Adidas's Stylish Turn

By aligning with cultural icons at least as much as athletes, Adidas has refound its footing.

- Mark Wilson

An onyx stage catches fire and three performers, silhouetted in the blaze, begin to sing from behind the flames. You can hear Kanye West’s voice, but you can’t make out his face. The first glimpse of him, poking out of the fire, is a shoe.

But not just any shoe: specifically, a white Adidas Ultra Boost, which until this moment—the Billboard Music Awards in May 2015— has never been worn in public.

West begins his next song and leaps through the f lames. He’s dressed all in black except for the two white Ultra Boosts, which hang in the air like exclamation points. “What happens next? Every single store that had [Ultra Boosts] cleared out within the hour,” says Yu-Ming Wu, founder of shoe-culture network Sneaker News, with only a touch of hyperbole.

Never mind that the flames weren’t real, or that, after more than a decade as the second-largest sports brand in the U.S., Adidas had recently fallen behind Under Armour, whose CEO, Kevin Plank, had called the German brand his “dumbest competitor.”

Adidas—with West—had created a moment. Wu compares it to Michael Jordan’s 1988 dunk from the free throw line, which made a legend out of Nike’s Air Jordan III: West’s fiery Ultra Boost debut turned Adidas’s Boost technology into a cultural touchstone.