Why do we wear Adidas? History of an iconic brand in subcultures

We trace the history of the iconic Adidas brand within our subcultures

Everyone has at least one thing that psychoanalysts call a “fetish”, a serial passion for inanimate objects. Some people have socks, others hats, nail varnish, bags, brooches, or shoes. I have this fetish, I have been collecting exclusively Adidas shoes for years, and I am into casual subculture, as well as being into punk music. The shoe, if it had a voice, would tell our most intimate stories. This was first understood by the ancient Romans, who called their tragedies cothurnatae, the name of the shoes worn by actors in the theatrical figurations of the time, used to identify roles and parts during performances. In this article, I will try, with minimal historical and bibliographical references, to give a general framing of the influence of the Adidas brand on urban subcultures (hence mainly punk, skinhead and b-boy) and vice versa, since, as the designer and streetwear brand co-founder Paolo Coppolella correctly argues: “It is a vicious/virtuous circle that between ‘street’ and fashion. They mutually influence each other: the fashion system – much more than one would think – is retro-fuelled by phenomena taken from the street – gangs/crews/bands – and turns them into iconic garments into popular trends.”

Like all social phenomena, those concerning youth cultures take on a certain sociological relevance, since they are motivated mainly by the desire for revenge of a social minority opposed in the affirmation of particular rights (work, home, integration) by the state. And like all ‘gangs’ in revolt against the oppressor state, they adopt identifying codes, languages, and styles of belonging. As Mauro Bonvicini (musician and scholar of ideologized fashions) aptly wrote in an interview: “a subculture without a critical apparatus – philosophy? – is a mere fashion, while when the aesthetic dimension is lacking and a worldview that is inevitably antagonistic is favoured, we are faced with mere ideology. Subculture is thus the right balance of stylistic symbolism, aggregative dynamics and, indeed, antagonistic sensibility.”

If what you’re looking for is an article à la Vice – “Tell me what shoes you wear and I’ll tell you what music you listen to” – then you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, we want to understand together why Adidas belongs to the aforementioned sub-culture style codes, then perhaps this article – without any pretentious desire to exhaust an extremely broad discourse – can be a first hint.

Once upon a time…

The origins of Adidas date back to 1924, when Adolf Dassler founded a shoe company with his brother Rudolf, the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik. The idea was to create sports-specific shoes that could offer athletes maximum comfort and protect them from injury. In the beginning there were only two side bands and they started out from a purely functional necessity: they served to maintain and support the structure of the shoe on the central area of the upper, but also became a company hallmark. For years the family business went well, but the outbreak of World War II started a rivalry between the two brothers, who had very different ideas on how to deal with the nascent Reich: Adolf had no intention of turning his sports shoe factory into a war boot factory for those who would shortly be trampling Europe and millions of corpses in their path of conquest. Rudolf, on the other hand, was sniffing out a bargain, the possibility of becoming the main supplier of footwear to the new great German empire appealed to him, and quite a lot. In 1947 each went his own way, Rudolf founded the new company RuDa (later renamed PUMA because of its catchier sound) and Adolf began the history of Adidas, whose name came from the union of his nickname and surname: Adi Dassler. Having founded the new company, however, Adi could no longer use the two side stripes. The solution was to add a third stripe in the middle and give birth to the iconic 3 stripes. Rudolf instead took them both and folded them diagonally creating what was the first Puma logo. Even the town of Herzogenaurach was divided over the issue and was nicknamed “the town of folded necks”, because people constantly looked at the shoes worn by others to see who they were siding with. The two brothers never reconciled and, although they are buried in the same cemetery, their graves are at opposite corners of the holy field.

From then on, the success of Adidas was an uphill road, punctuated by small major revolutions: in the early years, the new company concentrated on improving the materials used, the design structure and the search for ergonomic shapes. One of the brand’s main revolutions was to introduce “cleats” in football boots and “spikes” in running shoes, in both cases to increase the foot’s grip on the ground. It was in 1970, when Adidas started using modern technologies such as EVA rubber, that the performance of its footwear reached its peak and became massively established not only in Europe but also worldwide.

In the meantime, however, in the early seventies, other companies were making a name for themselves in the world. Competition in the footwear field was increasing, especially with Onitsuka from Japan and the rivalry with his brother’s company Puma, so much so that they felt the need to reinvent their brand and create a dynamic logo that could show the world a renewed, different and avant-garde Adidas. It was during this period that the legendary Clover or “tres foil” was born. Three leaves coming together in a figure of a plant, cut horizontally in the middle with the ever-present 3 stripes symbolising the Olympic spirit: strength, loyalty, sacrifice. The logo was used in the period 72-97 and only in 1991 was it joined by the other, for the Equipment line known as “the pyramid”, consisting of three thick diagonal stripes, which is the main logo the company currently uses.

The 3 Stripes have made a name for themselves in many different contexts, from sport and athletics to the worlds of music, fashion, and art. They have been adopted as a symbol for the identity of various underground and mainstream subcultures and continue to offer cutting-edge designs for the contemporary era. Practicality, versatility and flexibility are the elements that have allowed the logo to adapt to all kinds of contexts to become a worldwide icon.

ADIDAS AND MUSIC

The link between the two, which is strange to say if we think of the trendy imagery in today’s concerts, does not historically belong to the skinhead and punk subcultures. Instead, it is proper to those street cultures that are in some way linked to sports: hip-hop because of basketball and skateboard, and rude boys because of football and athletics. It is no coincidence, in terms of aesthetics, that the first punks and skinheads adopted a fashion that was foreign to the prevailing canons: through the symbolic weight given to this aspect, on the one hand they also visibly marked the border between “us” and the society that we can conveniently define as bourgeois, and on the other hand they recognised themselves among equals, enhancing that feeling of constituting a world apart that is at the basis of every subcultural impulse. As we mentioned, in the 1970s (thus in the Golden era of the skinhead movement and in the period of the punk explosion) Adidas was a more than established brand, occupying advertisements in Europe and around the world, creating sportswear worn by ordinary people for running or practising sport by imitating world icons; it could not be used as a distinctive element of rupture with bourgeois society. A third case was the Casuals, whose relationship with the three-striped brand obviously also derived from a connection with sport and sportswear, although not directly practised.

ADIDAS AND HIP HOP

The first shoe model to be adopted on the streets in a massive and widespread way, due to a massive marketing operation, was the Superstar, and it happened in the middle of the 80s in America. This iconic Adidas model is characterised by a soft-protect in the heel, thick padded tongue in the front, huge laces, the iconic reinforced rubber shell toe – hence the nickname shell shoe – and the 3 stripes on the sides. They were born in 1969 as low leather basketball shoes and were immediately chosen by famous Lakers player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Fifteen years later, they were the subject of a historic commercial agreement: for the first time in history, a sports brand creator of technical clothing signed a sponsorship contract not with an athlete but with a music band. In fact, after the band Run DMC dedicated the song ‘My adidas’ to them, and a video in which they appeared entirely dressed in stripes with Superstars on their feet, the German brand recognised the great commercial potential of these artists, and got them to sign a 1 million dollar contract. Run DMC became the first non-sports ambassadors of a sports equipment brand while launching the fashion of the no-string forward tongue: “With no shoe string in ‘em, I did not win ‘em”. By the mid-90s, Superstars were so popular that they even conquered the skateboarding world by crushing the Vans myth and started appearing everywhere on the feet of skateboarders and rappers, as well as high school kids, who could pose as b-boys by adding the famous fat laces to the silhouette. These trainers were the symbol of belonging to a club, to an exclusive niche that everyone wanted to be a part of, especially in the States. We can say that the Adidas Superstar was the first great universal “trainer”.

ADIDAS AND RUDE BOYS

In addressing the topic of youth subcultures, one cannot fail to refer to one of the most representative historical cases of suburban youth social phenomena: the “Rude Boy” culture, in vogue in Jamaica since the 1950s/60s and relocated in the early 1970s to England. The representatives of this youth subculture tended to identify with the cultural credentials typically embodied in Jamaican music (ska, rocksteady, and reggae) and the rules of street life. With reference to street life, mainly centred in shady underworld scenarios on the threshold of poverty, the youths were mainly marijuana dealers and/or hitmen with ties to the underworld. As journalist Mario Giancristoforo points out in an article: “the iconography of the underworld exerted on this youth subculture can be traced in the classic gangster attire (coppola, smart three-button jacket and black shoes). In those days, in Jamaica, rude boys tended to fill dance halls and challenge each other to music fights, until the situation degenerated completely into shoot-outs and stabbings between gangs, freely impeding the smooth running of the evenings.” The Rude emigrants to England mainly settled in the English working-class neighbourhoods and suburbs and came into contact with other subcultures (Mod), also belonging to the working class. They imported two things: the style of dress and the street attitude. Rudes and Mods frequented the same circles and slowly began to mix, giving rise to the Hard-Mod subculture (the most extreme version of Mod culture, which inherited from Rude culture its own influences regarding dress and culture). Later, the new hard-mod youth subculture would evolve into what would become the skinhead movement. The young rude boys were fascinated by sporting and musical icons who had enjoyed huge success outside the small Caribbean Island: reggae musicians like Robert Bob Marley and phenomenal athletes like Lennox Miller were the main products that Jamaica was known for in the world, besides marijuana. Musicians and athletes had just one thing in common, apart from their Caribbean origin: Adidas on their feet. “First place is music. Above everything is music, for me, and nothing can ever surpass it. But right after that there is football. Because football is freedom.” We can start with this quote from Bob Marley to convey the importance of football in his life and how this resulted in his devotion to Adidas. The Jamaican singer had never hidden his love for the sport, in his everyday life he dressed as if he were always ready for a football match. There are many photos of him playing with friends on the field with this outfit. At the same time, many African American athletes, at the Mexico ’68 and Munich ’72 Olympics, churned out sensational sporting successes, lowering world records and delivering exceptional performances in terms of sporting and social significance (of which Tommie Smith’s clenched fist after the world record in the 100m flat is just one example). Being an Afro at that time meant looking up to those icons and all of them had Adidas shoes on their feet, from jumper Bob Beamon to sprinter Melvin Pender. Adidas – in those editions of the games – dominated the sponsorship of winning athletes. The rude boys began wearing the only black, shiny Adidas shoes (as the street “thug” outfit dictated) produced at the time: the Adidas Samba, stylish on the street and comfortable in the ballrooms.

ADIDAS AND TERRACES

The third case, that of the Casual culture, is enormously broader – and an equally vast bibliography attempts to trace its crucial aspects. Here we will limit ourselves to recounting its most significant moments, starting with the identifying slogan that recurs like a mantra in the genesis of these firms: “Dress well, behave badly”. This ideal and intimately connected lifestyle was born around the 1980s, in England – mainly between Liverpool, Manchester and Aberdeen – where the phenomenon of hooligan clashes in previous years had spread to the point of reaching worrying dimensions even for the central government. The movement took hold on the terraces of local stadiums, i.e. the bleachers, frequented by the notorious hooligans, shaved heads (skinheads) and hard mods, always looking for a confrontation with the police or opposing supporters. Faced with the rampant violence in and outside the stadiums, the police ran for cover, often going so far as to arrest, even massively, young men wearing their team colours and corresponding to these aesthetic canons: shaved heads, Crombie coat and amphibians. There’s a countless number of photos of young skinheads stopped on the street, outside pubs and in the vicinity of stadiums, forced to strip, remove belts, scarves, and coats, even the laces on their boots, undergo personal searches and be taken to police stations. So the hooligan, in order not to be easily identified and to mix with other supporters and be able to continue to follow their team, began to wear “average English man” clothes, a “Sunday sports” type of supporter, rather than a real football one: the Lyle & Scott jumper usually worn by golfers, the Sergio Tacchini or Fila sweatshirt, the Fred Perry polo shirt worn by tennis fans, the C. P. Company Millemiglia coat for motoring fans, the white Diadora or Adidas shoes as those who follow athletics. In the United Kingdom, Adidas were all the rage in all their versions, from the very popular and colourful Gazelles – worn and sported by music and sports stars on every occasion – to the first City Series such as Forest Hills, London etc., while in Italy the all-white shoe culture was all the rage in the stands. A particularly lucky pair of trainers were the Stan Smiths: these also found their origin on the tennis courts, and were the first shoes made entirely of leather. They were designed for Robert Haillet and kept the French tennis player’s name until 1971, the year of his retirement. In 1973, tennis player Stanley Roger Smith and Adolf Dassler met by chance in a Parisian club. From that moment on, thanks to a reciprocal liking, the legend of the shoe symbol par excellence of casualism began. So, moving around in the underground or on intercity trains dressed in this manner allowed people to move between English cities inconspicuously, looking like an ordinary man travelling to watch a tennis match, only to gather with the other members of the firm in front of an enemy pub and seek a clash with opposing supporters. To this day, Casuals culture presents several controversies of its essence which, briefly, can be summarised in three points: the first is the economic paradox of a style that was born from and for the working class, but incorporates elements typical of the bourgeoisie if not of the aristocracy (such as very expensive brands like Burberry, Aquascutum, Stone Island etc.); the second is that of the mingling and influence suffered by one of the most noble sports in the world, without real “supporters”, and in which, on the contrary, silence dominates the scene, namely tennis. The brands worn by the tennis players are the same ones that colour the stadiums of the United Kingdom on Saturdays: Fila shirts or Sergio Tacchini garments, with its typical “white, off-white” colour à la McEnroe, are the most popular. The third and perhaps most important has to do with the genesis of it all, the ultimate purpose for which to be casual: as the years go by, the meticulousness of the casuals in their choice of clothing transforms the cover into a real uniform. The original intent of the casuals’ fans, which was to escape the eyes of the police, becomes by the 1990s the primary cause of their recognition outside the stadium, losing the ultimate purpose of it all.

ADIDAS AND PUNK

The worlds of music and fashion changed forever in the summer of 1977. On both sides of the Atlantic, London and New York were teetering on the brink of socio-economic collapse at the same time: while the British capital was on its knees being battered by constant IRA attacks and Margaret Thatcher was about to exercise the Iron Fist Law, New York was on the brink of chaos, grappling with long series of murders, constant blackouts, shop raids. Suddenly, the atmosphere of economic prosperity and optimism of the 1970s, the long-haired hippies and tawdry discos with dance music no longer held any fascination for the young, who, frightened by the absence of a concrete future, were blowing up social and aesthetic codes. Punk had arrived: a social reaction against capitalism and conformism without precedent and of exceptional proportions, redefining an entire generation of disgruntled young people. Within a few weeks, a dozen seminal punk albums came out, one after the other. London had the Clash, the Damned and the Sex Pistols, while in New York the innovative and pioneering music of Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers and the Ramones was spreading. And, of course, as punk became the soundtrack of a dissatisfied generation, its look became its uniform. In London, punk had an outrageous look: the more brazen, shocking, and disturbing the clothing, the better. PVC and S&M paraphernalia became the norm and the makeup for girls radically changed from coloured disco glitter to glossy, fierce black war paint. Meanwhile, tight jeans and bondage straps, collars, torn shirts and pins forced men to break gender distinctions and social rules. On their feet were Dr Martens, the shoes of Sid Vicious and the Who. They were the first to wear Dr Martens 1460s. Pete Townshend, founder of the band, made them his favourite footwear. In the song ‘Uniforms (Corp d’Esprit)’, the band talks about the famous boots made in England, singing “Wear your braces round your seat / Doctor Martens on your feet / Keep your barnet very neat / For credibility on street”. In the 1980s, punks, who often only used Converse or Creeper as an alternative, made Dr. Martens their official footwear, clearly visible in ’82 on singer Joe Strummer’s feet in the video for “Rock The Casbah”, as well as on Sid Vicious, the Rolling Stones or the Damned. Clothes, in fact, are never limited to being only clothes to be worn, but can always also be traced back to an image of the self that one wants to offer to the outside world; that is, they express a message, a code, a subjective and objective value. In this sense, such outrageous clothes can deny or disturb a normalised social context from the point of view of coherence and rationality, like a practice that disrupts an ordered thing and overturns the model on which it rests. One takes an object that everyone has, uses or wears (be it a t-shirt or a safety pin) and tears it up, overturns it. In this subversive viewpoint, of creating a different and alternative imagery, there was no room for the three-striped brand.

ADIDAS AND SKINHEADS

This brings us to the most important part of the article: to this day, it is widely believed that wearing Adidas – mostly Samba – is synonymous with belonging to the skinhead subculture. Even Wikipedia mentions this garment in the identifying paraphernalia of the modern skinhead! Beyond the current evaluations on the comeback of this model and the invasion of the modern market (mainly due to the commercial operation of Bella Hadid, the American supermodel with 56 million followers who – in the summer of 2022 – flaunted this garment on several occasions and with multiple provocative combinations, gaining enormous popularity among young people and influencing other stars such as Hailey Beiber and Kate Moss), and remaining in the underground movement, outside of mainstream fashion, today we all associate Samba’s with skinheads. But this only happens in modern times! In fact, one must differentiate between two moments of the skinhead cult: the first phase, better known as Spirit of ’69, and a second more recent one. When the skinhead cult was born, nobody wore Adidas, quite the contrary! As Flavio Frezza correctly analyses in his Italia Skins: “By 1969 the skin subculture was a different thing from the mod one. The outward appearance was codified – though of course it had not ceased to evolve – and the term skinhead had become established. […] Hair was short, sometimes very short but not to the point of zero. The boots worn were initially work or army boots, with eight or ten holes, preferably with a steel toe, which was particularly useful in fights and assaults: only later did the more comfortable Dr. Martens become popular. Among the shirt models in vogue at that time, button-downs with checks or stripes or white, especially from the Ben Sherman brand, prevailed. Other distinguishing features were Fred Perry brand tennis polo shirts and narrow braces”. It was ultimately a hard, clean-cut look, the essence of which could be summed up in the motto “dress hard, dress smart”. In these early years, being a skinhead allowed a kind of freedom on the way of dressing (between t-shirts or shirts, braces worn or not, Crombie or Harrington style coat) but was not transgressive on shoes: all the guys who belonged to skins crews wore boots on their feet. In the last part of his “Spirit of ’69 – the skinhead bible”, George Marshall alphabetises a list where he summarises in order all the identifying codes of the skinhead cult, going from the Chelsea cut to the Monkey boots, up to the tattoos and the colour of the braces. He mentions nothing about the Samba (even though they already existed, given that their creation dates back to 1949, with modernisation in ’54 and massive introduction on the market around ’63-’64) and he does not speak in any way of Adidas stuff. In his second book, also a reference for the international skinhead movement, again George Marshall writes about Adidas wearers, using derogatory tones, that: “We were still most definitely a bootboys crew and still wore DMs, the most important part of the bootboy uniform. There were others in different towns who called themselves bootboys, but they didn’t look the part in desert boots, Adidas trainers, flared Levi’s, and leather jackets.”. Yet, photos of skinheads in the 1990s dressed in Adidas, from t-shirt to shoes, fill up the archives. Indeed, in its second wave, known as the “revival period” and corresponding to the second half of the 1980s, the skinhead style also changed and evolved. Particularly by adopting elements from the military world, we find the inclusion in the clothing of items such as the aviator bomber jacket, the wide camouflage trousers with pockets and embroidered patches, which take space away from the elegant Crombie, braces and shiny boots. In the same period, the skin cult landed overseas, in the States, where it spread, fuelled by fundamental bands of the international Oi! scene such as Warzone, Agnostic Front, Doug & the Slugz, etc.
In the same period, the skin cult also spread widely in Europe, arriving in Italy (on this subject I recommend Flavio Frezza’s already cited book Italia Skins: notes and testimonies on the skinhead scene from the mid-1980s), Spain and France.

It is extremely difficult to establish what influenced what, whether the chicken or the egg was born first, but in order to understand why the Adidas brand was so massively adopted by the second skinhead wave, we have to consider a few factors, which I will try to enucleate: firstly, in the USA the (typical) military style intersects with the skinhead scene from Britain, generating what later became known as American Oi! hardcore. Some key members of the scene, such as Raymond Raybeez Barbieri were even veterans of the U.S. Army. Others, as Miret himself recounts, lived in squatted houses in the suburbs and ghettos of the big cities, among rats and beggars. They did not have the financial means to dress in Ben Sherman or Fred Perry brands, and therefore began to prefer – or to “make do with” – varicoloured jeans and self-made t-shirts, amphibious boots salvaged from the draft or clothing stolen from shops (hence of commercial brands such as Adidas). Secondly, exclusively in European countries, the military style became necessary at times, due to the escalation of gang wars. Although they had always existed within the skinhead cult – often between rival gangs and for territorial reasons – they took on greater importance during the revival period, because they were politically connoted. In other words, redskins and Nazi bonheads literally started to wage war against each other, with ambushes, fights, assaults on landmarks and murders. Clothing inevitably reflects these dynamics and is affected. The shirt and braces gave way to more comfortable jeans and t-shirts, even acetate tracksuits (on the subject of how to dress and procure clothing, I recommend watching “Antifa Nazi Hunters” – Chasseur de Nazi – sub.it.avi, a documentary available on YouTube).
Furthermore, as a third factor, there is the mixture that skinheads and ultras (or hooligans in the UK) had in the 1980s. An analysis that must be made distinctly: in the ’80s in Europe, the ultras phenomenon went through perhaps its most impressive phase, becoming what it still means for many to be ultras; oceanic journeys, drums and smoke bombs to colour, group memberships and the search for confrontation with the opponent. Allow me to go further: these methods seem to work, also due to the inability of the repressive forces to understand and foresee the phenomenon. It is in this period that historic and crucial episodes (for better or for worse) of the European ultras movement are recorded, for the quantity of masses mobilised and for the level of violence. The 1980s also pervaded the curves in their clothing. You don’t have to be a skinhead to represent the hardcore side of the supporters: other subcultures, with their own stylistic characteristics, invaded the bleachers and equally satisfied the young ones (mods, freaks, teddy boys, etc). In England, on the other hand, we see the first wave of Casualism, as mentioned above, thanks to which the young skins who still frequent the terraces realise that by “softening” their style, they can continue to frequent the corners despite the war on hooliganism imposed by Margaret Thatcher’s Football Spectacular Act (on this topic I recommend reading Indro Pajaro’s article in the web magazine Ultimo Uomo https://www.ultimouomo.com/margaret-thatcher-hooligans). English casualism “imposes” the colourful and flashy Adidas shoes. Perhaps too much for skins, accustomed to the shiny black of the boot. Samba trainers would seem to be the right compromise. Lastly, as a fourth and final element, we must remember the mixture that the skin cult, with the passing of time, undergoes together with other cultural and musical phenomena: that of Black Music, from which it is generated and to which it is forever linked, and that with ’90s hardcore punk. In the first case we have already analysed the presence of the three-striped brand, in the second case something needs to be added. Because – if it is true that the ’82 punks wore ripped black jeans, pinned studs and big Dr.Martens boots – the hardcore ’90s introduced clothing from exquisitely American and typically sporty brands, revolutionising – in this sense – the purely punk conception of being “alternative”.  Champion sweatshirts, Converse t-shirts, Vans checkered shirts made their entrance onto the punk scene. With them also Nike, Reebok and Adidas tracksuits.  All those – skinheads for many years – whom I asked why they wore Samba and where they thought this choice came from, whether it was influenced by something or not, answered differently. But undoubtedly the percentages go in favour of the “connection to the stadium” reason. Some answered that it was common to see youngsters dancing to soul and black music at rallies and mod nights wearing low-slung 1461 amphibians or shiny Adidas with elegant designs such as Samba or Beckenbauer or Munchen. Many, on the other hand, put the reason down to the link with casual culture, the frequenting of the bleachers and a non-need to protect themselves in case of assaults and fights (objectively, as the years passed, less and less frequent within the skinhead and ultras scene). In the 1990s, many fans began to make casualism a real cult, and frequenting the terraces meant being influenced by this style.

Whatever the reason why a commercial brand has been able to establish itself so predominantly within the style of a niche subculture, allow me a concluding thought: Adidas is a brand as well as one of the largest multinationals on the planet, one of the many drivers of today’s global economy, a company with thousands of employees, businesses, and industrial locations all over the planet. Reasons that lead us to always look at it with a critical eye and a spirit of protest, since the logic behind its business is that of capital: accumulation of wealth, exploitation of the workforce, cuts in workers’ rights, pollution of the planet, and countless other iniquities. At the same time, it is pointless to deny that, at least in the past, Adidas has been approached with ‘left-wing’ ideas: this is because of its sponsorship of communist, socialist, openly anti-US countries (from the GDR, via Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union itself until 1991 and others) and in years when other multinationals preferred to avoid it. Even in more recent times, Adidas has taken public positions on certain social issues such as civil rights, environmental protection, the inclusiveness of disabled people, the fight against racial discrimination on and off the playing field, even on the Israel-Palestine issue. But it remains a multinational – the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second largest in the world – and scepticism is in order because any kind of “washing” is always functional to capital, to its sales aimed at establishing itself in other virgin market slices. The anti-capitalist critique must underlie any reasoning on the style of our subcultures. So, it simply remains a brand capable of (with a certain design line) making the eyes of the kids shine – kids who, aware of the infinite contradictions that this economic system imposes on us, wear Adidas just for standing, not for running.

Article by Andre Ardecore

This article is an unedited piece written by Andre Ardecore for Radio Punk, the result of months of research and work. Its sharing is free but if you would like to republish or quote it write to us at info@radiopunk.it

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