Just The Shoe

Jürgen Teller shooting an adidas campaign on Berlin streets makes immediate sense. He’s built a career on the idea that the street doesn’t perform—you show up, work with what’s actually there, photograph the texture and light of a place in its own time. Berlin understands this. The city won’t stage itself for the camera. It’s too used to being exactly what it is. Every brand eventually figures out they need to come here.

The collection is a 90s EQT revival. Block colors, straightforward proportions, nothing designed to mean anything beyond what it is. That era had a specific generosity: you could like something because it worked and looked decent without it becoming a statement about your taste or who you were. Everything signifies something now, so there’s an obvious appeal in the idea of just buying a shoe.

Teller’s photographs reduce things to their material reality—texture, light, the way a body or wall or object occupies space. He doesn’t impose meaning. He finds what’s there. The real test of a campaign like this is whether that restraint actually survives—whether adidas can sell sportswear as just sportswear, without turning it into another performance of authenticity. I don’t know if they pull it off. But the setup is right.