The Only Shoe
I’ve been saying it for years in different cities, different bars, to people who either got it immediately or thought I was being ridiculous: the adidas Superstar is the only shoe. Not the only good one. The only one that matters. So when 2015 showed up and the Superstar suddenly became the focus of everything—entire magazine issues, fashion shoots, cultural retrospectives—it felt less like vindication and more like watching the world finally notice something obvious.
The new adidas Originals Series made the Superstar its subject, which is exactly what should happen when a shoe has been this good for this long. There was a fashion shoot across the roofs of Berlin, getting the new collection into that particular Berlin light. Eskei83 asked people who their Superstar was and why—which is actually asking something deeper, about the symbols we return to. Oliver Jopke documented creative makers around the city. And Alex Flach from Civilist, one of Berlin’s original skate shops, talked about how the Superstar became one of the first real skate shoes almost by accident, not through design ambition but through the simple fact that it was cheap and durable enough to actually wear.
The shoe has never been about innovation. It’s been about getting the fundamentals right and never overthinking it. Three stripes, rubber toe cap, clean proportions. In the seventies it was a basketball shoe. Then it crossed into tennis, into the street, into skate parks where people realized you could destroy it and it would still work. Then into hip-hop, but not as a trend—as something that was already there, already essential. The Superstar didn’t become an icon. It just outlasted everything that tried to replace it.
What does it mean to call something a Superstar now, forty years into its existence? I think the answer is that the shoe doesn’t try. Everything around it is trying—every brand, every product trying to be cool, trying to be innovative, trying to be something. The Superstar just sits there. It’s the same thing it was in 1969, essentially, because there was nothing in it that needed fixing. That’s maybe the deepest kind of cool there is: the confidence to change nothing.