The Room That Smelled Like a New Sneaker

Adidas Originals has been part of Berlin’s cultural fabric long enough that the trefoil stopped feeling like branding somewhere around 2005 and started feeling like neighborhood. The Represent event was the label doing what labels do when they want to remind you they belong—live music, a good room, the whole ritual of a brand inserting itself into a night that would have happened anyway. And it worked, the way these things occasionally do when the room is right: you forget for a few hours that you’re standing inside a marketing exercise, because the music is loud and the people are interesting and everyone’s wearing the right shoes.