Print Your Own Mythology

Adidas relaunched their miadidas customization program and, with it, the proposition that you should be able to put your own photo on the side of a ZX FLUX. An app for iPhone and Android, due in August, would let you shoot anything and have it printed directly onto the mesh panel. Your face. Your dog. A photo of fries. The abstract screengrab you’ve been using as a wallpaper for three years without knowing why.

The ZX FLUX was already a clean enough canvas that this made sense. It had the right kind of visual blankness—not boring, but neutral enough that strong imagery wouldn’t fight the silhouette. And the idea of sneakers as a personal archive rather than a brand statement is interesting to me in a way that most sneaker collaboration press releases aren’t. Collaborations are someone else’s taste. This was the option of using your own.

What would I put on mine? I kept turning the question over and none of the answers felt right. That’s probably the honest truth about customization in general: the freedom is real and the paralysis it produces is equally real. Infinite options, and I’d probably end up with something I pulled off my phone at 1am that made perfect sense in the moment and seemed faintly embarrassing by the time the box arrived.