A VERY close friend of me once told me that “somebody” he knows designed a series of adidas Consortium Superstars a few years back which were heavily influenced by Star Wars. The shoes in question embodied the foundation of Star Wars, the Dark Side of the Force and the Light Side of the Force. The resulting design and featured a black vs. white combo. The aglets of the laces were colored in the relevant Lightsaber hues of red for the Dark Side and neon green for the Light Side. The appropriation didn’t stop there as the shoes came in a action-figure style packaging complete with the use of a Star Wars’ familiar type-font. Only problem, there wasn’t an actual license on adidas’ behalf for this project. EDIT: Here’s a link back to Nice Kicks who have the shoes in question.
Apparently, $1,000,000 USD later and a lawsuit, the shoes never got released and if they did, they weren’t supposed to. There was even talk that the shoes were even more audacious in the sampling stages, superimposing the Superstar Shelltoe onto the head of Vader and Yoda respectively. All hearsay I guess…
Fast forward to 2010, adidas and Star Wars come together on legitimate terms this time. I’m sure many have mixed reactions to the whole team-up. On one hand, from a commercial stand-point and arguably the one that is most important at the end of the day, adidas is introducing a whole wack of people to the adidas Originals franchise. Who hasn’t seen Star Wars??? The fact that this first pack revolves around the first three movies also means one thing… an open door for more collections down the line with the later movies.
I personally never paid attention to the latter three “episodes”, but the new generation surely did. Unfortunately, there’s something about associating one’s self with Star Wars. Maybe cause it’s on the sci-fi tip, but I sort liken it to being something everybody will generally love and appreciate but will be slow to acknowledge in the public sphere.
Anyways on to the product which I must thank Gary and Charlie over at Crooked Tongues for some SPEEDY turn around. I don’t think there’s a more knowledgeable and legitimate online sneaker retailer out there. By far the cream of the crop. Found the Darth Vader ZX 8000s on my doorstep in only a few days from the UK!
Generally I find sneaker design quite difficult when a presented theme has the opportunity to be re-appropriated very literally. You’re taking something that is pretty much tangible and have to sort of design something that takes into account the inspirations but isn’t too literal. All-in-all, I thought the collection itself wasn’t bad at all. The real literal models that had me wondering such as the “Battle of Hoth” Micropacer, “Tie Fighter” Nizzas and the “Death Star” Superstars probably would have been fine as kid’s shoes… but adults ehhhhhhhhhh. You can pretty much slap anything on a shoe for kids and nobody will really be as quick to judge. When you’re 4 years old I would imagine you would be able to wear as bright of fucking shoes as you’d want!
For many of these models, I think if you released them as in-line styles and took out the tongue logos, people could probably reference the colorways to iconic aspects of Star Wars on their own and bestow the appropriate nicknames. The packaging isn’t unique and it has been done before with A Bathing Ape etc, but since it’s so fitting, no qualms here. We did something similar for our Hypebeast x Subcrew caps in a sort of (cheesy) quasi-super hero theme as well.
-Eugene
On the topic of taking things too literally… yeh way to go New Era congratulations.
On to the pics…
The tags sort of ruined this picture haha.
Black midsoles are tough to pull off in any event but I don’t think anything else would have worked… maybe “Dark Side of the Force” red instead of black?
