Wing boots would become the defacto foot uniform for every artisanal pencil shaper or mustache waxer this side of Brooklyn’s Bushwick (which is that side of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, if you’re wondering) either. The fact that his leathers now adorn some of snowboarding’s most exciting shredders like Mark McMorris and Mikkel Bang is just one more instance of modern whiz-bangery that would leave the poor old guy scratching his noggin.