The Year of the Superstar

I don’t care about brands. Store-brand groceries, Ikea everything, clothes that fit. But Superstars—I’m particular about Superstars. Adidas, only Adidas, white leather with the black stripe. If I could I’d fill an entire closet with them, nothing else.

For years I went around Berlin like a broken record: the Superstar is the best sneaker ever made. The best. People jogged past me in their Nikes, their Onitsuka Tigers, their Converse. Nobody listened. I sounded like a lunatic.

Then I read what Sarah Gottschalk had written, and she got it exactly. The Superstar moves in cycles, she explained. Loved to death, then sidelined, then forgotten, then loved again. After the Stan Smith moment everyone who actually knows was coming back to the chunky shoe with wide jeans. Could even spark an Adidas revival. She’d gotten strange looks when she bought a new pair two years earlier, trying to feel like a kid again. But she was certain: the Superstar revival was coming.

I’m sitting here in my beat-up Superstars reading those words, and I feel it: 2014 is the year. The year of clean lines, of simplicity, of something real making its way back. Run DMC knew. Sarah called it. I’ve been saying it the whole time.

Finally.