Last September saw Elton jazz his up with zebra stripes, multicoloured beading and a set of gold initials on each tongue – all in aid of a special auction with the charity Stonewall – but now the Stan Smith is on the rerelease trail good and proper, ensuring each and every Instagram account holder has a boxfresh pair. Or perhaps it’s just the famous ones?
Whatever, adidas has our hashtag cache filled, and it’s all thanks to a design first debuted over forty years ago.
Plain in colour and simple in design, the tennis shoe is the underlying staple of Phoebe Philo’s show time look (see also the roll neck jumper and loose black trouser for how to replicate the outfit of a modern day superwoman-cum-90s throwback), it also holds its own against the Raf Simons’ collaborative trainer, last year’s must have for the customer of a similar discretion.
What redeems the shoe for Philo and the rest (Marc Jacobs amongst them), is its clean aesthetic and undemanding branding; the usual thick stripes replaced with three perforated lines that make for a non-committal footwear experience.
Something many other brands have ignored, instead opting for the brighter and busier.
The busiest the Smith ever got is now, with a capsule Consortium collection also available; the traditional plain white replaced by leathers of Reptile, Phoenix Aniline, Ostrich or Cracked.
On paper at least, the popularity of a shoe that bears not only the name but the face of a former World No. 1 tennis player, wouldn’t seem terribly likely, after all who wants to walk around with a 1973 headshot on their foot?
But as Smith readily admits in the accompanying campaign, many “don’t even know that I exist.” Which suits him just fine we reckon, given the sporting merits that surpass the whole trainer thing on his Wikipedia page.
Words and styling: Zoe Whitfield
Photo: Coco Capitan
Model: Coral @ M+P
