Brain Dead Wrapped the Guide Tennie in Hairy Suede, and Five Ten’s Oldest Idea Is Still Underneath

adidas Five Ten and Brain Dead release two climbing shoes on November 6, and the Guide Tennie is the one most people will actually wear. It is an approach shoe, the category Five Ten effectively created, rebuilt by a Los Angeles studio in hairy burgundy suede with teal laces and honeycomb cutouts punched through the side panels. Both pairs arrive in limited quantities through adidas and Brain Dead’s own store. The part worth reading twice is what the collaboration left alone.

The approach shoe exists because Charles Cole slipped. Coming down from Sentinel Rock in Yosemite in July 1985, he lost his footing badly enough to go home and build a company around the problem, and the shoe he made was the Five Tennie. Five Ten took its name from the 5.10 grade in the Yosemite Decimal System, and the Five Tennie did something nothing else on the market did, putting climbing-grade traction under something a person could hike several miles in. Cole followed it in 1986 with Stealth, the high-friction rubber compound that became the brand’s entire argument and still is. The Guide Tennie is the direct descendant of that first shoe, and it has spent decades as the default answer for a climber walking into a route carrying a rack. adidas bought Five Ten in 2011. Cole stayed on in research and development for a few years and died in 2018, and for most of the period since, the line has lived well outside the conversation sneaker buyers are having.

Brain Dead kept the architecture and changed every surface above it. The upper runs hairy suede in a washed burgundy, cut with a teal mesh collar, mustard contrast stitching and a purple webbing pull at the heel. The honeycomb openings worked into the side panels are the loudest move, opening a contrast layer where the standard shoe runs solid. A woven tongue label carries Brain Dead’s outlined head logo. The 5.10 wordmark sits oversized in white across the lateral side, larger than adidas usually lets a sub-brand be on a shoe it owns. Underneath, none of it is decorative. The Stealth rubber outsole is the real compound, with the flat flexible tread and the wrapped toe bumper that make an approach shoe useful on rock rather than merely rugged-looking. adidas lists a lace closure, a soft sockliner and a premium leather and textile upper. The brand’s own phrase for the result, technical climbing footwear built equally for everyday wear, reads like marketing and happens to describe the shoe accurately.

Five Ten has been adidas property for fifteen years, and for most of them adidas did very little with it anywhere sneaker buyers were looking. That has changed quickly. The Samba Climbing put a curved Stealth outsole under the most visible silhouette adidas has, and the Freerider Pro BOA became the first Five Ten built to wear the 3-Stripes and the 5.10 mark together. This collaboration runs the trade in the opposite direction. Instead of borrowing Five Ten’s rubber for an adidas shoe, it hands an actual Five Ten model to a label whose audience has mostly never clipped a bolt. Brain Dead is a defensible choice for that job, because the studio has spent a decade making objects for people who like the object more than the activity behind it, which is also a fair description of how approach shoes get worn in cities. Whether a climbing brand gains anything durable from that attention is the open question, and adidas has not answered it yet.

Both shoes in the collection carry the same retail, $180. That sits well above the $120 adidas charged for the Samba Climbing earlier this autumn, which is the nearest recent comparison, and it lands in the ordinary band for a Brain Dead collaboration rather than the ordinary band for a Five Ten shoe. The premium buys the suede, the limited run and the label on the tongue. It does not buy anything underfoot, because the outsole is the same compound Five Ten puts on the version a working guide would pick off a shelf. Resale history on Five Ten is thin enough that there is no useful pattern to price this against, and the previous Brain Dead adidas release was limited enough that it never established one either.

The Brain Dead x adidas Five Ten Guide Tennie releases November 6 in limited quantities at $180, in the colorway adidas lists as Supplier Colour / Core Black / Violet, under style code KJ2641. It is available at adidas.com, at wearebraindead.com and at select retailers including Feature. The NIAD, the slip-on climbing shoe released alongside it, lands the same day at the same price.

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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