The Experimental adidas Sneakers Born of a Dissolving Racetrack (EXCLUSIVE)
Of adidas' many product lines, Equipment is the easiest to describe. Its aim is to create, simply, equipment. A little less simply, adidas Equipment (EQT) specializes in equipment for running, uncomplicated stuff intended to offer a direct route to the runner's high.
However, EQT hasn't specialized in all that much in recent years, its output slowed to a relative trickle compared to the constant churn of adidas Originals and even the many recent crossover aspirations of adizero.
EQT has kept such a low profile, in fact, that even its latest undertaking, huge as it was, remained almost entirely under wraps for almost a year. That was intentional, to be fair.
"The project sat outside of our traditional business process with no formal marketing briefing," Nic Galway, adidas' Senior Vice-President of Global Design tells Highsnobiety.
Through his responsibilities in directing high-level adidas partnerships with world-famous talent like Rick Owens, Stella McCartney, and Yohji Yamamoto, Galway has become a footwear legend in his own right. Over two decades, Galway has been as responsible as anyone for shaping the state of the Three Stripes.
Hence why he spearheaded this recent EQT endeavor.
In the warming months of 2024, adidas quietly ventured into the arid Zia Pueblo of Santa Fe to build something special. The project: Shape a monument to the sport of running. The purpose: Celebrating two all-new EQT sneakers, the adidas Equipment Pro 91/24 and adidas Equipment Guidance 91/24 Proto.
These are not mere running shoes. They are the physical manifestation of "Everything that is essential and nothing that is not," the EQT mantra.
Two of Galway's primary influences were Rob Strasser and Peter Moore, two pioneering Nike designers — Moore designed the Air Jordan 1 — who rejuvenated adidas in the '80s. One of their innovations was the 1991 launch of adidas EQT, a pioneering collection of pure sportswear.
"I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with Peter Moore early in my career in adidas," Galway says. "At that time he was already less involved with the day to day but his influence was immediately felt. What really stuck with me was his ability to understand the history and DNA of adidas and distil this to unlock the future and push the brand forward. This was the starting point for the project we dubbed 91/24"
adidas EQT 91/24 was so named for the "values and ambition" of EQT's founding year and the "innovation and context" made possible by 2024 tech, Galway explains. The Equipment Pro 91/24 and Equipment Guidance 91/24 may be born of adidas' Innovation Lab but they're shaped by age-old aspirations of speed.
The Guidance is a case study of design by reduction. It takes 40 hours to carve the featherweight sneaker's custom midsole from singular foam blocks, for instance, and its silhouette reflects extreme refinement of the original Guidance sneaker. The Pro more overtly builds on its heritage, stacking the quintessentially EQT Three Stripes support system atop an "adapted" Adios Pro 3 sole unit, while similarly streamlining its parts to create a newly aerodynamic sum.
These are experimental shoes, not commercial endeavors. As such, these limited-edition EQT sneakers will not see wide release, though the ideas that shaped them will live on for years to come.
"Our intent was to explore a series of creative studies to unlock future design codes and inspire the design teams to look at the archive through the ambition of those that created the products, to understand what were they trying to achieve vs simply what did it look like," says Galway.
These are future relics deserving of a suitable palace.
So, with PlayLab's aid, adidas sculpted a running track out of the very desert itself so as to give its athletes a proper place to test out the cutting-edge EQT shoes.
"This monument takes a track – one of the most identifiable symbols of running – as its base, before abstracting it by forming perimeter walls in the landscape," Galway notes.
"The installation was constructed purely from materials available on location, in this case mostly gypsum. Following the conclusion of the experience, every inch of the gypsum used will be used by the [local] mine, with most of the geological components being formed into drywall to be distributed throughout New Mexico."
Raw materials guided into a historic shape so clarified that it appears futuristic. The ephemeral formed into the essential and back into the ephemeral. It's sober stuff for what's essentially the low-key launch of two shoes that aren't actually dropping. But as much as this moment is predicated upon the physical, it's also informed by intangible implication.
Says Galway, "As the world becomes ever more complicated and overwhelming, it felt right for us to refocus on what makes adidas special, to strip back to the essential, sport & the culture that surrounds it."
