Source: Superstar: Pushing Culture Forward for Fifty Years
It’s important to lead this story with a collage of Run DMC. It’s also important to note that adidas was the shoe tied most prominently into Hip-Hop. At least that’s from my perspective (I know Puma was there, but let’s leave brothers out of this). I remember being one of the first people to have a pair of Nike kicks in 7th grade. My mom took me to Goldsmith’s (an anchor department store) and she bought me two sweatsuits with two Nike shirts. I wore those items to death. I was a Nike head before there was a term for it. Living in Memphis it wasn’t a mecca of sneaker culture like the east coast, but because my music choice was Hip-Hop my dress and style was rooted in the culture.
Then Run DMC arrived. They dressed like dope boys and that resonated with me because of the street culture in Memphis. I have long explained that Memphis didn’t have gangs in the same way that other cities did. Memphis had drug families. The dealers went to high school with you and parked Corvettes and Blazers with I-ROC Rims on the Blazers in front of the school. They wore big gold chains, leather outfits and in Memphis, cowboy boots (or Jordans they were the only ones who could afford them). I couldn’t get down with the cowboy boots and leather, but I could rock with the sweatsuits and once I heard and saw Run-DMC I was sold on adidas and I stayed team adidas until I graduated from high school and entered the Navy.
The Superstar was my weapon of choice in daily wear, but on the court I was all Ewing Rivalry. In the Navy I became a sneaker free agent. I rocked Saucony, Ellesse, Nike (The Air Mowabb was my shoe of choice) and adidas took a back seat as Nike was producing models that are now considered classic. As I was leaving the Navy to play college basketball, Nike was becoming readily available in most sneaker accounts and in San Diego we had a Nike Factory store at the border. That store would allow you to trade in old kicks. My college teammates, would rip up their Reebok team shoes to go to Nike. Two of my teammates rocked the Jordan 11. I wore the Air LWP because I was a Memphis guy and Penny Hardaway rocked the shoe before he got his signature line.
I wouldn’t damage my team shoes in college since I was older and military. I stuck with my Reebok shoes because I couldn’t break rank. As I shifted from college ball after getting injured, into coaching and became a head high school coach, I immediately shifted back to my high school days and my teams wore the Bromium basketball shoe from adidas. When I didn’t wear a tie I coached in… adidas Superstars.
I would alternate my teams from adidas to Jordan Brand because I was a young coach who had sneaker connections and I could get shoes cheap. We wore Team Jordans one season and in my final season we wore Nike, but I was never crazy about Jordans or Nikes. I was always Team adidas. My first big date with my future wife was at Disneyland and we wore matching adidas apparel and sneakers… the Superstar basketball low. It’s appropriate that I start this post off with Run-DMC because whether adidas understands this or not, they wouldn’t still be around if Run-DMC hadn’t arrived (okay that’s extreme); but today’s Yeezy and Pharrell lines descend from that moment.
Over the last few years I didn’t get to wear many different brands because I created my own shoe companies and it would have been weird to wear another company’s shoes when I was designing and making my own clothing. That doesn’t mean I didn’t buy footwear. I always kept pairs of the shoes I sold as an e-commerce shop. Every now and then I’d break out a pair of Jordan 2s and from 2014 to 2016 as I stopped production on my ARCH line I shifted right back to adidas wearing the ZX Flux, NMD and UltraBOOST models at different times and mixing those in with a lot of different brands. My son, who is indifferent to sneakers, but has a huge collection by default, is a Jordan 1 head, but because his foot is the same size is mine he takes every shoe I own. He destroyed my Wool NMDs. Since 2017 this feel good narrative for adidas shifted. As every website touted the rise of adidas. I said in 2017 that adidas had a silhouette problem and that the shoes had lost all momentum in resale.
One of my biggest points of discussion on sneakers is that the resale of general release sneakers determines brand heat. In the last two years with over 10,000 shoes sold via third party I can count on one hand the general release models from adidas I’ve sold for over retail. Yeezy, Game of Thrones UB, and the NMD Japan, Berlin and Tokyo. The rest of my sales in adidas GRs were at clearance prices, bought at clearance prices.
adidas may be as popular as ever, but they have an issue. It’s the 50th Anniversary of the Superstar. While many people claim the Jordan 1 as the shoe that changed sneaker culture, I will always look at the Superstar as that shoe. In 2016 adidas had the momentum and the best marketing in the sneaker industry. Today Yeezy can be found in Finish Line the day after release and at City Gear NMDs can be found at 49.99. There hasn’t been a groundbreaking ad that changed the game lately, and the brand’s reliance on Yeezy has led to their flagship UB no longer being a flagship. The 2019 never took off and the brand has quickly moved on to 2020, but it looks the same.
They’ve added BOOST to the Superstar, they’ve added adiprene, Torsion, velvet, Gold chains, wings with Jeremy Scott and they’ve dropped the basketball version. The shoe has never really left the market and was one of the reasons that adidas grew so much over the last few years, but with it never leaving and always being here, it’s familiar. How can you celebrate 50 years of familiarity? What can adidas do to recapture their momentum while celebrating the foundation?
I know exactly what has to be done and I’m hoping the team at adidas does it and I get to relive my youth and introduce my son and daughter to the moments that have made me a lifelong lover of leather, suede and rubber combined in various colors made only to protect my feet, but in actuality the shoes helped to craft my identity and gave me confidence until I learned who I was. adidas created sneaker therapy and at 50 years I hope they tell the story correctly.