Fashion Goes Underground

At some point Berlin stopped being a city and became a concept, and the Adidas EQT Support 93/17 Berlin is probably the most literal evidence of that. The shoe—a collaboration between Adidas and the BVG, Berlin’s public transit authority—has a valid annual U-Bahn pass physically sewn into the tongue. Around two hundred euros, and you ride free for a year. Not a voucher. Not a QR code. An actual, physical ticket, stitched into the sneaker.

There’s something both absurd and perfectly logical about this. The BVG has long been less a transit system and more a civic personality—the kind of institution that runs self-deprecating ad campaigns and sells branded merchandise. Turning a sneaker into a Jahreskarte is exactly the kind of move that could only happen in Berlin, where the aesthetic of public infrastructure has been cool enough to commodify for decades. The joke is that the shoe itself is genuinely good. The EQT Support line is one of Adidas’s most reliable silhouettes, and the Berlin colorway is clean.

Fashion making itself actually useful, even once, is worth noting. Whether that usefulness justifies two hundred euros depends on how much you already spend on transit and how badly you want strangers on the U8 to notice your shoes. In Berlin, the answer to both questions is probably more than you’d admit.