Shell Toe Gospel

The adidas Superstar is the only shoe. I’ve believed this for years, preaching it in cities across multiple continents to anyone who would listen. And 2015 was finally the year the world came around—which made me feel both vindicated and slightly territorial, the way you feel when something you loved in relative obscurity becomes ubiquitous.

Alex Flach, who founded Civilist—Berlin’s most serious skate shop—has been talking about how the Superstar became one of the first skate shoes, back before anyone was designing footwear specifically for skating. Kids just grabbed what felt right on a board. A basketball shoe with a rubber shell toe, a flat sole, leather that could take abuse. Not designed for the purpose, but it worked. That’s often how the best things happen: sideways, through misuse.

The shoe launched in 1969 as a low-top basketball sneaker. From there it moved into hip-hop—Run-DMC made it a religion in the mid-eighties—then into skateboarding, then into fashion, then into the kind of ubiquity that somehow still feels correct on your feet regardless of what else is happening in culture. That’s a strange trick to pull off across five decades.

iGNANT, a Berlin-based design and culture magazine, shot the current Originals collection on rooftops across the city, and the images are genuinely good. Whatever you think about branded editorial, the Superstar looks right in every context you place it in. This isn’t a new observation. It was true in 1969 and it’s true now, and I suspect it’ll still be true when everything else we’re wearing today looks embarrassing.