adidas Basketball Enters Its Golden Age
From the Harden Vol. 8 to the AE1, the Three Stripes is reinventing performance footwear with a language informed by the past and guided by the future.
It’s said fashion is cyclical. What resonated 20 years ago resonates now and what resonates now will resonate again in 20 years. This concept, however, rarely applies to the world of performance footwear, where new technologies and understandings of human anatomy cause seismic shifts at a breakneck pace. adidas’ basketball division is proving itself to be the exception to the rule.
From the Supergrip in the mid ’60s to the Superstar in the ’70s to the Forum in the ’80s, adidas basketball silhouettes followed a clear lineage for the better part of the 20th century. That all changed in the ’90s with statement models like the Mutombo and Streetball II. And then Kobe Bryant joined the Three Stripes, setting off a shockwave. The KB8, KB8 II and KB8 III. The introduction of The Kobe at the turn of the millennium and The Kobe 2 in 2001.
The avant-garde design of Eirik Lund Nielsen’s metallic experimentations proved too ahead of their time, failing to ignite the cultural fuse both silhouettes seemed to promise upon their debut. Fast forward 20 years and that time has finally arrived.